WHY ARE THERE SO MANY WIDOWS?

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 19, 6 February 1937, Page 9

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY WIDOWS?

Woman Stronger Than Man

•'pmAJLLTY, thy name is woman," Mad po«t — but poet errs, writes Walter Finker. In spite of those hulging bioeps and the swaggering boasts of the beer-parlor, the fact is that the male aex is the weaker of the jfcwo. Don't. let yourseif be iooled by old Moebiu* who wrote a ponderous volume on the physiological and theiefore inherent weakness of woman. And don't let yourseif be deluded by all that bunk about feminine softness as opposed to brutish. masculinity, either. He (or in this case, she) who laughs iut laughs best, they say, and scienIfcifically the woman actualiy has the last laugh, if we consider the question of longevity. (lf longevity is a laugh-. ing matter, in these troublous tames . . . But thefe, we won't go into that). Clinging-vine or not, ehe is biologically stronger, longer-lived, and •quipped with greater powers of ro■istance. These facts are directly responsible for the surplus of women which obtains everywhere to-day, making it impossible for a certain per cent. to find husbands, simply because of the jnsufficient number of men. Among new-born children the eituation is reversed. More boyB are born than girls; there are 21 male infants to 20 female. But the Grim Reaper is prejudiced. He has a startling) predileptioa for the boys and shuns the girls. This process' of eliiuin'ation goes back even before birth. For it is predominately the male embryo that meets a premature death, wliile still in the body of the mother. Thus it has been established that if the fertilised eggs fdl matured normaly there would be 1750 boys born a to cvery 1000 girls. The female; then, in spite of fewer numbers, shows inherent biological superiority of strength ' and * resistance. From childhood on there is a level|jntr process till about the age of puberty when we have an approximately equal number of majes and fomales. It isn't till the twenties are resiched that there are more women 'than nenThis is the crucial point of both curves. The male goes down, and the preponderance of women takes on greater and greater dimensions (since more men die than women); till we come to the extremo end of the ecalo • in the Old Folks' Home the original birfch statistics are reversed, for tbere are two men here to every three women. He who laughs last . . 1 According to the records then, the poor dear girls are gettiqg. .a .Wjgb break. Even if there were no inveterate bachelo'rs on the fa.ce of ihe eartb, their prospects of marriage would still seem to be • callously limited by Nature. In Vienna-, • for -instance,- -there are 170,000 jnore, women than .inen; 170,000 "Viennese - maidens are looking for a man and can't find him because he died before he was born. 'But this

outlook is dreary only because we are considering it from the point of view of statistics. (Statistics unadorned are always dreary . . ) If, however, we deal more particularly with unmarrjed men and "women, we are presented with a ditferent picinre. For: There i's actualiy a lack of marriageable young girls I (We are using Viennese statistics, but a eimilar situation obtains in any average large city all over the. world). From the age of 20 to 33 there axe far more single men than women. Aftor 33 the baiance weighs more heavily on the side of the women; then eligibie bachelors become really scarce. The moral eeems quite obvious. Nature is On your side after all, fair damsell There are lots of men to choose from between the ages of 20 to 33; make the rnost of your opportunity. You will have only yourseif to blamo for failure. But later it is a different story ; the male minority is startling. Among married people many moie husbands die than wivea. In 1933 there were three million widows in Germany to •one million widowers. But, you interrupt, is this not a direct result of the Great WarF Only to a negligible degree. The German census of 1910, compiled during a peaceful and prosperous era, shows a similar disproportionate number of widows. One fact stands out clearly from all this, and that is that the male sex is the weaker. This isn't confined to the world of human beings alone. It embraces all epecies of animal existence; and polygamy seems to be the solution to the problem of these lower creatures in alniost every instance. Look into " the chicken coop, where the lordly rooster presides over his harem of hens. Scientificaliy, there are at least as many potential roosters among the hens as hens, but due again to the high male . death rate, there is the same large preponderance of femaje s. Polygamy and a surplus of women seein biologically to belong together. But we wouldn't advise friend husband to express such a sentiment in front of the gqod wife, or he may learn to his discomfiture whieh is the stronger sex.