Femininity and the Factory: Womenâs Labouring Bodies in the Moirâs Candy Plant, 1949-1970
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In post-war Canada, married women’s labour force participation rose dramatically. Labour historians have studied this trend with a primary focus on married women’s disadvantaged position in the labour market. This thesis examines female factory workers as manual labourers and asks how their bodies affected and were affected by their jobs, and how specifically female embodiment shaped their experience of work. Using the framework of job-related, cultural, and reproductive body work developed by sociologist Chris Shilling, this case study examines the experiences of eleven women who worked at the Moir’s candy plant in Halifax between 1949 and 1970. Semi-structured interviews are the main source of research data for this study. This case study explores working conditions at Moir’s, such as work on conveyor belts, the gendered division of labour, piece-work, and breaks, and determines the ways the women responded to and also shaped these conditions. The women’s testimonies reveal that their embodied experience as labourers was based both in workplace conditions (such as company regulations) and in family responsibilities. There are three main findings. First, I argue that in the context of the Moir’s factory, women’s acts of sabotage (in the form of breaking the conveyor belts), use of make-work, and development of other coping strategies were intended to create needed leisure time in the workplace. Second, I challenge the common assumption in labour sociology that factory work does not require that employees carry out true emotional labour. I argue that feelings of pride and shame had a strong influence over the women’s workplace dress and behaviour; managing these feelings were an important part of the women’s occupation. Finally, I argue that in the post-war era, women’s reproductive body work was directly connected to their paid labour because of the lack of public childcare and other reproductive labour resources available to wives and working mothers.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".