Histories of Female Progress in <i>Memoirs of Modern Philosophers</i>
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Elizabeth Hamilton's novel Memoirs of Modern Philosophers deploys the rubric of philosophical or conjectural history in order to argue for a model of female domesticity and to score many of her satirical points. Hamilton's satire subverts radical pretensions to progress by linking sexual opportunism with social opportunism: first, by identifying it with Hottentot savagery via Bridgetina and her Jacobin friends, and their plans to emigrate to Africa, and second, by identifying it with a barbarous era exemplified by Julia's seduction and ruin. By aligning Jacobinism and the New Philosophy with savagery and barbarism, Hamilton opens the way for Harriet, the only one of the three female characters who rejects the New Philosophy, to be aligned with the most advanced state of civilization, a modernity that sees the rise of female and domestic virtue. Hamilton's Whiggish history of female progress thus presents a challenge to certain understandings of conservative culture in the 1790s that implicitly align anti-Jacobin writers such as Hamilton with nostalgic defences of tradition.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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