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WIDOWS AND WIDOWHOOD

WIDOWS AND WIDOWHOOD. Vedova, viuda, veuve, Witwe, widow: all are words derived from the Indo-European base meaning 'to separate', and early modern Europeans were very familiar with the grief of a separation by the death of one's spouse. But these words also represent something else about widowhood. They are female forms, for widowhood affected women far more than it did men. Male words for widowhood—for example the English widower—derived from the female form and were infrequently used in the early modern period. Widows always outnumbered widowers: in Castile by up to 12 to 1, in Tuscany by more than 5 to 1, in England by 2 to 1. Wives, generally younger than their husbands, usually outlived them, and the dangers of childbirth were more than balanced by violence and occupational hazards experienced by men. Widowers were also at least twice as likely to remarry, and remarry quickly, driven by the domestic problems consequent on the absence of a wife. Their marital status was rarely remarked in literature and legal records, their occupational, financial, and public roles little altered by bereavement.

On the other hand, great cultural and economic change usually marked a woman's transition to widowhood. Widows were a large, identifiable, and problematic social group. In fifteenth-century Florence, for example, a quarter of females over age twelve were widows. Even in England, where age differences between husbands and wives were usually relatively small, widows constituted almost a tenth of the female population.

CULTURE AND IDEAS

For a few of these women, widowhood conveyed wealth and independence; for most, it meant increased poverty. But whether rich or poor, widows challenged the fundamental premise of patriarchal order. Not only did every widow remind each man of his own mortality, a widow heading her own household also represented a lapse of the universal idea that women should be controlled by men. There were alternatives to this dangerous independence. Where Roman law was influential, widows sometimes, at least in theory, continued under male guardianship of father or brother or brother-in-law. Traditional Christian admiration for celibacy extended to chaste widowhood, and some Catholic widows took the opportunity of bereavement to enter (and in the case of some wealthy widows, to found) religious houses to secure an honorable home. Remarriage was another solution, but it suggested disloyalty to the dead husband, threatened his property and his children, and was generally criticized except for young childless women. The remarrying widow was a standard subject for jokes, satire, and gossip. But widows who did not marry were equally subject to criticism: as sexually rapacious, as subversive advisors to potentially rebellious wives, as aggressive and irritating borrowers and beggars, or, at best, as pathetic objects of charity. In the eighteenth century this last idea developed into the sentimentalized image of the permanently grieving and helpless widow, replacing the disorderly crone. Works of advice for widows prescribed a private life of chaste loyalty to the dead husband as the only defense against these negative images.

PROPERTY AND WORK

Of course, most widows did not and could not retire into helpless passivity. How did they live? Across Europe, most widows had some rights by law or custom, but variations were complex. One factor was the nature of conjugal estate in the area. Where tradition emphasized the separated unit of husband, wife, and children, the widow was more likely to succeed to headship of an independent household, with all the opportunities and problems that implied; where integration of the conjugal unit into a lineage was stronger, the widow would more likely make her home with her dead husband's successors, or return to her own male kin. Widows' rights to the couple's property also varied. At one extreme, a wife's estate (that is, the wealth she brought to the marriage as dowry, the parallel gift from her husband's family to her, and what she earned) remained all or partly under her own control during and after the marriage. Wives who traded in their own right in London, women in the Netherlands who chose to manage their own wealth (like many Jewish and Muslim women), and noble wives in Russia who gained the right to acquire their own lands during the eighteenth century probably experienced very little economic change in the transition to widowhood. In other systems, for example in Valencia, the property that a bride brought to her marriage remained hers but under her husband's control, until his death allowed the wife/widow to reclaim her contribution. In Florence a widow could, if she chose, take her wealth back and return to her own kin. But her children, part of her husband's lineage, stayed with his family, and by retrieving her wealth, she was potentially depriving them of both herself and her wealth. Even where, as in England, the wife's contribution in cash or goods belonged, notoriously, to her husband, some latent tradition remained by legitime of a guaranteed customary widow's share of the husband's goods. A widow could also claim a share of his real property (one-third by common-law dower, sometimes more, according to local custom). It was hers for life, but she could not sell it or bequeath it by will. An English husband had a corresponding right to his dead wife's real property, provided a child had been born to the couple. Similar rules of life estate have been studied in Paris, in parts of the Netherlands, and in Poland and elsewhere. For many wives the crucial document was the husband's will. A large, but declining, proportion of husbands conveyed substantial control by making their wives executors; but a will could also be used to reduce customary rights. Indeed, during the early modern period, widows' traditional rights tended almost everywhere to become more attenuated, sometimes replaced by negotiated contractual protections. Historians have been surprised by the energy with which widows used the courts, often successfully, to defend their customary or individual rights.

Rural widows thus sometimes had access to land and continued to farm. In some localities, up to a quarter of the land might be under widows' control. In towns and cities, wives of craftsmen and merchants also commonly carried on their husbands' businesses. Glikl bas Judah Leib of Hameln, whose memoirs have made her one of the best known of early modern widows, continued her Jewish family's trade in jewels during her first widowhood. Tax records and family letters reveal the lives of many other economically active widows. Even where there was no custom of wives' separate trading, most women had their own occupations that they continued in widowhood. Access to work encouraged widows to migrate and perhaps discouraged make-do remarriage; thus, the proportions of widows in lace-making communities, for example, tended to be higher than in other parts of rural France. But like rights of succession to land, widows' rights to practice their husbands' trades became more circumscribed through the period, and women's opportunities to be trained for a profitable separate occupation were also reduced.

HOME AND CHILDREN

The presence or absence of children made a huge difference. The desire to protect children's inheritances sometimes discouraged widowers from remarrying, despite the problems of single parenthood. Although patriarchal ideals theoretically favored a dying husband's right to control the guardianship of his children, in practice, respect for mothers' capabilities and high male mortality meant that widows often found themselves responsible for at least some young children, for educating them and arranging good marriages. It might be presumed that adult children would ease a widow's problems, but widows competed with children for resources, residence in a child's home was not necessarily attractive, and in the mobile early modern world adult children were often far away.

Widow-headed households were common (almost 14 percent in fifteenth-century Florence, 12 percent in sixteenth-century Paris, 13 percent in England) and although very few widows acquired any public authority by their headship (royal widows such as Catherine de Médicis and Anne of Austria were uniquely famous exceptions), having her own home could give a widow a novel opportunity for informal power in her family and community. But most widows succeeded to little property. If they headed their own households, they would inevitably be poor, and widow-headed households are overrepresented among the poorest groups in most communities for which we have records.

POVERTY

However much widows were vilified in popular literature, in practice, early modern societies generally also regarded poor widows as deserving objects of charity and relief. Asylums and almshouses were endowed to care for them; giving charity to one's widowed neighbor was a duty. Where state-funded poor relief was established, widows were among those deemed, almost by definition, eligible recipients, and they dominated the relief lists. While wills, deeds, tax lists, and the records of law courts record the lives of propertied widows, the lives of the poorest are documented in the records of the asylums that gave them shelter or in the tiny sums doled out week after week to support a few widowed men, and a vast group of widows. These records evoke the generosity of early modern communities and, at the same time, mark the consequences of patriarchal structures that subordinated women and made most widows poor and vulnerable.

See also Family; Inheritance and Wills; Marriage; Patriarchy and Paternalism; Poverty; Women.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

Glikl bas Judah Leib. Memoirs of Glükel of Hameln. Translated by Marvin Lowenthal. New York, 1977.

Secondary Sources

Bremmer, Jan, and Lourens van den Bosch, eds. Between Poverty and the Pyre: Moments in the History of Widowhood. London, 1995. Provides useful extra-European perspective.

Cavallo, Sandra, and Lyndan Warner, eds. Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. London, 1998. This fine collection is the best place to start; it also includes an excellent bibliography.

Diefendorf, Barbara. "Widowhood and Remarriage in Sixteenth-Century Paris." Journal of Family History 7 (1982): 379–395.

Hardwick, Julia. "Widowhood and Patriarchy in Seventeenth-Century France" Journal of Social History 26 (1992): 133–148.

Hufton, Olwen. "Widowhood." Chap. 6 in her The Prospect Before Her: History of Women in Western Europe. Vol. I, 1500–1800. London, 1995. Excellent overview.

Klapisch-Zuper, Christiane. "The Cruel Mother." In Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, pp. 117–131. Chicago, 1985. A classic essay.

Maresse, Michelle. A Woman's Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861. Ithaca, N.Y., 2002.

Vassberg, David E. "The Status of Widows in Sixteenth-Century Castile." In Poor Women and Children in the European Past, edited by John Henderson and Richard Wall, pp. 180–195. London, 1994.

Wall, Richard, ed. "Widows in European Society." Special edition of History of the Family 7, no. 1 (2002).

BARBARA J. TODD