Wife to Widow

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.