JENNIFER A. STEPHEN. Pick One Intelligent Girl: Employability, Domesticity, and the Gendering of Canada's Welfare State, 1939-1947. (Studies in Gender and History, number 29.) Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2007. Pp. x, 299. Cloth $75.00, paper $29.95
Bibliographic record
Abstract
North American feminist historians have a long-standing interest in accounts of the mobilization and demobilization of women during and after World War II, and for good reason. The significant influx of women into the labor force, as well as recruitment of women for the armed forces, saw dramatic changes in women's lives. In Canada, the labor force participation rate soared from twenty-four to thirty-three percent in the space of five years, yet some of these women were encouraged, enticed, or pushed out of the labor force after the war. At least, that is the story we know. As Jennifer A. Stephen shows, there is more we can learn from these crucial years, particularly about the ongoing gendering of the welfare state. Stephen's book builds on the core Canadian text on women and World War II by Ruth Roach Pierson, They're Still Women after All: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (1986), probing federal policy, as well as the thinking behind it, that shaped the management of the female labor force, or, as she stresses, the discourses of employability that undergirded the welfare state. Women, she argues, occupied a “natural” (and domesticized) space “outside rational economic space” (p. 31) in the minds of many policy makers who did not see female workers, first and foremost, as workers. During the war women's employment was regulated by the National Selective Service Women's Division, which in turn was influenced by the prevailing discourses about women's proper sexual/gender roles and their class position, as well as by emerging concepts of personnel and vocational placement. Even as women flooded the workforce, their role as marginal/temporary workers was reinforced: the dominant typology of an “ideal type” citizen worker—white and male—characterized the emerging welfare state and the labor market so intimately connected to it. Women's labor, Stephen concludes, was thus firmly governed by “policy discourses of masculinist state power” (p. 207).
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.004 |
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".