Widows

<p>In Japanese, the word for widow – a woman who has outlived her husband – literally translates as ‘she who has not yet died.’ For millennia, widows have lived on the margins of society: banished to the wilderness, silenced, and shrouded in black or white. Across cultures, laws and local customs have maligned them as witches, dependants or objects of pity.<br><br>In some traditions, widows are expected to remarry within the husband’s family, or even – in extreme cases – commit self-immolation – expectations not placed on men. Yet widowhood has also brought unexpected freedoms: financial, social and sexual autonomy denied to married women. In medieval Europe, widows owned property and ran businesses; in India’s Maratha courts, they wielded political influence long before married women could.<br><br>Drawing on sources from Ancient Egypt and Greece to Africa, the Americas and beyond, cultural historian Mineke Schipper explores widowhood as both oppression and liberation. <em>Widows</em> reveals one of feminism’s last great taboos, and the story of women the world has long refused to see.</p>