Medford mail tribune., June 16, 1963, Image 42

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Family WeelcJy June 16,
1963
Insuring a woman's life
makes sense in this age
when the loss of a wife
and mother, can bring
financial disaster to a family
By OSCAR SCHISGALL
Another woman told me: "Last year my sister-in-law died at the age
of 32. She carried no insurance at all. I saw what happened to my brother
who was left with three small kids. He had to hire a combination house
keeper and governess. Most of the women he hired couldn't stand the
long hours and hard work that only a mother will accept, so he had to
find new help every few months. In between, he had to pay for temporary
help and baby sitters. He told me it was costing him about $6,000 a year
above the household expenses he had while his wife was alive.
"We, too, have three children. My husband just couldn't afford an
extra $6,000 a year on what he earns. So if anything happens to me, I
want to be sure there's a fund that will look after their needs."
Next I talked to a woman of 39 who had never married. She was an
office manager and earned a good salary. Though she had carried a small
life-insurance policy for many years ("to take care of my funeral ex
penses, if you want the truth"), she had just increased the amount to a
considerable sum almost $40,000.
"I'm trying to be realistic," she said. "The chances are I may never
marry. There's nobody around who'll look after me in my later years
unless you consider Social Security a girl's best friend. But Social Se
curity won't be enough, and our office has no pension plan. So I bought
the kind of policy that will have a high cash value when I'm in my 60s.
I can turn that cash value into an annuity and have a fair income from it
And when I die well, I love my nieces and nephews, and I won't mind
leaving them a nice sum to remember me by."
So it goes. Every woman has her own good reasons for investing in
life insurance. As a matter of fact, the 1,600 life-insurance companies
in the United States are so confident of women's future participation
that many of them are now concentrating on policies whick insure hut
band and wife simultaneously. Children come under such plans, too. Each
child, no matter how many there are, begins life with a $1,000 policy.
This new type of family service (each company gives it its own name)
provides, through a single premium payment every month, virtually
every type of insurance a family requires: fire, theft, liability, and so on.
It is the comprehensiveness- of the concept, as well as its simplicity and its
appreciation of women's value, that has made it flourish.
True, women still have far to go. With more than $600 billion of life
insurance now in force in the United States, women have only $100 billion
of that amount only l6th the total. But the differential is being
lessened every day. For the first time in its history, the Institute of Life
Insurance, an association of life-insurance companies, has recognized
the trend by creating a Women's Division.
How much life insurance should the average woman carry? Each
family must decide that for itself, but here is some helpful advice:
The women's BUREAU of the Department, of Labor has said that the
average woman may expect to work 25 years of her life. It also
points out that the average full-time feminine worker earns $3,300 a
year. That means she may expect to earn $82,500 during her lifetime.
Is it the full loss of this amount against which she ought to insure
her family? Obviously no such generalizations are possible. I have talked
to many families in the $5,000- to $7,500-a-year bracket, and usually the
woman's contribution to this total is somewhere around $1,500 a year
(because so many married women work only part-time).
Therefore a fairer evaluation of a woman's earning capacity, in these
cases, would be to multiply the number of working years ahead by about
$1,500. In most of the cases I investigated, the expected lifetime income
of these wives was about $30,000. It was this potential income they
wanted to protect by as much insurance as they could afford. A similar
amount seems logical for wives who do not work outside the home.
One of the oddities of the past or was it one of the failures? was
that few women became insurance agents, and almost none made their
way into the top echelons of insurance executives. The result was that
little feminine thinking was applied to the problems of insurance.
Today, it is still predominantly a masculine business, but much at
tention is focused on women's needs and this generation is finally dis
covering that a woman can be every bit as valuable as a man.
family Wkl. Jr If, INI