The ‘Curious Mennonite’: Seeing Canadian Mennonite Women through Low-Lying Fog
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Katie Funk Wiebe, a woman whose life and writing have inspired much of my thinking on Mennonite women, once described the important texts in Mennonite history as seeing women "mostly through a low-lying fog." 1 Indeed, women's invisibility in 'mainstream' historical texts was often cited as a crucial impetus to the agenda of women's history.As recently as 2004, two well-established women's historians commented that they sometimes "become depressed" at the difficulty of inserting women into the traditional historical narrative.2 One doesn't need to look far to find numerous examples where the fog was and is particularly low and thick.In some accounts of Mennonite pioneers and immigrants in Canada, women are starkly invisible, although we know women were surely there.For instance, in the book Mennonite Memories, published in 1974 on the centennial of Mennonite settlement on the prairies, an essay on "Homesteading at Rosthern [Saskatchewan]" does not list one woman's name, though names of male participants as 'heads of families' figure prominently.3 An "historic picture" of pioneers who attended the first Mennonite church service at Yarrow, British Columbia, in April 1928 depicts twenty men, though one must assume that women were also in attendance and also contributed to "the start of a religious program which, through the years, has found expression in I N T R O D U C T I O N T h e ' C u r i o u s M e n n o n i t e ' : S e e i n g C a n a d i a n M e n n o n i t e Wo m e n t h r o u g h L o w -L y i n g F o g
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.064 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
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".