The Status of Women and Family Planning Acceptance: Some Field Results

Abstract

The term status of women is very elusive in concept and there are difficulties in defining as well as measuring it (for a detailed discussion on this subject, see Mason [1]. Though social demographic literature uses numerous terms such as female 'autonomy', women's rights, prestige, power or freedom to describe the status of women, its measurement is often confined to two standard and readily ascertainable variables - education and occupation. In this paper, these two indicators of status of women have been used to study their effect on
contraceptive behavior.