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.

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 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.

On the morning of 4 April 1877, estate agent Arthur Brooke drove his carriage up to the gate of Cashel Farm, the residence of John Magroarty in Carrick, a small market town in the mountainous hinterland of southwest Donegal. Brooke had brought sheriff McCrory along with him, but his bailiffs emerged from their nearby homes a bit more reluctantly than usual. It was clear to Brooke that tenant Magroarty would not submit mildly to the impending eviction, for, although warned of the sheriff's intention several days earlier, he had not budged a parcel and a large crowd was gathering to witness the proceedings. Agent Brooke had never been so loath to perform his duty, for Magroarty was not the average evictee. He was the owner of several cows and was a reliable and even “improving tenant.” Most of all, however, he was the parish priest. It was Father Magroarty Brooke and his henchmen had come to toss into the streets of Carrick.

The plow is one of those seminal inventions which has transformed history; unfortunately, we have little archaeological evidence about its origins. We believe that the plow existed 4,000 years ago in both ancient Sumar and Egypt, but we do not know when it was first introduced, or where, or by whom. It arrived in human history without fanfare and was an integral part of complex technological and social systems by the era from which we have first evidence of its presence.