Word: widowhood
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...needs a protector, even a man who beats her. Ashamed, terrified that any resistance will provoke greater violence, isolated from her family and friends, often without any means of support other than the husband, many a battered woman sinks into despairing submission, from which the only escape is eventual widowhood, her own murder (or, perhaps in a flash of retaliatory rage, her husband's), or suicide. According to a four-year study of a major metropolitan hospital completed this year, 25% of all women's suicide attempts are preceded by a prior history of battering...
Skelton, the British translator of Cosima Wagner's Diaries, recounts all this with grace and a perhaps too benign indulgence. Since his story leaves off before Cosima's long widowhood (she died in 1930, at 93), he does not have to confront her in the decades when she reigned implacably over Bayreuth. He cites ample evidence of Wagner's more monstrous traits, which Cosima shared or abetted: egomania, antiSemitism, a devouring exploitativeness. Yet Skelton seems to take his tone from a remark of Cosima's, when the abandoned Bülow told her he forgave...
...subject is Social Security, the nation's biggest, broadest and probably most successful social program. To some 36 million people, nearly one American in every six, the Social Security system now provides a monthly check promising that old age, widowhood or disabling injury will not throw them into poverty. To 116 million others who pay Social Security taxes, the system offers assurance that they too will be taken care of when they become too old to work...
...matter: the elderly, and many of the young, have been convinced that they have a right to Social Security payments high enough to maintain a comfortable standard of living despite old age, widowhood or disability, and this right is every bit as inalienable as the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Harold Sheppard, associate director of the National Council on the Aging, has a one-word description of benefits paid now and all increases that may be necessary to keep those payments abreast of inflation. The word is: sacred. And all politicians know that the aged...
...difficult to understand why women can survive widowhood more successfully than men. Very simply, they continue to do what they have been doing all of their lives: cooking, cleaning, shopping, gardening, paying the bills, mowing the lawn, etc. Losing this valuable workhorse and jack-of-all-trades is indeed traumatic for the male. Consequently, remarriage is a must for his survival...