“Mind above matter”: Work, gender, and social class in Susanna Moodie’s immigration memoirs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines Susanna Moodie’s memoirs in the context of changing narratives around immigration and social class in the 1830s. She overtly engaged with the age’s boosterist literature, warning genteel Britons about unrealistic portrayals of emigration, and positioning herself as an authentic interpreter of colonial realities. Moodie’s texts dramatize the settler-colonial dilemma of early Canada, caught between American influences and imperial loyalties. In Canada, class was inflected and performed differently from in Britain due to local realities and to the different attitudes that working-class immigrants and genteel immigrants had towards women, waged labour, upward mobility, and social hierarchies. Given imperial fears of American republican influences, Moodie uses class markers as national identifiers to redefine gentility in this new setting. While sympathetic to upward mobility, her settlerist discourse remains inflected in class terms, presenting social hierarchies as an ideological bulwark protecting the colonies from the lure of American political models.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.046 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| 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".