The Strange Tale of Tom Cassidy and Catherine Rose, or, Free Love, Heterosexuality, and the One Big Union
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Tom Cassidy and Catherine Rose were purged from the One Big Union (OBU) in October 1923 for their illicit sexual relationship, it unleashed an intense and at times dramatic series of confrontations lasting more than six months in which members said to advocate the ideals of “free love” became the greatest threat to the union's existence. Remarkably, these debates at dozens of union meetings occurred without any public reference to sex. Instead, OBU executive members contained the sexual content of Cassidy's and Rose's affair by posing the question of their relationship in terms of a value judgement about what would hinder the progress of the union. To talk of sex, they argued, would enable a sexual Red Scare at the hands of the bourgeois press. The OBU would be destroyed in the ensuing panic over charges of “free love” and the working-class movement for liberation would be undermined. But underneath their concern to protect the union's reputation lay patriarchal assumptions about heterosexuality, both as sexual practice and family structure, to explain the union's existence, its organizational tactics, and their dream of a better future. Thus, it was not so much that the OBU Executive refused to challenge conservative sexual values to protect the union, but that they promoted these values.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".