Reading the Archives of the Illicit: Gender, Labour, and Race in Helen McGowan’s Motor City Madam
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay explores the gender, racial, and labour politics in Helen McGowan’s Motor City Madam, an autobiography written by a woman who worked as a prostitute and madam in Detroit, Michigan from the 1920s to the 1960s. Using the text as a case study, it examines how historians can utilize autobiography in order to excavate the subjective experiences of women who worked in illicit forms of labour. In blending feminist literary theory with the methodologies of social and labour historians, this essay moves beyond the strict letter of the text in order to analyze how the author tells her personal narrative. It argues that McGowan frames her story first and foremost as one of labour, and in doing do, forms pointed critiques of gender, class, and racial inequality in industries cities at mid-century. McGowan develops a proto-feminist defense of sex work as work, and pushes for legalized prostitution at a time in which vice codes remained strictly intact. By analyzing autobiographies like Motor City Madam as constructions of subjectivity rather than simply empirical sources, we can gain important insight to the voices of working peoples often relegated to the margins of labour history.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".