Caroline Kearney faced a heartbreaking dilemma. In 1865 she was newly widowed, thirty-one years old, and the mother of six children. She had hoped her husband would leave his sheep station in Victoria, Australia to her sons. Instead, his will required that the family move to Ireland and live in a house chosen by her brothers-in-law. Pieced together from archives, newspapers, genealogical sites, and legal records, Caroline’s Dilemma sheds new light on colonial family and gender relationships of the nineteenth century and tells the story of how one woman fought to shape her own life within the British Empire.

Caroline Kearney's husband bequeathed her a heart-breaking dilemma. Writing his will as he lay dying in Melbourne in 1865, Edward Kearney promised his wife GBP100 a year and more to educate their sons, but only if she moved to Ireland with their six children and lived in a house that her brothers-in-law would choose and furnish. Caroline (nee Bax) had never been to Ireland. Edward had left as a young man. Why were these his final wishes? How did this young widow respond to such a draconian exercise of male power from the grave? Could a husband legally force his widow to migrate against her wishes? Caroline's Dilemma follows Caroline and Edward's migration histories from Britain and Ireland to Australia, their marriage, and their experiences running sheep stations on Aboriginal land in South Australia and Victoria. Caroline did not want to leave Australia, leaving her own parents and siblings behind. She contested his will in the courts and struggled against the growing influence of his Irish Catholic family. Feisty, determined and sometimes devious, she drew on the support of her family, drink and his estate to try to shape her future and that of her children. This extraordinary book combines story telling with an historian's detective work required to bring it to light. Pieced together from evidence in archives, newspapers, genealogical sites and legal records, this book sheds new light on the workings of nineteenth-century gender and male power, family lives that span imperial sites, inheritance, migration, settler colonialism, the Irish diaspora and sectarian conflict. It shows how one middle-class woman and her family fought to shape their own lives within the British Empire and its colonies.

Caroline Kearney faced a heartbreaking dilemma. In 1865 she was newly widowed, thirty-one years old, and the mother of six children. She had hoped her husband would leave his sheep station in Victoria, Australia to her sons. Instead, his will required that the family move to Ireland and live in a house chosen by her brothers-in-law. Pieced together from archives, newspapers, genealogical sites, and legal records, Caroline’s Dilemma sheds new light on colonial family and gender relationships of the nineteenth century and tells the story of how one woman fought to shape her own life within the British Empire.

"Working Families" takes the reader onto the streets of Montreal and into the homes of its working-class families during the years that it became a major, industrial city. Between the 1860s and 1890s the expansion of wage labour changed the bases of family survival. It offered new possibilities and created new points of tension within the families of the emerging working class. Here we meet the men, youth, and children who worked for wages. We see the women who stayed home with their young, cooked and sewed, planted gardens and tended animals, stretching their often meagre family wages into goods and services for survival. We also see the ingenuity and agony of women whose husbands lost their jobs, fell ill, drank up their wages, deserted their families, or died.

"Working Families" explores the complex variety of responses of working-class families to their new lives within industrial capitalist society, and offers new ways of looking at the industrial revolution 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. 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.

With its focus on sites where identities were forged and contested overcrucial decades in Montreal’s history, this collectionilluminates the cultural complexity and richness of a modernizing city.Readers will discover the links between identity, place, and historicalmoment as they meet vagrant women, sailors in port, unemployed men ofthe Great Depression, elite families, shopkeepers, and reformers, amongothers. This fascinating study explores the intersections of state,people, and the voluntary sector to elucidate the processes that tookpeople between homes and cemeteries, between families and shops, andonto the streets.

Negotiating identity in 19th- and 20th-Century Montreal illuminates the cultural complexity and richness of a modernizing city and its people. The chapters focus on sites where identities were forged and contested over critical decades in the city's history. Readers will discover the link between the production of identity, place, and historical moment, as they meet vagrant women, sailors in port, unemployed men of the Great Depression, elite families, widows, youth, students, shopkeepers, and female smokers as well as reformers, notaries, social workers, and educational authorities. Collectively, the contributors explore the intermediate spaces between the state, the voluntary sector, and the people, probing the in-between institutions of reform, shelter, education, and control, and of the processes that took people between homes and cemeteries, between families and shops, and onto the streets. This book will be of interest to a wide range of social and cultural historians, critical geographers, students of gender studies, and those wanting to know more about the fascinating past of one of Canada's most lively cities.