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. Bradbury draws on a wealth of primary sources, weaving together biographies of individual women against a backdrop of the collective genealogies of over 500 , to show 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.A truly monumental study, Wife to Widow is an immensely readable, rigorous, and compelling examination of the significance of marriage and widowhood at a key moment in history.
