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M1524 - WILSON TEXT.qxp:Graham Q7 25/9/08 12:18 Page 154 6 Widows and property Widows were discernably marginalised from family property at this time. Throughout the period, all women in the families in this study received jointure in place of dower, which in most cases was significantly less than the widow would have received as dower. Widows also had no rights to their husbands’ personal property, which tended to be treated as an extension of estate property and bequeathed as such to the heir. Family practices, such as the use of trustees, further
Downriver , Sinclair deliberately complicates any sense that he might stand outside the structures he satirises; he is already, unavoidably complicit with capital and with exploitation. The widow The subtitle of Downriver is ‘The Vessels of Wrath’. The novel is, in itself, such a vessel. The satire or ‘savage comedy’ in the novel is in the service of an angry critique of the policies of Margaret Thatcher, and a grotesque caricature of the then prime minister as ‘the Widow’, a monstrous tyrant. I will return more
Thomas Middleton's The Puritan Widow (1607), 1 as scholars have noted, invites readings of its satirical elements as well as its confusing, even ‘flawed’, dramatic form. 2 The readings of satire illuminate the play's treatment of religious and political debates. Donna Hamilton, for instance, says the play's satire is ‘unrelenting and comprehensive’, before claiming that the ‘main targets [of the satire] are Puritans and Catholics
7 Disabled husbands, deserted wives, working widows: the marriage bar in public servants’ private lives until 1946 W hilst the last chapter sought to examine the socio-political context of the marriage bar and employers’ rationalisations for largely keeping it in place in peacetime, this chapter examines the marriage bar in relation to women undergoing marital breakdown, or facing economic difficulties because their husbands were unable to work. In so doing, it reveals the way in which the marriage bar as an institutional ideal was unsustainable and
4 ‘Easing the burden of the tragic widow’: the making of ‘Mrs Pace’ The most remarkable woman in England The making of ‘Mrs Pace’ From the beginning, the Pace case was more than simply a legal (or local) matter. Up to the inquest verdict, most of its key events took place within a few miles of Rose Cottage yet were followed throughout Britain and beyond. Press coverage created a figure known to millions of newspaper readers: ‘Mrs Pace’. The inquest verdict charging her with murder made her not only a more sensational but also a more complex figure. Women went
Historians of the British Civil Wars are increasingly taking notice of these bloody conflicts as a critical event in the welfare history of Europe. This volume will examine the human costs of the conflict and the ways in which they left lasting physical and mental scars after the cessation of armed hostilities. Its essays examine the effectiveness of medical care and the capacity of the British peoples to endure these traumatic events. During these wars, the Long Parliament’s concern for the ‘commonweal’ led to centralised care for those who had suffered ‘in the State’s service’, including improved medical treatment, permanent military hospitals, and a national pension scheme, that for the first time included widows and orphans. This signified a novel acceptance of the State’s duty of care to its servicemen and their families. These essays explore these developments from a variety of new angles, drawing upon the insights shared at the inaugural conference of the National Civil War Centre in August 2015. This book reaches out to new audiences for military history, broadening its remit and extending its methodological reach.
husbands. In the case where a woman loses her husband, and in the absence of close relatives who are willing to assist, the responsibility of caring and providing for her children lies on her. When asked about the expectations and challenges of widowhood, a lead mother answered: It can be very difficult for widows around here. First, they are expected to undergo some form of traditional rites to mourn their husbands. Then they may marry their brother in-law if there is love and agreement between them. They can also marry any suitor of their choosing. Ultimately, they
create ‘spaces for social experimentation’ ( Joseph, 2004 : 277), where humanitarian assistance, family separations and gender and generational dynamics all shape how women’s positioning is negotiated by themselves and their loved ones – and that middle-aged women themselves sometimes change their minds about what women could and should be doing. ‘We’re All Widows Here’ – Middle-Aged Women as Breadwinners ‘We’re all widows here
over time. For a family of six children, size may be a priority. For a widow living on her own it may be security and protection. For a Pakistani family it may be privacy; for a Filipino household it could be ventilation and an attractive street frontage. For people living through the trauma of an earthquake and its aftershocks, it may be structural safety – but this concern may reduce as normality resumes. In each of these examples the need for a family to be able to exercise agency and choice, based on sound information, is paramount to their recovery. The
Women outside marriage between 1850 and the Second World War were seen as abnormal, threatening, superfluous and incomplete, whilst also being hailed as ‘women of the future’. Before 1850 odd women were marginalised, minor characters, yet by the 1930s spinsters, lesbians and widows had become heroines. This book considers how Victorian and modernist women's writing challenged the heterosexual plot and reconfigured conceptualisations of public and private space in order to valorise female oddity. It offers queer readings of novels and stories by women writers, from Charlotte Bronte, Elisabeth Gaskell, Ella Hepworth Dixon and Netta Syrett to May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall, Clemence Dane, Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf. This interdisciplinary study tracks diverse representations of the odd woman in fiction and autobiographical accounts in relation to the rise of feminism. It illuminates singleness in the context of the suffrage campaign, women's work, sexual inversion and birth control as well as assessing the impact of the First World War. It draws on advice literature, medical texts, feminist polemic and articles from the new women's magazines. Developing debates within queer theory about gender non-conformity, heteronormativity and relationships between women, this genealogy of the odd woman shows how new conceptualisations of female singleness and lesbianism troubled, and ultimately transformed, social norms.