Imagining Girlhood in Seventeenth-Century Female-Authored Fairytales
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over two-thirds of the fairytales published in late seventeenth-century France were authored by female conteuses who recount the births of beautiful and virtuous princesses. Although little is known about these authors' personal lives, their portrayals of girlhood reveal glimpses of their individual lives and experiences. Applying Robert Darnton's cultural approach to fairytales, I situate these tales and their tellers within their historical context. In each story, the girls' virtue or vice are not developed over time, but are embedded at birth, demarcated by beauty or ugliness. This entwining of beauty and virtue is typical of late seventeenth-century salon and educational writings. However, the conteuses' girl characters also challenge gendered stereotypes, playing assertive roles and holding authority over older male characters. The conteuses crafted their conceptions of girlhood in dialogue with individual and cultural influences, culminating in a shared conception of noble girls as virtuous, beautiful, and capable individuals.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it