Table of Contents

1: Introduction: Toward a Comparative History of Gender, Kinship and Power; 1: Kinship Systems; 1: The Father, the Phallus, and the Seminal Word: Dilemmas of Patrilineality in Ancient Judaism; 2: Blood Ties and Semen Ties: Consanguinity and Agnation in Roman Law; 3: Kinship Between the Lines: The Patriline, the Concubine and the Adopted Son in Late Imperial China; 4: Musings on Matriliny: Understandings and Social Relations among the Sursurunga of New Ireland; 2: Women's Perspectives On Kinship; 5: Family Trees and the Construction of Kinship in Renaissance Italy; 6: Marriage and Women's Subjectivity in a Patrilineal System: The Case of Early Modern Bologna; 7: Male Authority and Female Autonomy: A Study of the Matrilineal Nayars of Kerala, South India; 8: The Limits of Patriliny: Kinship, Gender and Women's Speech Practices in Rural North India; 9: Cooking Inside: Kinship and Gender in Bangangté Idioms of Marriage and Procreation; 3: “Fish without Bicycles”; 10: Patriarchal Provisions for Widows and Orphans in Medieval London; 11: Work and Residence of “Women Alone” in the Context of a Patrilineal System (Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Northern Italy); 12: Heading Households and Surviving in a Man's World: Brazilian Women in the Nineteenth Century; 4: Parents, Breadwinners, Providers; 13: Illegitimacy and Low-Wage Economy in Highland Austria and Jamaica; 14: Women and Kinship in Propertyless Classes in Western Europe in the Nineteenth Century; 15: The Social Construction of Wife and Mother: Women in Porfirian Mexico, 1880–1917; 16: Matrifocal Males: Gender, Perception and Experience of the Domestic Domain in Brazil; 5: Gender and Kinship in Changing Political Economies; 17: The Waxing and Waning of Matrilineality in São Paulo, Brazil: Historical Variations in an Ambilineal System, 1500–1900; 18: Divorced from the Land: Accommodation Strategies of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England; 19: Let's Go to My Place: Residence, Gender and Power in a Mende Community; 20: The Land, the Law and Legitimate Children: Thinking through Gender, Kinship and Nation in the British Virgin Islands

About the Author

Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner, Birgitte Soland, Ulrike Strasser