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.

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.

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 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.

Resurgent scholarly interest in the state has focused attention on the growth and decline of state power: Samuel Huntington's emphasis on the importance of state making and state decay, James O'Connor's anticipation of the financial crises of large states, Immanuel Wallerstein's identification of strong states with core areas of the world economy, Charles Tilly's accounts of European efforts to create more powerful states, and Theda Skocpol's analysis of revolutions as attempts to restore the strength of weakened central regimes.

Roger Daniels' comments (CSSH 1983:401–404) pertaining to my paper on assimilation of the Chinese in Peru and the U.S.A. (CSSH 1978:335–358) contained several misrepresentations which need to be corrected lest readers of this journal who may be unfamiliar with my paper be misled.