Beyond mothers who father : the study of female headship

More than half of a century has passed since Edith Clark first wrote "My Mother Who Fathered Me" in 1957, a classic study on single motherhood (marriage, sex, and concubinage) in Jamaica at the time. The Caribbean, along with Latin America, continue to experience high levels of non-marital childbearing today. The traditional narrative of female headship tells the story of single mothers raising children with limited male assistance, whereas in modern reality female headship occurs under a plethora of circumstances. Latin America in particular has not only experienced a rise in cohabitation, but such expansion has reached even the higher strata of the societies, as predicted by the second demographic transition (LaPlante, et al, 2015; Lesthaeghe, 2014). This phenomenon thus begs the question: how should we interpret female headship now