Sisters Doing for Themselves, or Not: Aunts and Caregiving in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Childcare arrangements of many wage-earning parents depend on sisters or sisters-in-law. Yet, for all their significance, aunts have been largely invisible in discussions of child welfare. “Sisters Are Doing for Themselves, Or Not” invokes the iconic Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin to remind us that the very vocabulary of feminist solidarity celebrates an idealized kin relationship. The very popularity of notions of sisterhood contributes to the taken-for-grantedness of sibling ties and recurring failure to investigate them. This article begins with observations about women’s longstanding role in kith and kin care and then turns to Canadian aunts and their involvement with nieces and nephews over more than one hundred and fifty years. This last discussion has four parts. The first, “Alliances with the Living,” points to sibling practices of mutual aid in child rearing. The next, “Tributes to the Dead,” addresses aunts’ substitution for dead mothers. “Sibling Contests,” considers sisters in disagreement about the best interests of youngsters. The final section, “Disengagement,” acknowledges another story, the disinterest, withdrawal, or worse of some sisters from any duty of care. In all cases, women’s work as kinkeepers underpins Canada’s longstanding political economy of residualism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".