Fair hair and dark hair.
--A writer in the
Anthropological Review argues that fair haired women are getting rarer in
England than they were formerly, and that the change is the result of "conjugal selection, the man having a decided preference for dark hair.
Mrs. Somerville remarked upon this fact some years ago, in her valuable work on physical geography.
She was of opinion that fair hair was then much less common among her country men and country women than she remembered in her youth.
Dr. John Beddoe took the pains to collect some statistics on this subject.
He gives particulars respecting the color of the hair and the social condition of 737 women who have come under his observation, in his capacity of physician to the
Bristol Royal infirmary.
Of these 737 women the hair of 22 was "red," that of 95 was "fair." that of 340 was brown, that of 336 was "dark brown," and that of 33 was "black. "Reckoning all the "red," the "fair," and the "brown, " as "fair," and only the "dark brown" and the "black" as "dark," the respective totals were thus nearly equal, being 367 "fair" and 369 "dark." Of the 367 fair haired women however, 32 per cent. were single, while of 369 dark haired women only 21.5 per cent. were single.
It would thus appear that a greater proportion of fair haired women "live and die unmarried and without off-spring," and that the increasing prevalence of dark hair in
England is due to what — slightly varying the phrase which
Dr. Darwin has rendered so familiar--
Dr. Beddoe calls "conjugal selection."
It should be noted, too, that
Dr. Beddoe's figures established not only that, speaking generally, a dark haired woman has (at least in the west of
England) a much better chance of getting married than a fair-haired woman — the proportion of fair-haired women who failed to find husbands being to that of dark-haired women who similarly fail, as three to two--but, also, that among dark-haired women themselves the chances of marriage are in proportion to the degree of the darkness of the hair.
Thus, of the women with dark-brown hair, who came under his observation, twenty-two per cent. were single, while of the women with black hair, only eighteen per cent. were so.
Dr. Beddoe had some reason for supposing that dark hair has been on the increase in
England from as far back as the Norman conquest.
It has been noticed that dark hair is more common in the U. S. eastern middle States than in the
West.
