Emily’s Maternal Ideal: Pregnancy, Birth, and Resistance at Kingston Penitentiary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 1850s and 1860s saw the rise of a new women’s prison reform ideology that would shape the next half-century of women’s imprisonment. “Maternalism” was the promotion of femininity as the basis of reform and rehabilitation with accompanying notions of ideal womanhood and appropriate roles for imprisoned women and in the aftermath of a penitentiary sentence. This paper looks at literal motherhood in the penitentiary by examining the experiences of prisoner Emily Boyle. Boyle was pregnant during two separate terms at Kingston Penitentiary. During the first term in 1926, she was paroled so that she could return to Edmonton to give birth. During her second term in 1932, no mercy was extended in consideration of her pregnancy and Boyle began a battle with the Department of Justice over her right to keep her baby within the walls of Kingston Penitentiary. The warden recommended that Boyle be separated from her child and it be sent to the Home for Infants, in spite of the fact that the father was in Edmonton. Boyle resisted this decision, and in fact resisted all penitentiary involvement with her pregnancy and childbirth. She ultimately gave birth in the bathroom of the women’s ward with the assistance of two matrons. When the child was taken away from her, both Boyle and her husband fought the Department of Justice decision on the matter, rallying against the notion that their child was better served by the Children’s Aid Society. The paper examines multiple questions about motherhood and maternalism in the penitentiary’s first century. It argues that maternalism and motherhood were found at cross purposes when balanced with the demands of punishment. Emily Boyle found herself at this intersection, fighting to keep her child in an institution geared towards teaching her to become the ideal mother.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".