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. Drawing on a wealth of
primary
sources, from church and court records, censuses, and tax
documents, to
newspapers and pamphlets, Bradbury shows 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.
Weaving together the individual biographies of twenty women
against
the backdrop of the collective genealogy of over 500, Bradbury
tells
the stories of these women through the traces their actions left
in
documents and archives. In doing so, she makes an invaluable
contribution to the writing on the histories of women,
families,
cities, law, religion and politics.
A truly monumental study, Wife to Widow is an immensely
readable, rigorous, and compelling work.
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