Transformations in Sub-Saharan African Marriage and Fertility
- 1 July 1990
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
- Vol. 510 (1), 115-125
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716290510001009
Abstract
Among populations that value high fertility, marital practices often play important roles in regulating fertility. This article interprets ethnographic and demographic data to examine changes in contemporary African marriage. It shows that female education exacerbates inequities between de facto polygynous women who previously would have lived together, shared household resources, and acknowledged each other as cowives. These new forms of polygyny, however, hold an important key to explaining why polygyny and high fertility still proliferate. Men sustain the costs of polygyny and of high fertility in large part by marginalizing low-status women, usually those with the least education, as outside wives and their children as outside children.Keywords
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- Some data on natural fertilityEugenics Quarterly, 1961