Why women are the weaker sex

This article does not question the link between psychiatry and anti-feminism, but considers this history from another angle, by analysing the repercussions of this sexist standpoint on the shaping of medical knowledge, and conversely, on representations of female patients. Put differently, experts of the mind have had a troubling tendency to confuse a rejection of social conventions with mental illness. As a consequence, in the same way that homosexuals and dissidents Communards, anti-Franco-ists, anti-Putinists, etc. Moreover, if writers have exaggerated the inflexibility of the medical profession, so, conversely, have they underestimated the capacity of patients, in particular women patients, to counteract the pronouncements of the doctors. And how did British women like Edith Lanchester manage to fight it?

Sex differences in mortality SDIM vary over time and place as a function of social, health, and medical circumstances. The magnitude of these variations, and their response to large socioeconomic changes, suggest that biological differences cannot fully account for sex differences in survival. We draw on a wide swath of mortality data, including probability of survival to age 70 by county in the United States, the Human Mortality Database data for 18 high-income countries since , and mortality data within and across developing countries over time periods for which reasonably reliable data are available. We show that, in each of the periods of economic development after the onset of demographic and epidemiologic transition, cross-sectional variation in SDIM exhibits a consistent pattern of female resilience to mortality under adversity. The Weaker Sex?

London: Women are more likely than men to survive in times of famine and epidemics, research has found. While it has long been known that women have a higher life expectancy than men in general, analysis of historical records stretching back years shows that women have, for example, outlived men on slave plantations in Trinidad, during famines in Sweden and through various measles outbreaks in Iceland. Even when mortality was very high for both sexes, women still outlived men, on average, by six months to four years, according to the report by Duke University in North Carolina. The data sets included seven groups of people for whom life expectancy was 20 years or under for one or both sexes.

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