Wife to Widow

Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

By Bettina Bradbury
Categories: History, Canadian History, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Women’s Studies, Regional & Cultural Studies, Canadian Studies, Law & Legal Studies, Legal History
Publisher: UBC Press
Hardcover : 9780774819510, 520 pages, June 2011
Paperback : 9780774819527, 520 pages, January 2012
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774819534, 520 pages, May 2011
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Table of contents

Introduction

Part 1: Marriage, Identity, and the Law

1 Marriage Metropole: Mobility and Marriage in Early-Nineteenth-Century Montreal

2 Companionate Patriarchies: Money Matters and Marriage

3 Marriage Trajectories: Class, Choices, and Chance

4 “Dower This Barbarous Law”: Debating Marriage and Widows’ Rights

5 Imagining Widowhood and Death: Marriage Contracts, Wills, and Funeral Provisions

Part 2: Individual Itineraries of Widowhood

6 Diverse Demographies: Death, Widowhood, and Remarriage

7 In the Shadow of Their Husbands: The First Days of Widowhood

8 “Within a Year and a Day”: The First Year of Widowhood

9 Widows’ Votes: Marguerite Paris, Émilie Tavernier, Sarah Harrison, and the Montreal By-Elections of 1832

10 Widow to Mother Superior: Émilie Tavernier Gamelin and Catholic Institution Building

11 Patchworks of the Possible: Widows’ Wealth, Work, and Children

12 Final Years, Final Wishes: Care, Connections, Old Age and Death

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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

Description

This monumental study of two generations of women who married either before or after the Patriote rebellions of 1837-38 explores the meaning of the transition from wife to widowhood in early nineteenth-century Montreal. Bettina Bradbury weaves together the individual biographies of twenty women, against the backdrop of collective genealogies of over 500, to offer new insights into the law, politics, demography, religion, and domestic life of the time. She shows how women from all walks of life interacted with and shaped Montreal’s culture, customs, and institutions, even as they laboured under the shifting conditions of patriarchy. Wife to Widow provides a rare window into the significance of marriage and widowhood.

Awards

  • Winner, Clio Award for Quebec, Canadian Historical Association 2012
  • Short-listed, Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, Canadian Historical Association 2012
  • Short-listed, Canada Prize in Social Sciences, Canadian Federation for Humanities and Social Sciences 2013
  • Short-listed, Canadian Political History Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association 2012
  • Short-listed, The François-Xavier Garneau Medal, Canadian HIstorical Association 2015
  • Winner, Prix Lionel Groulx, L'Institut d'histoire de l'Amérique francaise 2012