“I Just Felt Like I Belonged to Them”: Women’s Industrial Softball, London, Ontario, 1923-1935
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract By the mid 1920s, company-sponsored sport leagues for women were well established in Canadian cities such as London, Ontario, Canada. As both an act of welfarism and convenient brand-identification advertising, London companies such as Kellogg’s, Silverwood Dairy, Smallman & Ingram, and Gorman Eckerts sponsored, and in some cases organized, women’s industrial softball teams for workers from 1923 until 1935. As a part of corporate welfarism, employers viewed team sports as activities that would encourage and develop a sense of cooperation, team spirit, and loyalty among employees—characteristics that employers hoped would transfer to the production line. From the narratives of three women who worked and played for various London companies, I consider the constructions of meaning that shape our understanding of the leisure time pursuits of working women in the city and the meaning it has for them decades later. The narratives and industrial sport experiences of these three women suggest that gender hierarchies and competing (sometimes conflicting) loyalties were at the foundation of how they negotiated belonging to company sports teams, related work and educational opportunities, and the eventual changes in their recreation practices that came with marriage and childbirth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".