“Trust the Women”: Dora Meeson Coates’s Suffrage Banner and the Popular Construction of Australia’s Feminist Past in the Late Twentieth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In 1988, the Australian federal government purchased Anglo-Australian artist Dora Meeson Coates’s “Trust the Women” banner as part of the country’s belated efforts to memorialize the suffrage victories that once made its White citizens the most enfranchised people on earth. However, between the fin de siècle and the 1970s, which witnessed the concurrent rise of women’s history and state feminism, feminists had been ambivalent about commemorating the suffrage campaigns, especially at the national level. Since the late 1980s, the banner has experienced a transformation from an artefact few Australians had known about, much less forgotten, into the most familiar symbol of the country’s suffrage movements. Brought about by memory agents—activists, bureaucrats, historians, and politicians—this shift reveals the public appeal of British suffrage iconography over the material record of Australian activists’ “quiet” toil, a sentiment which has increasingly shaped the memorialization of local suffrage stories. Abstract: En 1988, le gouvernement fédéral australien a acheté la bannière « Trust the Women » de l’artiste anglo-australienne Dora Meeson Coates dans le cadre des efforts tardifs du pays pour commémorer les victoires en matière de suffrage qui avaient jadis permis à ses citoyens Blancs d’être le peuple avec le droit de vote le plus étendu de la planète. Cependant, entre la fin du siècle et les années 1970, une période qui a vu la montée simultanée de l’histoire des femmes et du féminisme d’État, les féministes ont fait preuve d’ambivalence quant à la commémoration des campagnes de suffrage, plus particulièrement au niveau national. Depuis la fin des années 1980, la bannière a connu une transformation, passant d’un artefact dont peu d’Australiens connaissaient l’existence, et encore moins qu’ils avaient oublié, au symbole le plus familier des mouvements de suffrage du pays. Provoqué par les agents de la mémoire —activistes, bureaucrates, historiens et politiciens —ce changement révèle l’attrait public de l’iconographie du suffrage britannique au détriment de l’enregistrement matériel du labeur « tranquille » des activistes australiens, un sentiment qui a de plus en plus façonné la commémoration des histoires locales du suffrage.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".