To "make things move, somewhere": mobility and the public roles of girls and women in popular girls’ novels, 1900-1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines a number of popular girls’ novels in relation to their time of publication in the early twentieth century, a time when women of Canada, Britain, and the United States were experiencing increased involvement in the public sphere; these novels are: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903); A Little Princess (1905); The Secret Garden (1911); the Pearl Watson trilogy (Sowing Seeds in Danny [1908], The Second Chance [1910], and Purple Springs [1921]); Anne of Green Gables (1908); Anne of Avonlea (1909); Pollyanna (1913); and Pollyanna Grows Up (1915). Drawing on theories of female mobility and feminist geographies, I explore the presentation of fictional girls and women in these novels as engaged in public matters. I argue that the novels depict them exploring and pushing the boundaries of what their roles in the public sphere could be while also delimiting the borders within which their involvement is acceptable. In chapter one, I establish physical mobility’s integral role in constituting the model girl, a girl who can embody the qualities that make her a valuable member of the nation. Chapter two explores the girls’ use of physical mobility to spread visions of national identity within local communities. The third chapter contrasts rural spaces with urban ones and links physical mobility with social mobility; girls’ ability to promote domestic comfort through upward social mobility and easy physical movement is impinged in urban settings. Chapter four takes up the movement from girlhood to womanhood and the similarities in girls’ narratives are juxtaposed with the varied unconventionalities and masculine powers available to women. In chapter five, I shift from the fictional to the historical to examine how two of the authors, Nellie L. McClung and L.M. Montgomery, navigated gender expectations and their own relationships to the public sphere, constructing personas that would circulate in public and moving between private and public spaces.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".