Colonies, condoms and corsets : fertility regulation in Australia and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates Australian and Canadian legislation that regulated women's reproduction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and offers some explanation for their enactment. At the turn of the twentieth century, Australia and Canada enacted a series of laws that were aimed at limiting the control women could exercise over their reproductive functions. From the 1880s through to the first decade of the twentieth century, legislation that prohibited the advertisement of contraception, regulated maternity homes as well as criminal laws that proscribed abortion were promulgated by Australian and Canadian parliaments. This thesis investigates why such legislative activity occurred and proposes that the initiation of these measures targeting abortion, infanticide and birth control cannot be disassociated from the highly gendered and racialised rhetoric resonating throughout the British Empire. Concern about racial integrity, heightened by a fear generated by the declining birth rate, promoted a climate in which exercising control over women's fertility was seen as warranted. White women's reproductive capabilities were a vital ingredient in keeping the settler colonies of Australia and Canada white and British — white women were expected, quite literally, to give birth to the nation. As this thesis shows, when women did not adhere to these expectations of maternity, the law was used in an attempt to monitor and regulate their reproductive activities.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".