Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
Product details
- ISBN 9780774819510
- Weight: 880g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jun 2011
- Publisher: University of British Columbia Press
- Publication City/Country: Canada
- Language: English
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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.
