The paper identifies some of the demographic, background and socio-economic characteristics of women that affect cumulative fertility and examines the magnitude of differentials in cumulative fertility due to these factors using data from the Bangladesh Fertility Survey. Multivariate techniques are adopted in the analysis to understand the net effect of each of the factors. The results indicate the predominance of demographic variables such as age, age at first marriage and number of times married over other types of variables in the determination of fertility behaviour in rural Bangladesh. However, some of the background and socio-economic variables such as religion, wife’s work status and husband’s occupation turn out to be significant predictors of fertility behaviour for older women. There is also some indirect evidence to suggest the presence of some kind of involuntary control on fertility behaviour through such mechanism as prolonged breastfeeding, in fecundity or sub-fecundity, pregnancy wastage etc. among various sub-groups of the population which are suffering from an extremely poor standard of living.