‘We Played Ball Just the Same’: Selected Recollections of Black Women’s Sport Experiences in Southern Ontario (1920s–1940s)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Due to historical systemic subordination, few Black women’s histories are preserved in public archives and written records. In Canada, oral traditions’ prevalence in Black communities made written documentation rare, affording their histories less legitimacy in academia. Hence, Black women’s experiences are largely absent from national grand narratives about sport. By bridging the gap between dominant narratives and Black women’s marginal narratives, we may appreciate how their gendered and racialized identities are situated within, and reorganize, the nation’s identity. Using the Multicultural History Society of Ontario’s archived oral histories, we present a novel sporting account of a group of Black women in Southern Ontario. Collected to preserve minority ethnic/racial groups’ life memories in the late twentieth century, the histories centred individuals who were active early in the century. Informants recalled participating in a range of athletic endeavours, and a small number were in coaching and umpire positions, while men and boys played a role as inspiration and gatekeepers. Within that, women’s sport spectatorship emerges as a key unexplored dimension of sport involvement. These narratives demonstrate the influence of gender, racial, and class forces on women’s sport, while also suggesting that sporting spaces could contribute to socio-cultural expression, resistance, and survival.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".