Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the first half of the twentieth century, “practice houses,” or home management houses, thrived in home economics departments of land-grant universities around North America. Practice houses were domestic settings where young women could get hands-on training and experience in all the latest methods and technologies to efficiently manage domestic space and activity. They were also part of a larger trend of professionalization of home economic activities, intimately related to scientific rhetoric. This article discusses the Department of Home Economics’ practice house at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, where during the 1930s and 1940s, thirty-three “borrowed” children (from the city’s department of child welfare), referred to as practice babies, were tended to by a monthly rotation of women students who themselves were supervised by a house mother. The article situates the practice babies at the intersection of two historical trajectories, that of home economics itself and that of child-rearing advice, and draws attention to the ways in which the babies, and the women who cared for them, were mutually and jointly gendered. The narrative of the rise and fall of the practice babies in Winnipeg contributes to the literature on changing ideologies of scientific motherhood with an argument for feminist scholarship to develop a more ethnographically grounded linkage of children to women.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.082 | 0.020 |
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".