As illustrated in Table 4.1, the case of Bangladesh contrasts markedly with that of Barbados. In the former, childbirth comes relatively early and almost exclusively within the confines of marriage, which occurs early for women7 and, according to Duza (1989:127,140), is virtually universal, with unmarried women generally being considered redundant. Of females aged 20 to 24 in 1981, only 5.1 per cent remained ‘never married’. While almost 17 per cent of households in Bangladesh were female headed in 1981, over half of these heads were widows; only 1.4 per cent were single women (and probably fewer still were never-married lone parents). In Pakistan, female headship was even less common, applying to only 4.3 per cent of households in 1981 (United Nations 1989: Table 35). As in Bangladesh, there was only a minuscule proportion of households (less than 0.5 per cent) headed by single women.
Bharat’s analysis of 1981 census data in India found lone mothers to be similarly rare: 4.8 per cent of the female population aged 15 to 49 years and 6 per cent of the ever-married female population. The overwhelming majority of lone mothers—85 per cent—were widows. No figures are given for unmarried mothers, underlining their paucity—or at least invisibility (Bharat 1986:57). Across much of south Asia, where lone parenthood has occurred, for whatever reason, the parent has characteristically been absorbed into the extended family. But there are portents of change. Alam (1985) argues that the rise in female-headed households in Bangladesh in the 1980s is largely a reflection of the increasing ‘social abandonment of women’, partly through a loosening of kinship obligations, ironically through what she refers to as the modernization of patriarchal attitudes toward women, aggravated by a pattern of economic change leading to increased inequality in the agrarian sector and a lack of alternative wage employment.