‘How to Keep a Husband on Packaged Foods’ and Other Lessons: Gendered Education in the Canadian National Exhibition’s Women’s Division during the Kate Aitken Era, 1920s-1950s 1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kate Aitken (1891-1971), perhaps best known as a broadcasting pioneer in Canadian history, was the first director of “Women’s Activities” at the Women’s Division of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in Toronto. It was a position she officially took on in 1938 until her retirement in 1952. Aitken’s kitchen demonstration development, and her overwhelming success as an educator at the CNE offers a lens through which to examine the gendered education of food preparation, at a time when what constituted as ‘women’s work’ was itself being re-worked. This paper will investigate women’s programming at the CNE, and how it helped to support and construct women’s accepted roles as part of a wider discourse about women’s place both within and outside the home. Food played an intensely important part in this process. While the pedagogical purpose of many of the activities at the Women’s Building were described as the “capture, care and feeding of husbands,” Aitken’s use of food programming fulfilled multiple functions: as a tool for community organizing in her massive ‘ladies luncheons’ and her work with Women’s Institutes; as a gendered pedagogy in her restaurants, table-setting and cooking demonstrations and competitions; and as a means of teaching children and young people the skill of feeding themselves. As a woman whose work sat at the intersection of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ kitchen she also communicated important messages about shifting gender roles in the early to mid-twentieth century in Canada.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".