Third, women, as a rule, are more numerous than men because, practicing dangerous and deadly jobs in factories, mines, and the like, men encounter fatal dangers. Men, naturally, are less immunized and more subjected to the infections of diseases and epidemics than women are. Biologists, referring to this fact, say that women enjoy physical abilities that men lack and nearly all diseases affect men, not women. On this account, there are 7,700,000 widows living, currently, in the U.S.A. The office of American Census predicts that numbers of this class will raise in the rate of two million per one decade.
Dr. Marion Langer, the sociologist, says that there are two solutions only for covering the reduction in the numbers of men-either polygamy or inventing a method that elongates men's ages!
War is another reason beyond women's being more than men in numbers. Wars in fact terminate great numbers of men and cause horrible decrease in their rates in proportion to women. In the First World War, the number of the casualties was 21,000,000. The Second World War consumed about 50,000,000 men. This huge number of casualties caused a big space in the numbers of men and created an international crisis that needed a decisive treatment.
The Western nations, because they prohibited polygamy, faced this problem with puzzlement; therefore, they had to treat it by means of moral corruption that rumored profanity, prostitution, and bastards as well as moral disorder.
Using such a unique, nonesuch method befitting the nature of humankind and requirements of circumstances, Islam has treated this problem with polygamy through which individuals and societies are saved from many tragedies:
"Marry such women as seem good to you, two and three and four; but if you fear that you will not do justice between them, then marry only one. 4:4)