Marital and Fertility Careers of Soviet Women: A Life Table Analysis

Willekens, F. & Scherbov, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0881-1073 (1990). Marital and Fertility Careers of Soviet Women: A Life Table Analysis. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-90-078

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Abstract

This paper uses recently published data and life table analysis to describe the marital and fertility behavior of women on a country level. The purpose of this paper is to explore the changes in nuptiality and fertility in the Soviet Union and the associated changes in women's lives. Soviet women differ greatly from women in Western Europe in their early start of marital and fertility careers. One-third of females are married before their 20th birthday. The age at which women have their first child is decreasing. Fifteen percent have at least one child at age 20, and 65 percent have one or more children at age 25.

In the first part of the paper, multistate life table analysis is introduced to generate complete marital histories (biographies) of women as they pass through the reproductive ages (16-50). The second part describes fertility histories for two birth cohorts: 1940-1944 and 1950-1954, where the theory of staging or sequential processes is used to describe fertility careers.

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