Lady Smugglers and Lynx-Eyed Customs Agents: Gender, Morality, and Cross-Border Shopping in Detroit and Windsor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines popular attitudes towards cross-border shopping and smuggling in the Detroit-Windsor border region from 1900 to 1960. Reports of individuals attempting to fool border guards by failing to declare items, wearing multiple layers of clothing, or disguising new purchases as used reveal how shoppers felt entitled to goods and were not deterred by customs regulations. Middle-class families that might otherwise balk at breaking the law saw no problem with lying to border agents. This behaviour was highly gendered: women were characterized as naturally inclined to smuggle, given their love of shopping and inability to comprehend the law. Border guards were selective in their application of the law, and middle-class consumers generally had little to fear when they brought back purchases in excess of customs limits. Smuggling went both ways across the border. During the Second World War, Detroit residents flocked to Windsor to purchase meat and dairy products, while in the postwar period, Canadians more typically frequented American stores. This article offers a new way to think about consumer citizenship and how access to goods was assumed to be a right for people living on both sides of the border.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".