In any given culture kinship is understood as "natural", but by comparing these international studies, it reveals how kinship is an ongoing project of human construction. Aspects including gender, family position and descent are explored.

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