Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

In Wife to Widow, 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 five hundred, 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.