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The Sexes

About This Item

  • Title: The Sexes
  • Date: 14 August 1857
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.01366
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 14 August 1857: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
  • Contributors to digital file: Thara Michaelis Kaylen Michaelis Stephanie Blalock Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "The Sexes." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 16 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.01366.xml (TEI)
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THE SEXES.—

Some philosopher has discovered that "there is a natural law of relations between the sexes, which is found to vary at different ages, according to the different dangers to which they are exposed. There are more males than females born by about four percent; at twenty years of age, this preponderance is entirely lost, and there are more females than males; at forty years, the balance is again the other way, and there are more males than females: at seventy the sexes are about even, and the ultimate age of the human being is reached without any decided advantage to either sex." This is one of the most curious of the natural laws, and one of the most interesting. If the number of males and females born was exactly equal, the result would be that before they reached middle age, the female sex would be reduced too low, and become inadequate to the purposes which it has to fill. In fact, the number of males born is always greater than the females by about four per cent. Past the age of forty the deaths of females are the smallest.

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