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

This hefty volume is the fruit of a long collaborative project involving, among others, the Montreal History Project and was long in the making (some of the earlier research was published in the early 1990s). This can be explained by the methodology, part social history, part genealogy, and part prosopography, which is very time-consuming but yields an incredible mass of information. The book extends the author’s previous work on nineteenth-century Montreal families by looking specifically at the experience of widowhood, and it is a welcome continuation of Josette Brun’s Vie et mort du couple en Nouvelle France.

It compares the life histories of two groups of women, one of which married in the 1820s and the other in the 1840s, following each through married life and widowhood until the end of their lives. The approach is particularly fruitful because these women’s lives unfolded against a backdrop of profound social, economic, legal, and political changes. The overall conclusion is that widowhood could follow so many different paths that none can be considered typical or representative, even if one categorizes them in terms of ethnicity, religion, or class. This is a useful corrective to social scientists’ propensity to try to modellize everything. The sources and methods are typical of those used by the quantitative, structural approach to social history that prevailed when the project was started, but they are kept discretely in the background of the narrative. The volume also pays tribute to developments in social history and, more important, cultural history that have occurred in the past twenty-five years. Except for gender, those developments are more acknowledged than incorporated into the narrative.

The book, however, goes beyond describing and analyzing the fate of widows in nineteenth-century Montreal. Widows had to first be wives, and we learn a lot about wives as well in the process. More important, what widows (and wives) were legally allowed to do, were expected to do, or could manage reveals the values of the society in which they lived. Patriarchy – an overused and ahistorical concept that Bettina Bradbury acknowledges as such but nonetheless manages to conscript to good use – imposed limitations on widows’ activities; gender norms sought to naturalize those limitations. Neither patriarchy nor gender norms were static; their evolution was closely linked with contemporary economic, social, and political transformations. Men, for instance, did not define voters as males to be tyrannical but because they had come to understand active citizenship as a male attribute.

The conclusion is not as convincing as it could be. It does an excellent job at recapitulating the variety of widows’ experiences and the ways in which changes in the period had an impact on their lives. What this diversity meant is more described than truly explained until the very last paragraph, where property and economic resources are identified as key issues and gender (re)definitions as disguised ways of reallocating resources. It is as if Bradbury is afraid, in this postmodern, post-structural, post–linguistic turn era, to assert that the economy matters, despite believing it did. There are also a few minor irritants: an unfortunate tendency to describe what she is going to do and what she has done, too many uses of the first-person pronoun for my liking (and I am not a great purist on that count), and obtrusive references to the secondary literature in the text (after a while, Suzan Lebsock began to look like an uninvited guest at the party). I also regret that the book is so long because that makes it unusable in an undergraduate classroom (although chapters 4, 9, and 10 can be used on their own for this purpose).