Widows in European Economy and Society, 1600–1920 by Beatrice Moring, Richard Wall (review)

“It is high time to stop sweeping widows aside as insignificant or marginalized” (259): Beatrice Moring (completing a project begun with her partner Richard Wall before his death in 2011) thus challenges received ideas of widows as poor and helpless, using evidence from hundreds of local and regional studies. Instead, she demonstrates that over time and across cultures widows were secure, productive, autonomous, and self-determining.

Moring and Wall reject relying on one or two court cases, arguing that such cases represent only the women mentioned. They also turn away from studies of aristocratic widows. Rather, they have mobilized data from hundreds of local and regional studies, including surveys and censuses, to compile information “about average experience” in different environments, “never denying the reality of variation” (18). “Average” is both social and statistical: ordinary widows, neither aristocratic nor poor, are represented in statistical studies which report arithmetical averages. For example, table 19, presenting the ratio of inventoried wealth of early modern English widows to that of men in four communities, is set in comparison with table 21, the mean value of widows’ property in nineteenth-century inventories in a parish in central Sweden. In the first, widows’ inventories vary from 22 to 61 percent of married men’s; in the latter, the mean value of widows’ property is 59 percent. So there is rough continuity, provided one suspends any question as to what differences shaped Swedish versus English inventories.

The chronological and geographical scope of this study is vast, surveying more than three centuries from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia. Accordingly, the reader is sometimes taken on an exhilarating but dizzying tour of data points from local evidence across Europe. Five pages on widows in towns (149–52) take the reader from Christiania, Norway (1745) to Stockholm (1676), Leiden, Ravensberg, Paris, Brittany, Oxford, Bristol, and Aberdeen, ending with a table on Finland (1805). The volume is most valuable for evidence from Nordic areas. Moring’s own fine work on retirement contracts is complemented by rich demographic and economic evidence from Sweden and Finland (much of which was not previously available to English readers). Almost all of the Nordic material is from the eighteenth century and later. The early modern material (for instance, English hearth tax with the occasional references to Italian, French, and Spanish studies) is more familiar. Students of early modern women will be rewarded less by new evidence from the period and more with an understanding of patterns of continuity into later eras.

The first chapter addresses poverty, showing that consistently only about 10 to 15 percent of widows were poor enough to receive relief (23). But even for this small percentage, poverty was not a consequence of marital status. Poor widows were poor because they had been poor as wives. As elsewhere, emphasis is on the active strategies of widows in earning and spending, showing for example that relief was less than half, often much less than half, of their household income; nineteenth-century diets in households of poor widows were equivalent in calories to households of married men.

The rest of the book focuses on widows with some property. A chapter on the legal regimes of landholding and widows’ succession (somewhat misleadingly entitled “legislation”) is followed by one assessing assets of widows, after which usufructuary and life-estate provisions are outlined (primarily Nordic retirement contracts in comparison with marriage contracts elsewhere). Urban succession in business is next surveyed, using statistics and a handful of narratives of specific widows’ successful working lives. Here, Moring joins in dismissing the mostly discarded idea of separate spheres.

The last two chapters query two other received premises of widowhood. In “demography” the primary subject is remarriage. Moring somewhat hesitantly posits that widows who did not remarry did so by choice, still a controversial premise more than three decades after I first proposed that much-criticized possibility in “The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype...