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Previous explanations of female centrality and “matrilateral asymmetry” in urban bilateral kinship have tended to reduce women's roles in extrahousehold kinship relations to their roles as mothers, and they have failed to explicate the social and cultural processes through which this asymmetry has emerged. In contrast, the present analysis of kinship relationships in an urban Japanese‐American community attributes the centrality of women in interhousehold networks to the creation of new normative expectations of the role of female kin. The failure of previous discussions of female centrality to differentiate analytically people's cultural constructs from the actual social consequences of their behaviors has obscured our understanding of kinship in urban industrial societies.