"In either a woman or a horse": Emily Murphy and the Road to Supporting Sexual Sterilization in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emily Murphy was a pioneering advocate for women's rights in Alberta. She was instrumental in securing greater legal protections for married women through her advocacy of the province's Dower Act and was actively involved in both the suffrage and birth control movements. Perhaps more notably, she is remembered as the instigator of the Person's Case, which sought to amend the British North America Act to recognize women as "persons" eligible for appointment to the Canadian Senate. However, Murphy's legacy has been complicated by the resurfacing of her support for eugenics and sexual sterilization. A vocal proponent for Alberta's Sexual Sterilization Act of 1928, her view on these issues shocked many Canadians. This thesis examines the intersection of class, gender, religion, maternal feminism and Irish Protestant ideology to uncover the motivations of Murphy's support for such a controversial piece of legislature. By examining her early life in Cookstown, the Orange Order's influence on the construction of her values, her writings under the Janey Canuck pseudonym, and her role as a Police Magistrate, this thesis argues that Murphy's involvement in Canada9s eugenic movement was deeply entwined with her views of feminism, nationalism, and class.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".