This paper compares two familiar events who affect women’s life, marriage and birth of the first child. We support our analysis on demographic statistics of two Portuguese regions: Azores and Lisbon. We pretend to characterise the female population between fifteen and forty nine years old, especially when they become married women and mothers, and compare women from Azores and from Lisbon, at those transition moments, in the last decades.

keywords: transition, private household, marriage, childbirth, life cycle, Azores, Lisbon, demography