Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty-eight and forty.

Thurber’s line is a compact piece of comic social criticism. By treating the span from twenty‑eight to forty as if it were merely “twelve years,” he highlights how cultural expectations can make women’s time feel compressed—years in which they are often judged most harshly for aging, appearance, marriageability, and motherhood. The quip implies that social pressures and double standards effectively steal time from women, making a normal stretch of life seem shorter, more urgent, and more policed than it is for men. The humor depends on a mock-mathematical framing to expose an emotional truth: women are frequently denied the luxury of aging at a natural pace.