"A stronger and more independent self": single, middle-class British women emigrants to the Canadian West, 1880-1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis tells the stories of ninety-one single, middle-class British women who emigrated to Western Canada between 1880 and 1930, and compares their experiences with contemporary women's emigration literature. This project maps out the economic, cultural and physical space that the ‘last, best West’ offered these women. The three analytical frameworks used to explore this space are the ideas and experiences of singleness; the social hierarchies of class, race, gender, and nationality; and the landscape of the Western Canadian frontier. The emigration literature which was produced between 1880 and 1910 characterized single, middle-class British women as potential wives and mothers, and advocated home-help work for strangers as the best form of employment for them. Most of the women studied here rejected this model of emigration, coming out instead to join relatives, most often their unmarried brothers. Between 1911 and 1930, the emigration literature came to more accurately reflect the expanding range of waged work in which educated women engaged. The image of the happy, permanently single woman also appeared in the literature. The rhetoric of imperialism and motherhood, however, continued unabated as threats to Britain's imperial power multiplied. Women found that while they might bring some British culture to the frontier, they were, in turn, significantly transformed by their new lives in Western Canada. The principal finding of this thesis is that single, middle-class British women did find space in the West, gaining financial independence, free choice of residence and association, and the freedom to choose between lifelong singleness and marriage. This space was defined in three important ways. First, the primacy of women's roles as future wives and mothers shaped the female labour market. Second, this space was shaped by the evolving nature of social hierarchies; more egalitarian notions of social class made it acceptable for these middle-class women to work for wages, while racial and ethnic hierarchies gave them privileged positions in Western communities. Finally, the landscape of the West came to represent the new opportunities, choices and freedom which single middle-class British women found there.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".