Working Madames in Canada’s Sin City: The Lives and Businesses of Montreal’s Brothel Owners and Workers in the 1930s and 1940s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sex work has held an important yet marginalised space within Montreal society, with a pervasive culture of vice living alongside a selectively implemented legal framework. This thesis examines the lives and legal status of the women who owned and worked within brothels in Montreal during the 1930s and 1940s, as well as how brothels operated as small businesses. Women at all levels within the brothels, from sex workers to housekeepers to brothel owners, exercised agency in different ways. Many of Montreal’s brothels during this period were run as female small businesses that both interacted with and circumvented the police and municipal authorities. The main sources for this thesis are the depositions of twelve sex workers before Montreal’s 1954 Caron Inquiry, which provide an insider perspective on Montreal’s sex work industry in this period. These sources also shift the perspective from seeing sex workers as “existing” on the margins of society, criminalised and stigmatised for their methods of procuring a living and brings their work into Canadian workers history as a form of labour. Using a history from below approach, this thesis reads hostile state documents against their grain to piece together the lives of sex workers and to situate their stories within the context of the period’s legal framework surrounding sex work and cycles of relative toleration and repression. Through biographies of the women who were deposed before the Caron Inquiry, this thesis contextualises and humanises sex workers as workers and Montrealers with multi-faceted lives.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".