Includes index.

Contents: Part One: Putting family in perspective: The unnatural family -- Is there family? New anthropological views -- Conceptualizing family -- Part Two: Examining family diversity across history and culture: Section 1: Foraging societies: communal households: !Kung women: contrasts in sexual egalitarianism in foraging and sedentary contexts -- Women in an egalitarian society: the montagnais-naskapi of Canada -- Section 2: Preindustrial Europe and North America: the household economy: Women, men, and the family in medieval England -- The family economy in modern England and France -- Gender at work at home: family decisions, the labour market, and girls' contributions to the family economy -- Domesticity -- Putting mothers on the pedestal -- Part Three: Twentieth-century developments: As times change: a review of trends in personal and family life -- Wives and husbands -- 'Leave it to beaver' and 'Ozzie and Harriet': American families in the 1950s -- Part Four:Section 1: Exploring the many facets of personal life and family: The social construction of gender: processes creating mothers, wives and breadwinners -- The reproduction of family life: perspectives of male and female adolescents -- Hard choices: veering toward domesticity -- Section 2: Sexuality and love: gendered experiences -- Heterosexuality: contested ground -- Heterosexual sex: power and desire for the other -- Section 3: Becoming a mother, becoming a father, doing motherwork: Making labour work: women negotiating medicalized childbirth -- Reproducing difference: changes in the lives of partners becoming parents -- Motherwork, stress, and depression: the costs of privatized social reproduction -- Section 4: The gendered division of household work: Family coping strategies: balancing paid employment and domestic labour -- The third shift -- The politics of family and immigration in the subordination of domestic workers in Canada -- Part Five: Ethnic/ racial diversity in families: African- American families and family values -- Swapping : 'what goes round comes round' -- Black families in Canada: exploring the interconnections of race, class, and gender -- From Hong Kong to Canada: immigration and the changing family lives of middle-class women from Hong Kong -- Part Six: Families that challenge conventional patterns: Lesbian families -- Pathbreakers: some unconventional families of the nineties -- Part Seven: Other Family Matters: Confronting violence in women's lives -- Children's adjustment to divorce -- Part Eight: Toward change: social policies for families: Lessons from Europe: policy options to enhance the economic security of Canadian families -- Welfare state restructuring and changing gender relations: the politics of family policy in Sweden and Canada.