From 100-Year-Old Women’s Motoring Masks to Contemporary PPE: A Socio-Political Study of Persistent Problems and Inventive Possibilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, personal protective equipment became central to daily news. Face masks may have been critical, but they were clearly not equally designed or distributed, compelling many health workers to make their own. These issues are neither new nor specific to health-oriented fields. We offer insights from another case of individuals taking personal protective equipment into their own hands. We analyse patents for women’s motoring face masks invented in the USA, Canada, England and France (1900–1925). Our findings suggest that women invented and wore face masks not only to drive safely, but to position themselves as legitimate motorists and as citizens with equal rights to technology, public space and resources at the turn of the last century. We propose that a study of historic motoring face masks might offer insights into persistent problems and inventive possibilities relating to contemporary personal protective equipment.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".