Facts and Errors About Women

Widespread beliefs about woman, which the specialists have taken an interest in studying. Here are the results of these studies:

Sixteen is the happiest year of a woman's life

False: It has been proved that people, men and women alike, enjoy the greatest share of happiness between the ages of thirty and fifty. Perhaps this is because during these years we have grown practiced in facing life and accustomed to living most of the time in the present, whereas we live in the future before thirty, and in the past after fifty.

Woman feels the advance of age more keenly, and dreads it more, than man

True: Woman fears old age and dreads it because the years in which she is fit for marriage, and then for childbearing, are numbered, ending at about forty-five. And since marriage and the bearing of offspring are what matter most to her in life, the advance of age, with the loss of them, is what she dreads most.

The girl is always ahead of the boy in the ripening and completion of the body

True: The specialists say: a girl is born with her body as mature as that of a male infant who has completed about a month of his life, and she goes on outstripping him in maturity as she grows older; her body is more mature than his by the equivalent of six months when she is two years old, by the equivalent of a year when she is nine, and by two years when she is twelve.

Women mature sexually before men

False: For though women's bodies are earlier to ripen, their sexual maturity is not complete until the age of eighteen, though they may marry and give birth ten years before that; whereas men's sexual maturity is not delayed beyond sixteen. This was proved by Professor "Alfred McKenzie," one of the great American scientists, through the careful researches he carried out on this subject. Perhaps this explains many of the cases of failed marriage in which the wife is below the said age of sexual maturity.

A girl grows no taller after she reaches eighteen years of age

True: For at this age she has attained her utmost height, except in abnormal cases connected with her general health and her natural constitution — whereas a young man's height goes on increasing until he reaches twenty.

Woman is most candid about her age at twenty

True: The psychologists hold that between twenty and thirty a woman is most confident of herself and most perceptive of life as it really is. She is therefore less conscious of her age then than at any other time, and may see no harm in declaring her true age. In adolescence, however, she will usually add a year or two to her age, so as to appear more fit for marriage; and once she has passed thirty, she takes care to subtract from her age, so as to remain forever at the age of ripeness and fullness. Rarely can a woman's age be determined between twenty-five and thirty-five.

The younger the wife, the better she keeps her husband's love

False: It has appeared that a woman past thirty is better able to keep her husband's love. The reason may be that she does everything in her power to please him; at this age she often imagines that she is on the point of losing his interest in her, and so she makes a doubled effort so that his feeling for her may not cool and his bond with her weaken.

Whereas wives at the age of twenty often behave toward their husbands in a way that weakens the marriage bond... And statistics show that most divorces occur at this age.

False: For a woman is fit to keep a secret only in the period between twenty and thirty, when she has no need to draw the hearts of her listeners to her by divulging it. Before twenty she is usually possessed by vanity and by an eagerness to assert her personality by any means; and after forty she finds it hard to keep a secret, reckoning that spreading it will raise her standing with those who listen.

True: And there are two contradictory causes to which this is attributed: security and anxiety. The woman who is secure and comfortably off, confident of her husband's love for her, takes no care to keep her slimness, and usually indulges freely in rest and food. And the anxious woman, who doubts her husband's affection or fears the future, often resorts to overeating, driven by the psychological forces that rage within her breast. In both cases, the woman becomes prone to stoutness.

The older a woman grows, the more she can be relied upon to keep a secret

A woman's weight increases at forty, and her body inclines to stoutness