study of family and kinship in Guyana showed that a high proportion of villagers lived in female-headed households, and that often the core of the domestic unit consisted of a woman, her children and her daughters’ children. Arguing that the ‘family is not based on marriage or the nuclear family’ (1973: 137), Smith describes a developmental cycle in which households are established when a man and woman, who may or may not be married and may or may not already have children either with other partners or together, set up house together