When I saw the quote from Mark Twain at the top of the blog "What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce?" I thought of something I read in my psych book, "the most difficult separation [separation being death] is from one's spouse- a loss suffered by five times more women than men" (133). This makes me wonder why most wives outlive their husbands? Is it just because their life expectancy is longer, which I don't know if it actually is, or something else? Generally women cook the meals and do the house work, so in some relationships the husband would be at quite a loss without help from his spouse. There are many other examples like this, but I wonder if those patterns in a marriage actually has any connection to that statistic.
Back to the Twain quote, I wondered whether scarce meant like less than or something along those lines, or just lost and confused? In the dictionary it means not abundant, but I wonder if that's what he means here? Is he literally talking about the fact that you need both a male and female to have kids-meaning more men?
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I think that what Twain is saying in this quote is similar to what you say above - that in many relationships men rely on women. Whether it's for cooking, cleaning or just well being, I think Twain is trying to say that men are nothing without women and visa versa. But I also can understand how you interpreted the quote; literally men without women can't reproduce.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Twain. I think that women and men are dependent on each other (not in terms of reproducing). I think that without the opposite gender men/women would be very different from what they are today, for better or for worse I have no idea. But I think that in these times men and women balance each other out.