Mac at war: Women’s work and education at the Macdonald Institute during the First and Second World Wars
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1903, the Macdonald Institute opened in Guelph with the stated aim of training rural women in home economics and domestic science. Part of the Ontario Agriculture College (OAC), the school progressed quickly and soon became an invaluable resource for both Canadian and international women. Over the years, the “Mac girls” made their mark on the world, including during the two World Wars. Under the leadership of directors Mary Watson during the First World War, and Olive Cruikshank during part of the Second World War, the Macdonald Institute supported the war effort in several ways. These included adapting curricula to the exigencies of wartime, and sending material overseas. The Macdonald Institute initially remained open during the Second World War, yet in 1941, standard classes ceased for five years as the Royal Canadian Air Force’s (RCAF) No. 4 Wireless School took control of the Institute’s buildings and property. Throughout this period of closure, women arrived to live and attend classes at the Wireless School as part of the RCAF’s Women’s Division and School of Cookery. Throughout the two World Wars, women associated with the Macdonald Institute and the No. 4 Wireless School, including students, graduates, instructors, and members of the Women’s Division, variously involved themselves with the war effort. The activities of the Macdonald Institute, and of the No. 4 Wireless School, afford an opportunity to examine how women’s work and education was viewed, deployed, and reallocated throughout the two World Wars.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.003 |
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".