Still behind, but working to get caught up. I don’t want to overwhelm you too much in one day, but I am going to try to do a morning/evening post tomorrow and the next day to catch you up on my writing.

For tonight, I give you a poem. It is suited, since it mentions Erasmus Darwin, and he used a poem, a long poem, to explain his ideas about evolution. Things were different back then, right? How many scientists now would feel comfortable putting forth scientific ideas in a poem? For those who are unsure of who Erasmus Darwin was, he was the grandfather of Charles Darwin, and proposed an evolutionary theory sometime before his more famous grandson. His had the misfortune of being incorrect, but we shouldn’t hold that against him. Many scientific ideas have been incorrect until they were refined and polished by later generations.

The premise behind today’s poem is the reality that men seem to benefit more from marriage than women. Married men have an increased life expectancy. They are prone to remarry quickly following divorce or death of their spouse. Their marriage often confers privileges in terms of jobs and promotions, while for women, the opposite is true. So I decided to put at least some of that in a poem. Here it is.

MARRIAGE

 Marriage is for the man;
He benefits from the union.
Woman loses her independence,
Her name,
Often her property.
She becomes “Mrs.”
He stays the same.

 Erasmus Darwin knew
Marriage was for the man.
He had to persuade female patients
To marry.
They didn’t want to be
Just Mrs. Him.

 Somewhere we lost the understanding.
We used tricks,
Smoke and mirrors,
To convince women
Marriage was for them.
Men just went along with it
For the women.

For the sex.
For the housecleaning and cooking.
For the children.

 Now we have a backwards view,
Assuming women gain from marriage
And men lose.
Actuarial statistics
Tell us the truth.
But parlor tricks and PR
Have convinced us
The statistics lie.