WHY ARE THERE SO MANY WIDOWS?

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 34, 10 February 1937, Page 16 (Supplement)

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY WIDOWS?

Woman Stronger Than Man

thy name is woman,” said the poet—but tho poet errs, writes Walter Jbinker. In spite of those bulging biceps and the swaggering boasts ot the beer-pailor, the tact is that the male sex is the weaker of tho two. Don’t let yourself be tooled l>y old Moebius who wrote a ponderous volume on the physiological and tiiei'it'ore inherent weakness of woman. Ami don’t let yourselt be deluded by all that bunk about feminine softness as opposed to brutish masculinity, either. lie (or in this case, she) who laugh? last laugiis best, they say, and scientifically tho woman actually has the last laugh, if we consider the question ot longevity. (If longevity is a laughing matter, in these troublous times . . , Hut there, we won’t go into that). Clinging-vine or not, she is biologically stronger, longer-lived, and equipped with greater powers of resistance. 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 tho insufficient number of men.

Among new-born children the situation is reveised. More boys are born than girls; there are 21 male infanta to 20 female. But the Grim Reaper is prejudiced. He has a startling prediction for the boys and shuns the girls. This process ot elimination goes bark •ven before birth. For it is predominately the male embryo that meets a premature death while still in the body ot the mother. Tnus it has been established that if the fertilised eggs all m&tuEfd normaly there would he 1750 boys born to every 1000 gills. The female, then, in spite of lewer shows inherent biological superiority of strength and resistance. From childhood on there is a levelling process till about the age of puberty when we have an approximately equal number of males and females. It isn’t till the twenties aro reached that there are more women than l ien This is the crucial poiut of both curves. The malo goes down, and the preponderance of women takes on greater and greater dimensions (since more men die than women); rill we come to the extreme end ot the scalo: in the Old Folks’ Homo the original birth statistics are reversed, for tbera are two men hero to every three women. He who laughs last . . 1 According to tho records then, the poor dear girls aro getting a tough break. Kren if there were no inveterate bachelors on the face of the earth, their prospects of marriage would still seem to b* callously limited by Mature. In Vienna, for instance, there are 170,000 more women than uicn; 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 unmarried men and women, we are presented with a different picture. For: There is actually a lack of marriageable young girls 1 (We are using \ lennese statistics, but a similar situation obtains in any average large city all over the world). From the age of 20 to 33 there are far more single men than women. After 33 the balance weighs more heavily on tho side of the women; then eligible bachelors become really scarce. The moral seems quite obvious. Mature is on your sido alter all, fair damsel! There are lots of men to choose from between the ages of 20 to 33; make the most of your opportunity. You will have only yourselt to blamo for failure. But later it is a different story; the male minority is startling. Among married people many moie husbands die than wivee. 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 War? 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 malo sex is the weaker. This isn’t confined to the world of human beings alone. It embraces all species of animal existence; and polygamy seems to be the solution to the problem of these lower creatures in almost every instance. Look into the chicken coop, where the lordly rooster presides over his harem ot hens. Scientifically, 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 females. Polygamy and a surplus of women seem biologically to belong together. But we wouldn’t advise friend husband to express such a sentiment in front of the good wife, or he may learn to his discomfiture which is the stronger sqx.