The choice of a mate.

  • Anthony Ludovici
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details
    523/546 (page 493)
    RE-MARRIAGE OF WIDOWS (2) There is the probability of a difference, from the standpoint of the alleged telegonic influence, between marrying a widow who has had only one child, and one who has had several children. (3) Professor Karl Pearson’s observations appear to have been directed only to stature, which we know is most variable from numerous causes not directly traceable to parental stature. Would not other characters perhaps reveal an increasing resemblance to the sire in the younger children ? (4) It seems as if Professor Otto Grosser overestimates the efficacy of the placenta as a separation between the foetus and the mother. We are certainly not confronted in this structure by a hermetically sealed partition, and does not Parasitology teach us that certain parasites—and the foetus is a parasite on the mother— affect their host by their secretions, although less intimately connected with it ? On these grounds I think it possible that fresh light may yet be thrown on the theory of telegony, and that its dismissal by modern science has perhaps been a little hasty. I deplore the re-marriage of widows further for the following reasons :— (1) On the general grounds that they are usually well beyond their teens, that the most dramatic and unforgettable episode in a woman’s life has in them already been stamped with the image of another man—in short, that their pristine impressionability has already been appropriated—and also that unless their charms are so superlative as to make them unique, it amounts to an absurd exaggeration of an individual woman’s differences from other women, to select a widow rather than a nubile spinster who has not the former’s disadvantages. (2) It is the male’s privilege to be the initiator in sexual con gress, and this he forfeits with a widow. If the reluctance to act as initiator is a factor in making him choose a widow, as it undoubtedly is in many modern men, then what he needs most is not marriage but sex-education. Nevertheless, the following figures, culled from the Registrar- General’s Statistical Reviews, show what an unduly large pro portion of marriages in this country still take place with widows, and I should require a great deal of convincing that even as much as 10 per cent of them were due to the women in the case having been so superlatively seductive that no nubile virgin could have competed with them.