This analysis uses data from an intensive village study to investigate whether rising landlessness leads to increasing fragmentation and nucleation of families in rural Bangladesh. It was found that, even after rapid fertility decline, the elderly and women continue to rely extensively on family support. A persistence of traditional living arrangements, in which sons form their own households in the homesteads of their fathers, also contributes to retarding the process of family disintegration that is likely to be caused when farm size decreases and the role of the farm economy in a traditional peasant society diminishes. Though it has been the largest component of reproductive mortality since its statutory registration in 1928, stillbirth has received little attention from historical demographers, who have relied on the more orthodox indicator of early human survival changes - 'infant mortality'. A case is made for estimating stillbirth before 1928 as a ratio of early neonatal death, and for employing perinatal mortality as an historical indicator of female health status.
Reproductive mortality is a more complete indicator of death in infancy.
It offers demographers a means of fracturing the fertility versus mortality dualism and a potential purchase on gender as a demographic variable, while re-opening the case on mortality in the demographic dynamic of the world we have lost. In this paper we re-estimate the effects of breastfeeding patterns on the timing of resumption of menses after controlling for maternal nutrition and maternal stressor variables.