A study of changes in the marital pattern of Chinese women in the past 40 years.

"There has been a considerable amount of research on changes in the pattern of first marriage among Chinese women and its impact on [the] fertility rate since 1950. This paper attempts to establish several indexes for measuring various dimensions subsumed in the status of 'being married'...to expound the inter-relationships between the number and structure of marriages and the index of first marriage in the population."