Not an Accident: The Work of Thalidomide in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women's History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, thousands of women gave birth to children with impairments after consuming thalidomide during their pregnancies. The scandal has been discussed from legal, medical, and scientific perspectives, yet the position of women in the tragedy remains relatively underaddressed. The scandal is often described as a tragic accident that will not be repeated due to changes in pharmaceutical testing and regulation. I argue that the thalidomide tragedy was not an accident but was the result of competing social, economic, and cultural conditions and priorities within which mid-twentieth-century women were situated. I also consider the work that thalidomide accomplished in women's history by positing that the drug contributed to constructions of the unstable pregnant woman in need of expert medicalized intervention, in alignment with narratives that served contemporaneous public interests. I further consider how the effects of that work linger in social locations relevant 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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".