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

Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal, the first study of widowhood in Canada, is an intellectually rigorous, readable, and engaging book. Bradbury explores the dual heritages of the French and English legal systems and cultural institutions, the importance of class and property in wives’ and widows’ lived realities, and the “negotiations and renegotiations of patriarchy” (17) that limited the options available to all women in nineteenth-century Montreal. She uses a wide variety of sources, including wills, notaries’ manuals, court records, parish registries, statutes, censuses, diaries, letters, tax documents, newspapers, and pamphlets to trace the lives of two generations of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women who married and were widowed in Montreal before and after the Patriote rebellions of 1837 and 1838, interweaving the compelling individual biographies of twenty widows with collective genealogies of over five hundred women who left “scratches of evidence” (6) of their lives in archives.

Bradbury structures the organization of her book around the life course of women who outlived their husbands. In her first chapter, she begins by introducing readers to couples who married in Montreal in the 1820s and 1840s. Next, she analyzes the French and English legal traditions and economic issues that shaped the negotiations of couples on organization of property during marriage, illustrating that “law, contracts, and individual personalities produced marriages with diverse sets of authority relations and different legal identities and property claims, without ever toppling husbands’ broadest powers” (63). In her third chapter, Bradbury explores the assets, sometimes listed in marriage contracts or inventories, that women brought to marriage, asserting simultaneously that the “skills, reputation, good health and connections to kin” (88) of the wife had profound impacts on marriage that are harder to trace. In her fourth chapter, she explores the public discussions of marriage and the widow’s right to dower that dominated politics in Quebec in the 1830s, disentangling “posturing about the advantages of the Custom of Paris” and changing “understandings of freedom of contract, of property, gender, and power in families” (121). Her fifth chapter then turns to an exploration of “the omnipresence of death and widowhood” (142) and the ways in which men sought to make provisions for wives through wills, private contracts, and burial societies that minimized debts and protected and transferred assets. The remainder of the book explores the experiences of widowhood. Bradbury’s sixth chapter details when and how women became widows, including accounts of caring for dying husbands, and then asks why some women, usually those whose husbands had been labourers or craftsmen and who had been widowed young and with dependent children (196), chose to escape widowhood through remarriage. In her seventh chapter, Bradbury complicates the assumption that “the early period of mourning was one of withdrawal from the public and retreat into the family” (206) by illustrating the myriad tasks of cleaning, clothing, and burying the dead that occupied women’s first days of widowhood. She then explores “the diverse ways age, gender, class, wealth, custom, and religion shaped the tasks widows took on once their husbands’ funerals were over” (234). In chapters 9 and 10, Bradbury turns her attention to the ways in which propertied widows became involved in colonial politics. In the process, she challenges accepted wisdom about Patriote “understandings of gender and citizenship” (284) and produces a compelling biography of one widow, Emilie Tavernier, who played a key role in Catholic institution-building in Quebec. Next she examines census data, family papers, and city directories to understand “the diverse patchwork of practices that widows deployed to establish or support their children and themselves” (325), exposing poignantly the vulnerability of poorer widows and their offspring. Finally, she studies how widows’ “health, age, wealth, class, religion, and connectedness to family, kin, faith, and fellow citizens” shaped their choices about where they would live as they aged, how they would be cared for in final...