Critical Perspectives on Schooling and Fertility in the Developing World (1999) / Chapter Skim
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9 Women's Education, Marriage, and Fertility in South Asia: Do Men Really Not Matter?
9 Women's Education, Marriage, and Fertility in South Asia: Do Men Really Not Matter?
Pages 267-286
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From page 267... ...
Thus, for example, given that birth intervals are often shorter for educated women, we are impressed by the role of modern contraception, which seems not only to compensate for the resultant increase in fecundity, but also to reduce fertility to levels lower than those seen with longer birth intervals. Now that the negative relationship between female education and fertility has been clearly established, further research on this issue, at least in demography, seems to consist of doing more of the same, albeit with bigger and better data sets.
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From page 268... ...
This is especially the case for studies on Asia.4 That is, most analyses that use marriage as an intermediate variable to study fertility are concerned with the question of differentials in when women marry, and not at all with the question of whom they marry.5 In addition, because female education continues to have a strong relationship with fertility even when the standard household variables (of income, occupation, and SO on) are controlled, the explicit conclusion in the literature is that educated women have a single-handed role in their lower fertility.
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From page 269... ...
concludes that in this sense, the delayed marriage associated with women's education has an "unintended" impact on fertility in that educated women do not delay marriage as a means of reducing their fertility. This chapter attempts to isolate only one strand of the female educationmarriage-fertility relationship.
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From page 270... ...
Any table on the sex differential in educational attainment of the population in South Asia should make this quite obvious. For example, Table 9-1 is based on the sample households in the National Family Health Survey in India.
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From page 271... ...
They do so because of the norm of hypergamy in much of South Asian society (see Basu,1998~. In a general way, the system of hypergamy refers to the practice of women marrying men of higher ritual and social status than themselves.
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From page 272... ...
Looking only at more-educated brides and grooms, that is, at members of groups B and D, it is thus obvious that men have a much wider field than women. The main thesis of this chapter is that the way they play this field has a bearing on the relationship between female education and fertility.
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From page 273... ...
273 educated men those that marry more-educated women and those that marry less-educated women. The hypothesis here is that those who do the former are a select group who themselves have low reproductive goals, so that controlling family fertility requires no extraordinary effort on the part of their more-educated wives.
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From page 274... ...
That is, how can we assume that educated men who marry educated women are not a random sample of all educated men, but a group selected in some way? If they were a random sample, we could indeed infer that a strong relation between female education and fertility and a relatively weak one between male education and fertility reflects the primary or even sole impact of the woman's education on reproductive behavior, with men's reproductive goals being immaterial or even contrary to women's, as is often implied in the literature.
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From page 275... ...
As already mentioned, if a family can afford to educate its sons, it does so; 1OFemale education does also partly reflect resources and services. But the use of these resources and services is much more conditioned by norms and values than is the case for males.
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From page 276... ...
12Alternatively, one could look at the education of their mothers. But in a society in which female education is a recent event, this indicator might not be discriminatory enough.
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From page 277... ...
bIncludes women aged 15-24 who are the sisters and daughters of the household head. SOURCE: Computed from Indian National Family Health Survey data.
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From page 278... ...
can strengthen the case for stating that the husband is an important intermediate variable in the relationship between female education and fertility. This is a difficult research undertaking given the trend in academic and policy circles to focus on intrahousehold conflict, treating any convergence of interests as incidental at best and a result of bulldozing at worst.
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From page 279... ...
Or · In the case of low female education, both men and women want more children than they do in the case of high female education? (This is not to imply that husbands and wives have similar fertility goals altruistically, although that is not as impossible as the literature on intrahousehold conflict would have us believe; it could just be that their fertility goals are similar because their socioeconomic and external circumstances are similar.)
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From page 280... ...
Fifth, and this is a more charitable variant of the fourth interpretation, there may be a convergence of fertility goals between husband and wife as the two influence and are influenced by each other, not necessarily through pressure, but through persuasion and constant exposure to one another's views and beliefs. There is also a sixth and most plausible possibility: that husbands and wives do indeed enter a marriage with similar attitudes toward reproduction and family size.
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From page 281... ...
FEMALE EDUCATION, MARRIAGE, AND REPRODUCTIVE MOTIVATION If it is true that the educated men who marry educated women are qualitatively different from the educated or uneducated men who marry uneducated women, if an important part of this difference lies in the lower fertility goals of
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From page 282... ...
Continued intrahousehold hierarchies are quite compatible with fertility decline even in the face of rising female education, and in fact seem to be characterizing recent fertility declines in much of Asia today (see, for example, Greenhalgh, 1985; Basu, 1995~. I would suggest that an important determinant of intentional fertility decline associated with female education is an increase in the family's or, more narrowly, the husband-wife team's united ability to manipulate the environment, rather than an increase in such ability in the woman alone.
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From page 283... ...
Other ways include the differential impact of changes in the broader economy (couples with some education may be more likely to benefit from such changes if they have fewer children, or may even have more to lose with high fertility than do uneducated couples) ; access to modern views about family size in general; changing aspirations for one's children; the prestige of education being able to compensate for the loss of status associated with low fertility in uneducated families; the higher incomes that reduce the need for children as security; and the reduced fatalism about life in general and fertility control in particular that brings conscious birth control within the calculus of human choice.
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From page 284... ...
material life, even in the face of unchanged autonomy in domestic or reproductive decision making,l6 female education remains a major goal of antinatal policy. Whatever their ongins, educated women do clearly have lower fertility preferences, and a convergence of reproductive preferences between spouses should undoubtedly make it easier for fertility to decline than if one partner alone must impose fertility control.
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From page 285... ...
:265 - 314. International Institute for Population Sciences 1995 National Family Health Survey (MCH and Family Planning)
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From page 286... ...
Warren, B.D. 1966 A multiple variable approach to the assortative mating phenomenon.
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