Transformations in Sub-Saharan African Marriage and Fertility

Bibliographic Data

ID9765785
AuthorsCaroline Bledsoe (Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, corresponding author)
Year1990
Volume510
Issue1
Pages115-125
Publication date1990-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7162 • E-ISSN: 1552-3349
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0002716290510001009
OpenAlexW1988852839
LanguageEN
Citations received56
References cited12

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

Demographic economics · Economic growth · Economics · Ethnography · Fertility · Geography · Political science · Polygyny · Population · Sociology · Demography · Family Dynamics and Relationships · Gender Studies · Marriage and Sexual Relationships · Reproductive Health and Technologies