The Other Little House: The Brothel as a Colonial Institution on the Canadian Prairies, 1880–93
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract What role did settler bawdy houses play in Canadian colonial expansion in the 1880s? The trial of “Big Nelly” Webb, a white bawdy house madam and sex worker who shot a Mounted Police constable on the doorstep of her brothel in 1888, offers critical insight into the world of these seldom acknowledged colonial institutions and the women who ran them. Far from simply “women on the margins,” Canadian officials in the North-West Territories permitted many white madams and sex workers to operate bawdy houses in emerging prairie settlements because they viewed them as essential workers. Drawing from the archives of the North-West Mounted Police, memoirs and testimonies of bawdy house sex workers and madams, and newspaper and court reports, this article explores the networks of influence that supported these houses, including local police and high-ranking colonial officials. Beyond personal ties, the influence of women like Big Nelly reflected the colonial function of the settler brothel. The waves of migrating bawdy house madams and workers who flocked to Canada’s “Last Best West” during this period could serve a very real role in the growth and biopolitical regulation of new Canadian settlements in Indigenous territory. These workers were tasked with protecting and regulating settler sexual and reproductive health, retaining white bachelor migrants in isolated settlements, and fostering urban growth. Settler bawdy houses on the Prairies were also bastions of racial segregation and containment, built to displace (and expose) workers of color and stop the growth of Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race populations and resistance in the 1880s. Indeed, race-based hierarchies did not just exist within the settler brothel economies of Canada’s North-West Territories, they were one of the foundational justifications for their existence.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".