1. Some of the most interesting recent work includes Graham Allan, A Sociology of Friendship and Kinship (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979); Jessie Bernard, The Female World (New York: Free Press, 1981); Nancy E Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981); Claude S. Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Mary P. Ryan, "The Power of Women's Networks: A Case Study of Female Moral Reform in Antebellum America," Ferainist Studies 5 (Spring 1979): 66-87; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual," in A Heritage of Her Own, ed. Nancy E Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon and Schuster, Touchstone, 1979); Lillian Rubin, Just Friends (New York: Harper and Row, 1985); Barry Wellman, "The Community Question," American Journal of Sociology 84 (1979): 1201-31; and the articles collected in Steve W. Duck and Daniel Perlman, eds., Understanding Personal Relationships (Beverly Hills, Ca.: Sage, 1985); Laura Lein and Marvin B. Sussman, eds., The Ties That Bind (New York: Ha-worth Press, 1983); Elliott Leyton, ed., The Compact (Newfoundland: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1974); and Helena Z. Lopata and David Maines, eds., Research in the Interweave of Social Roles, vol. 2 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1981).

2. The contemporary exemplar of this tradition is Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network, 2d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1971).

3. See citations in Anne M. Seiden and Pauline B. Bart, "Woman to Woman: Is Sisterhood Possible?" in Old Family/New Family, ed. N. Glazer-Malbin (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1975), 189-228; see also

Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs 5 (1980): 631-60.

4. Compare, for example, research on working-class women in the fifties by Komarovsky and by Young and Willmott, to findings on the seventies by Rubin and, once more, Young and Willmott (Mirra Koma-rovsky, Blue-Collar Marriage [New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1967], chs. 5, 6; Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1957], ch. 1; The Symmetrical Family [New York: Penguin Books, 1973], ch. 3; Lillian Breslow Rubin, Worlds of Pain [New York: Basic Books, 1976], ch. 7).

5. Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), ch. 7.

6. Claude S. Fischer and Stacey J. Oliker, "A Research Note on Friendship, Gender, and the Life Cycle," Social Forces 62 (1983): 129-30; Fischer, To Dwell, 130-31.

7. Mary Jo Bane, Here to Stay (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 9.