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Myth or math: the waxing and waning of the female-headed household

Recently the long-accepted stereotypes of the female-headed household have been challenged from several directions. These households have been seen as a form of social pathology especially associated with African-Americans (Moynihan, 1965) and as an element of the culture of poverty (Lewis, 1966) detrimental to raising children (Vecchio and Roy, 1998). Aspects of modernization and urbanization including migration, increasing divorce and nonmarital fertility rates are seen as causes, leading to the assumption that trends in family organization in developing countries will follow the pattern in industrialized nations, predominantly as found in the USA and UK (Arias and Palloni, 1999). In this paper I shall examine some of these myths in the light of the new availability of nationaland international-level data (United Nations (UN), 2000; Economist, 2001; Harden, 2001), the increasingly widespread analysis of large-scale household surveys (Handa, 1994, 1996; Drèze and Shrinivasa, 1998; Fuwa, 2000) and studies done in hitherto under-reported areas such as Eastern Europe (Lokshin et al., 2000), the Caribbean (Barrow, 1996,1998), South Asia (Vecchio and Roy, 1998; Perera, 1999) and Africa (Juliusdottir,1995; Brown and Kerr, 1997).