Regulating Public Space in Early-Nineteenth-Century Montreal: Vagrancy Laws and Gender in a Colonial Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Montreal’s justices of the peace designed police regulations regarding vagrancy to include licensed begging as a form of social welfare for the respectable poor. Vagrant men and women deemed unworthy of state-sanctioned begging were apprehended and punished in the House of Correction or Common Gaol. City magistrates provided an opportunity for proper objects of charity to solicit alms while permitting some homeless vagrants, often women, to solicit shelter in prison. Women were economically dependent on male earnings, and single women were thus vulnerable to destitution. Gender was crucial to vagrancy laws, which acted as a form of moral regulation and had a concomitant impact on the lives of female vagrants. Men posed at least two threats: a moral one by their refusal to work and their perceived rejection of bourgeois notions of industry, sobriety, and discipline, and a physical threat exemplified by their potential for violence. In the wake of the Rebellions, harsh new laws thus reflected not only the British colonial views of dangerous Canadiens, but also the new bourgeois ideology that envisioned an orderly public space.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".