Widows
Description
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.
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. 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. Widows reveals one of feminism's last great taboos, and the story of women the world has long refused to see.More details
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Mineke Schipper is a cultural historian and writer. She is the author of seven critically acclaimed works including Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet: Women in Proverbs from Around the World and Naked or Covered: A History of Dressing and Undressing Around the World. Her writing has been published in The Times, El Mundo and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Schipper was foreign secretary of Dutch PEN, chair of Index on Censorship Nederland and currently serves as Emeritus Professor of Intercultural Literary Studies at the University of Leiden, with visiting professorships in Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and China. She received a Royal Order of Knighthood for her contribution to social and cultural studies.