Better Than The Poorhouse?: The Origins Of Mothers’ Aid In Maine
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rebecca White’s article examines the origins of a new state-funded welfare system in Maine through the prism of the 1917 “Act to Provide for Mothers with Dependent Children,” also known as mothers’ aid or mothers’ allowance legislation. This law established a centralized Mothers’ Allowance Board in Augusta to oversee applications and administer state funding to eligible Maine families. This represented a shift from traditional town-based poor services to a state-funded system of aid for those considered to be worthy. This article details the sparse landscape of public and private charity available to families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Maine, in particular the town-based pauper-relief and poor[1]farm systems common across the state. It then presents the ideological and practical processes that led to Maine’s adoption of this new centralized approach to public welfare. Rebecca White earned her PhD in Canadian-American History from the University of Maine in 2015 and her MA in European History from the University of Pittsburgh in 2002. Her research agenda focuses broadly on women, gender, and the impacts of the modernizing state in United States and Canada. Her current project looks at the gendered and class-based ideologies and practices of anti-tuberculosis efforts in the Province of New Brunswick, with a particular focus on the interplay of public welfare and public-health officials in casework and case-finding efforts. White’s dissertation examined the social history of mothers’ allowances in Maine and New Brunswick. The study explained the power structures and ideological basis of these state welfare programs and highlighted ways that women, families, and com[1]munities worked within these rigid systems to assert some level of independence. These same themes of gender, authority, and power infuse her teaching in the Women, Gender, and Sexualities Studies and History Department at the University of Maine.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it