Wife to Widow

Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

By: Bettina Bradbury

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Hardcover | 15 June 2011

At a Glance

Hardcover
520 Pages

Age
22+

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.81

Hardcover

$241.95

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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.

Industry Reviews

This groundbreaking work skillfully employs a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of traditional demographic, legal, and manuscript sources to explore the lives of two generations of women as they navigated their way through the often difficult transition from wife to widow in nineteenth-century Montreal. Highly readable, Bettina Bradbury offers us a fine example of how to get at and illuminate the lives and experiences of ordinary folk. Wife to Widow is family history of the best kind.
- JANE ERRINGTON, Dean of Arts and member of the Departments of History, Royal Military College and Queen's University

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