http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suttee

and wondering, on a global basis, how widows have fared.

This source:

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/414150.html

traces “any more than a cow needs a bicycle” back to 1898.

According to this source:

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/unknown.htm

“A man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle” was a:

Men’s-room graffito in a Berkeley, California bar during the late 1960s, quoted by Robert Anton Wilson in Cosmic Trigger. This was later bastardized by feminists to read: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” or something along those lines.

Even were we to accept this at face value, neither “bastardised” nor “parody” seem to me the right words.

What is more, the first of the three “Cosmic Trigger” novels dates to 1977, at least according to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson

By 1977, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” had certainly already been coined. So, unless someone can find an earlier citation, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” seems to antedate “A man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle”. It certainly does not, however, antedate “[a place] didn’t need an American consul any more than a cow needs a bicycle”.

At least, I’m not prepared to accept an alleged piece of graffiti as dating to the late 1960s — unless someone can cite an earlier published source. Neither, I’m sure, would the OED.

You know, that quote was actually a parody of someone else’s comments about religion (and fish, and bicycles, and the relative utility of these things).

Men don’t need wives…? Perhaps bicycles don’t need fish any more than fish need bicycles. :)

Yes, that’s an interesting point. The dictionary cites ‘widow-man’ as an alternative to ‘widower’, which backs it up somewhat.

I suppose it’s because men don’t need wives in the way women are seen to need husbands. What you get from a (dead) husband demonstrates that pretty well…

There many feminine words created by adding -ess to a masculine word, amongst them: goddess, lioness, princess and shepherdess.

There are also sexually neutral verbs that give rise to a female or male agent by adding either a feminine (-ess/-trix) or a masculine (-or) suffix. “Act” gives us actress and actor, “aviate” gives us aviatrix or aviator. A neutral verb plus -or is more likely to be used of a woman (these days) than is a masculine word without its -ess. Women are sometimes called “actors”, but the most recent case (of which I can think) of a woman referring to herself as a “prince” is Elizabeth I. (I stand to be corrected on that.)

But, if there is a feminine word other than “widow” that takes a masculine suffix, I’m unable to think of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

I was struck by this:
A common mnemonic is “An orphan has no past; a widow has no future”.

Hodge’s remarks throw doubt on whether a widow has no future.

It means a widow who has significant property (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowager) deriving, I suppose, from ‘dower’. But it usually appears in monarchical contexts, as in ‘the Dowager Queen’ = the queen whose husband was king, who is no longer queen. Like Catherine de Medici, or the Queen Mother.

(But in the case of our Queen Mother, she eschewed the title (one of many she was entitled to after the death of George V) because she preferred one which forced people to say ‘Queen’ twice. Thus she is ‘Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’ instead.)

One thing, can someone explain to me what the word “dowager” is/means? I’ve never quite managed to grasp it.