Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Bettina Bradbury (review)

The transition of Montréal women from one marital status to another is Bettina Bradbury’s central preoccupation in Wife to Widow. The book follows two generations of women in Montréal, those who married in the 1820s, and those who married in the 1840s. Bradbury suggests that their lives shed light on the politics, customs, and legal institutions of Montréal. She examines cultural change, questions of class, property and race, population movements, and family by studying the transitions to widowhood of a large group of women. The city of Montréal is portrayed as a marital and colonial contact zone grounding all other areas of inquiry.

Bradbury employs an approach she calls collective genealogy to study women as individuals and as statistics. She constructs women’s lives through the documents they and their husbands produced at key transitional moments. Bradbury draws on census data, parish registers, wills, marriage contracts and other notary records, city directories and city tax records. When possible she also utilizes letters and family papers. The book is painstakingly and richly researched. From all of these sources Bradbury speaks of the demographic profiles of large groups of wives who became widows, tracing the broad picture of the patterns and practices of families as they were changed by the deaths of husbands. But she moves beyond a quantitative cataloguing of patterns to develop more detailed biographies of about twenty women. Bradbury convincingly animates what is sometimes just a scratch of evidence in the archival record: a will, a notice of a husband’s occupation, a record of death, or a census enumeration. These stories are intertwined in each chapter.

Glimpsing individual women as they moved from a state of marriage to one of widowhood brings us into their lives in an arresting and intimate way. Sadly, as readers we realize that death will prematurely sever the relationships: seventeen-year-old Caroline Campbell marries in 1824 and by her inclusion in the story we already know that her husband Oliver’s death will leave her a widow. In most cases the reader also knows that the marriage contracts signed provided very little property or income for widows, making our foreknowledge all the more upsetting. Some deaths are to be expected, as when older men married very young women. Others are more shocking, such as the murder of a husband. We know when men failed to provide, when women were abused, and when others lost their babies or turned to prostitution or drink. Even if women left no first-hand accounts, thanks to the deftness with which Bradbury writes their stories we can extrapolate and imagine their grief (or in some cases their relief) upon being widowed.

Bradbury’s detailed documentation of Montréal wives and widows is fascinating but what is slightly difficult is keeping track of what provides commonality in the stories of widowhood across a 45 year period. Widows were a diverse group. Some were widowed young. Some remarried, others did not. Some were left wealthy while others lived in poverty. Some signed marriage contracts and others did not. Much differed across the two generations studied and women’s lives and marriages were influenced differently by shifting political, cultural, and legal contexts. Whether they married under English common law or under the Costume of Paris, whether they were Protestant, Jewish, or Catholic, and whether they married brutes or nurturing partners add to the difficulty of comparison. So does Bradbury’s effort to address almost everything else: the particularities and colonial context of Québec, effects of the rebellions, gender and empire, class, legal institutions, and political debates.

However, there are two stable and constant elements to Bradbury’s analysis: widowhood as a particular state and patriarchy as an over-riding framework. Focusing on widowhood provides a useful way to approach feminist, gender, and family history. Widowhood is a window on economic, political, and legal change. And patriarchy in many forms, even from the...