The Trouble with Teamwork: Doukhobor Women’s Plow Pulling in Western Canada, 1899
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pictures of Doukhobor women cooperating to pull plows in 1899 in Western Canada served at the time and since as evidence of immigrant homesteaders’ work ethic and of their cultural differences. The Doukhobor women’s agricultural initiative offered an unusual and powerful demonstration of women’s capacity to complete farm work normally assigned to men or draft animals at a time when first-wave feminists were arguing for improvements to women’s rights in Canada. This article argues that images of Doukhobor women pulling plows resonated so deeply because they challenged four assumptions concerning agricultural development in Canada’s Northwest: that it should be led by men rather than women; that farmers should work independently rather than cooperatively; that white settlers should prove to be culturally superior to Indigenous and racialized people who were excluded from the homesteading project; and that animals, and not women, should perform draft labour. The Doukhobor women’s hard work and resourcefulness proved that they were good agriculturalists. Whether they were a good cultural fit or not was another question entirely.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".