Village Women-Their Changing Lives and Fertility: Studies in Kenya, Mexico, and the Philippines

摘要

To discover how changes in women's status might influence family size, the lives of individual women in five villages in Kenya, Mexico, and the Philippines were studied. Techniques of the study, the results of which are here presented, included life histories, census and genealogical surveys, participant observations, and social character analyses; data were processed with the DEMOG computer program. In Kenya, the histories of women in the Kikuyu village of Kiaguri were studied at 20-year intervals from 1896 to 1976. Research in Mexico focused on the villages, agriculturally rich and poor, respectively, of Santa Maria and Tierra Alta. Cotawan, a Muslim village, and Niwang, a Christian settlement, both located on Mindanao, were sites of studies in the Philippines. The women studied included those who had no children, those who had many, and those who had an average number.