Fishing is commoniy thought of as a man's business. Yet fishing has a special interest for understanding the position of women, both past and present. There is a double reason for this: for the masculine image of the industry conceals the reality of an occupation which, by removing men to sea, makes them peculiarly dependent on the work of women ashore. And this dependence gives women not only more responsibility, but also the possibility of more power, both in the home and in the community. My concern here is therefore with the sexual division both of labour and of power. Of the two issues, the second is considerably more complicated. For while the character of women's work in fishing communities has again and again taken parallel forms in different societies, this is much less true of its consequences for the social position of women.

In recent years paternalism has become one of the most discussed concepts in social history. While historians of women invoke paternalism and patriarchy to help explain relations of male domination, Marxist historians have found paternalism useful in expanding their analyses of class consciousness. Eugene Genovese organized his interpretation of slavery in the American south around paternalism. For E. P. Thompson, the breakdown of the ideology and practice of rural paternalism underlay the development of “class struggle without class” in eighteenth-century England. Despite Genovese's warning that paternalism is an inappropriate concept for understanding industrial society, several recent studies have identified paternalism as an important factor in the history of industrial labor during the nineteenth century. Daniel Walkowitz and Tamara Haraven have analyzed paternalism in the textile industries of upstate New York and southern New Hampshire. Lawrence Schofer and David Crew have studied paternalism in nineteenth-century German heavy industry, and Patrick Joyce has recently argued for its centrality in the restructuring of class relations in the late Victorian textile industry.

Almost on the eve of the Iranian revolution, the shah's regime adopted a policy of daylight-saving time to cope with a chronic power shortage in Tehran, a densely populated city of more than four million people. The clock was moved ahead by an hour in the spring and set back again in the fall. Few decisions of the old government evoked as much public criticism and outcry as this one. Thousands of complaints were registered against the plan. The Department of Energy was swamped by daily protest letters and phone calls. Iran's daily newspapers printed hundreds of letters and editorials decrying the idea as absurd and futile. Comedians capitalized on the arbitrary nature of the official time as they sought to mobilize public ridicule of the government. Many people rejected the plan outright and adhered to the old time. Others kept both times. When you asked someone for the time of the day, the immediate response was “which time do you mean, the old time or the new time?” For some people, the rejection of daylight-saving time became a symbol of opposition to the shah's regime—it was at least justified as such.

Accounts of South African history and politics have been much influenced by what might be termed the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history. As a model for the historical understanding of modern Afrikaner nationalism and of the ideology of apartheid it has proved persuasive to historians and social scientists alike. In outline, it amounts to the view that the “seventeenth-century Calvinism” which the Afrikaner founding fathers derived from their countries of origin became fixed in the isolated frontier conditions of trekboer society and survived for generations in the form of a kind of “primitive Calvinism”; that in the first part of the nineteenth century, this gave rise to a nascent chosen people ideology among early Afrikaners, which provided much of the motivation for, as well as the self-understanding of, that central event in Afrikaner history, the Great Trek, while simultaneously serving to legitimate the conquest and subordination of indigenous peoples; and that, mediated in this way, an authentic tradition of Afrikaner Calvinism thus constitutes the root source of modern Afrikaner nationalism and the ideology of apartheid. In fact, very little of this purported historical explanation will stand up to rigorous critical scrutiny: in vain will one look for hard evidence, either in the primary sources of early Afrikaner political thinking or in the contemporary secondary literature, of a set of popular beliefs that might be recognised as “primitive Calvinism” or as an ideology of a chosen people with a national mission.

I. Some recent essays on the relationship between history on the one hand and anthropology and/or sociology on the other concentrate on the differences in the material with which the typical practitioner deals and the types of issues likely to be addressed (Thompson 1972, 1976, 1977; Davis 1981). They have tended to compare the perspectives that anthropologists1 and historians bring into their work. And both E. P. Thompson and Natalie Z. Davis advocate increasing mutual borrowing from each discipline: they wish the one discipline to deepen its sensitivity and to avoid the usual pitfalls by drawing on the strengths of the other. Thus, by way of illustration, one finds Thompson arguing that historians tend to be more attentive to the paradoxes and ambivalences of actual men, and that they are attuned to the discipline of context because of this attentiveness to heterogeneity, a strength which sociologists—who, he says, tend to overgeneralise and to swallow heterogeneity through the manufacture of neat typologies—would be well advised to draw upon (1976:387,394).

Historians and sociologists have long been aware of variability in family structure and behavior and curious about the effects of large-scale change on the family. Nineteenth-century social scientists from Frederic LePlay to Lewis Henry Morgan interpreted family change in an evolutionary framework: LePlay discerned what he believed was the baleful effect of changes in the law on family life, Morgan, the progress due to changing economic and environmental factors. The twentieth-century revival of family history received its impetus from Philippe Ariés, who in both his early Histoire des populations françaises and the later Centuries of Childhood maintained the evolutionary perspective.

A member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives sent in 1881 a letter to the state Bureau of Statistics of Labor asking: “Why is it that the working people in Fall River are in constant turmoil when at Lowell and Lawrence they are quiet?” Subsequently the bureau conducted a massive inquiry (Massachusetts 1882: 195–415). It concluded that the main cause of the labor troubles in Fall River during the 1870s was the recent influx of British immigrant cotton workers who brought with them their Old Country tradition of labor militancy.

In the first weeks of the Spanish civil war, there occurred massive popular assaults against the Catholic Church in those cities which did not fall to the Nationalists rising, the Church having been widely (and correctly) perceived as hostile to the Republic and sympathetic to the generals who sought its overthrow. As rumors of priests firing on the populace from church towers circulated wildly, churches and convents were rapidly sacked and burnt. Supporters of the Republic killed religious personnel in large numbers—certainly well into the thousands—while desecrating and destroying church paraphernalia and cultic objects en masse.

The priorities of British and American trade unions center predominantly on the economic rewards received by union members. Collective bargaining and strikes typically focus on how much employers must pay for labor (in wages, pensions, and other benefits) rather than on how the labor, once purchased, may be used. Basic decisions regarding the organization of production are not considered by most unionists as legitimate issues for negotiation. Disputes over working conditions do arise, of course, but rarely concern securing for labor the rights of management. They involve instead efforts to protect jobs and work practices from encroachment by employers or poaching by other unions. In short, labor's goals are largely economistic, defensive, and sectional.

In the past few decades, there has been an explosion of literature concerning the changes taking place in American art music. In many cases, this literature is the work of the very people who are making those changes, the composers of new music. Much of their commentary is written in a manifesto style reminiscent of avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. The dominant topic concerns the changes composers feel are needed to revolutionize American music.

The idea that firearms promote centralized government has a venerable pedigree in European historiography. Friedrich Engels observed that the new weapons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrought substantial changes on class relations as merchants allied themselves with monarchs to wrest control of firearms from nobles and to reap the benefits of emerging mercantile states. The history of firearms thus conceived highlights the cultural content of technology and may provide more than a barren chronicle of destructive tools, as illustrated in J. U. Nef's classic study of technology and war and, in the same tradition, William McNeill's recent synthesis outlining the manner in which European culture framed innovations in military technology

In its conventional Weberian version, “the state” is used to refer to human associations that successfully claim the monopoly of legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. In this conception, the state is presumed to have final authority, i.e., sovereignty as first formulated by Jean Bodin. As elaborated by David Easton, such a state is a neutral “transformatory structure” that would be “captured” by elected regimes, and used as an instrument for their own specific political purposes.

In recent years, there has been a growing realization that the contemporary social organization of homosexuality into lesbian and gay worlds is a socially and historically unique development and that the traditional academic construction of “the homosexual” has participated in this reifying process (Foucault 1978; Hocquenghem 1978; McIntosh 1981; Weeks 1981; Plummer 1981; Faderman 1981). This article seeks to contribute to this understanding by proposing a set of structural characteristics seen as preconditions to the existence of the gay world and by exploring theoretical leads, especially Marxist feminist initiatives, to make sense of these structures. The study of homosexuality has been so long dominated by psychiatry, biology, and theology that the usual tools of analysis provided by political economy (construed broadly) have not been employed to analyze it. This essay puts forward some structural linkages which set homosexuality within the context of the larger histories of gender, family, and production.