Review of <i>Working Girls in the West: Representations ofWage-Earning Women.</i> By Lindsey McMaster
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lindsey McMaster provides a lively account of how the working girl was "imagined, represented, and constructed as a figure within the cultural narratives of Canada, the West, and the empire" during the period of rapid economic growth and profound social transformation from the late 1800s to the early 1920s. She examines a range of different types of textsnewspaper reports, reform and social-purity discourse, official reports on labor, women's travel accounts of Canada, and Canadian literature and poetry-for common themes and tropes. Her goal is to see how social narratives of the working girl in the West, that vast imaginary from the Great Plains to the West Coast, took hold. Her claim is that the working girl in the West was the repository of a range of social anxieties about the pace and effects of change. She deftly shows how industrialization and urbanization combined with ideologies of racial and moral purity to create a terrain over which young working women challenged their traditional gender roles. Working Girls in the West is divided into five chapters framed by a short introduction and a short conclusion. The introduction sets out the scope of the book and provides a backdrop of demographics and labor market statistics. McMaster is specifically interested in "stories that featured the working girl and made sense of her role through narrative elements like plot, dramatic conflict, romance and moral endings." She focuses on Vancouver, and each chapter is devoted to a specific narrative. The first explores the ways in which white women were represented as desirable civilizing agents in the colonial West. She places bride ships and domestic service in the larger context of industrialism and urbanization in order to illustrate the anxieties induced by working girls' single status.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".