Wife to Widow

A fascinating look at how women’s lives shaped, and were shaped, by 19th-century Montreal as they moved from marriage to widowhood.

The diversity of women’s lives as wives then as widows negotiating the law, patriarchy, family relationships, and the economy in 19th-century Montreal come alive in this first major study of widows in Canada.

In Wife to Widow, award-winning historian Bettina Bradbury explores the little-studied phenomenon of the transition from wife to widowhood to offer new insights into the law, politics, demography, religion, and domestic life of early nineteenth-century Montreal.

Bradbury's unique history spans the lives of two generations of Montreal women who married either before or after the Patriote rebellions of 1837-38 to reveal a picture of a city and its inhabitants across a period of profound change. Bradbury draws on a wealth of primary sources, weaving together biographies of individual women against a backdrop of the collective genealogies of over 500 , to show how women – Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, wealthy and working-class – interacted with and shaped the city's culture, customs, and institutions, even as they laboured under the shifting conditions of patriarchy.

A truly monumental study, Wife to Widow is an immensely readable, rigorous, and compelling examination of the significance of marriage and widowhood at a key moment in history.