Labouring on the Margins: Representations of Edwardian Domestic Servants in Western Canadian Living History Museums
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since their popularization in the mid-twentieth century, living history museums in Canada have provided the public with a (necessarily) simplified representation of life in a previous era. Many western Canadian sites represent domestic life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through house museums, which can include servant characters. Domestic servants in western Canada during this period were typically young, single, workingclass women, many of whom were also recent immigrants. Excluded from structures of power, their daily lives and perspectives were sparsely documented. This study investigates how living history sites in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba portray the marginalized women who worked as servants between 1890 and 1920, and what these representations mean for our understanding of marginalized histories, living history, and public history in western Canada. In line with its concentration on working-class individuals, it primarily focuses on the perspectives of the front-line historical interpreters who play these roles, seeking to understand these representations and acts of public history from the bottom up. This study finds that the way these living history interpreters are treated by their museums has a profound influence on the way the past is depicted at each of these four sites, particularly the pasts of working-class women. This project employs four museums as case studies: Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria, British Columbia; Fort Edmonton Park in Edmonton, Alberta; Government House in Regina, Saskatchewan; and Dalnavert Museum and Visitors’ Center in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Its methodology combines archival research, oral history, public history, and museum studies to examine public representations of a marginalized history. Based on oral history interviews with ten historical interpreters and three program developers, it illustrates the critical role of the\n museum as workplace in determining how servants are portrayed in living history. Throughout these four case studies, it demonstrates the necessity for training, research, feedback, supervision, and safety protocols in order to support interpreters (frequently young women earning minimum wage themselves) in playing these challenging and vulnerable roles and creating well-informed, multifaceted, and engaging performances of these women and their era. The stories of women, working-class people, and recent immigrants are still frequently under-represented in public history. The care and attention with which these marginalized women are depicted at Craigdarroch Castle and Government House demonstrate these sites’ ethical commitment to both the well-being of their interpreters and the sensitive, accurate portrayal and valuation of these long-overlooked lives. In contrast, the lack of support and care for the interpreters who play these characters at Dalnavert Museum and Fort Edmonton Park frequently results in uneven and inaccurate performances, mental and emotional strain for these interpreters, and the diminution of the importance of these marginalized figures and their contemporaries in western Canadian history and society.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| 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".