Feminist Bestsellers: A Digital History of 1970s Feminism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feminism of the 1970s remains among the most influential social movements within the United States. Bestselling texts played a crucial role in spreading feminism beyond early activists into the mainstream of American society. Contemporary scholars of feminism continue to rely on these works as pivotal historical sources. This paper utilizes quantitative methods to compare six feminist bestsellers from 1970. Our data consists of three subcorpora of digitized books published in 1970 found in the Hathi Trust: six feminist bestsellers, a sample of non-fiction, and a sample of writing about women. Computational textual analysis identifies each bestselling title's salient features and the contributions each text made at this key moment in the development of feminist thought. These results led us to propose a historiographical intervention that credits one bestseller, The Black Woman, with a more prominent role in the development of 1970s feminism.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".