The Rise of Motherhood: Maternal Feminism and Health in the Rural Prairie Provinces, 1900-1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the rise of maternal feminism and the concept of motherhood in the Prairie West from 1900 to 1930. White, middle-class, British women (and male allies) adopted the rhetoric of moral reform, social decline, and Mothers of the Nation to argue that as mothers, their positions allowed them to contribute to the regeneration of the British race in Canada. Further, they justified their claims to political and social rights by referencing their maternal role, arguing that because they were the people responsible for regenerating the British-Canadian population, and providing care for these children, they ought to be awarded equality in the political arena as only mothers would know the best legislation for the well-being and development of children and, by extension, the nation. This conservative ideology of motherhood helped women gain support in the West, to integrate themselves in the public discourse of rights and responsibilities, and advocate for increased medical services in the rural areas of the Prairies. The Grain Grower’s Guide was an important platform for the female voice, and many maternal feminists and their opponents contributed their opinions to the publication, including an extensive campaign for heath and medical care for both mother and child in rural areas of the region. While maternal feminists gained significant success in their fight for medical and health services, these gains applied to a specific, narrow group of women. Women of color, of non-Protestant beliefs, and of the working class were not included in this group. This paper argues that the concept of motherhood became a political category of nation-building in the early 20th century promoted by the state, which maternal feminists employed to gain support from opponents of radical feminism and to advocate for advancements in both political and domestic spheres in the rural Prairie West.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".