Years Advanced: Widowhood and Old Age

Sources

A Deep Loss. The death of a spouse and old age are usually linked in the modern world, but they were not necessarily in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, for people became widowed at all ages and might easily be widowed several times during their lives. The demise of a mate brought a more dramatic change in status for women than it did for men, for women’s link to the world of work was often through their husbands, so that his death affected their opportunities for

making a living while the death of a wife did not. One can see this distinction in the fact that the word for “widower” in most European languages derives from the word for “widow,” whereas the more common pattern is for the female designation to derive from the male—princess from prince, actress from actor. “Widower,” in fact, does not enter common usage until the eighteenth century, when people began to think about the loss of a spouse more as an emotional than an economic issue.

Widows. In many parts of the world women who became widowed returned to their birth families or entered the household of a brother or brother-in-law, but in most areas of Europe, widows became heads of households themselves and were forced to find some way to survive and to support their dependent children. Not surprisingly, widowhood generally brought a decline in a woman’s economic status, with the poorest households in towns and villages headed by elderly widows; because the death of his wife did not mean a man had to change occupations, widowers did not become significantly poorer. During times of economic hardship, crime by widows, mostly petty theft, increased, though authorities tended to treat them less harshly than other lawbreakers.

Some Opportunities. Whereas widowhood often brought economic adversity for women, it also gave them a wider range of action throughout most of Europe. Widows who had inherited money or property from their husbands or who had

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received their dowry back at his death were usually quite free to invest or spend it as they wished. Aristocratic widows were often active managing their families’ business affairs, and identified the rights and privileges attached to their position as theirs, and not simply belonging to them in trust for their sons. Widowhood could also place a woman in a position of great power over her children, deciding the amount of dowry for her daughters and assisting her sons in gaining positions of political influence.

Challenging Convention. This social and economic independence was disturbing to many commentators, who viewed men being in charge as the norm, and they recommended that widows remarry. Remarriage was also troubling, however, for it lessened a woman’s allegiance to the family of her first husband and could have serious economic consequences for the children of her first marriage. It might also give a wealthy widow what was seen as an inappropriate amount of power over her spouse. Laws regarding widows often reflect this ambivalence. In many parts of Europe laws made remarriage more attractive by requiring a widow to have a male guardian cosign all financial transactions, even religious donations, and giving him power over her own children. The same law code might also make it less attractive by stipulating that a widow could lose all rights over her children, including the right to see them. Not wishing to contemplate either the independence or remarriage of their wives, lawmakers were thus attempting somehow to keep a widow dependent on the family of her first husband.

Reality. In actual practice, whether a widow remarried or not was determined more by her economic and personal situation than by laws or theoretical concerns. Younger widows remarried much more readily than older ones, and widows with few children more readily than those with many. The opposite is true in the case of widowers; those with many children were most likely to remarry, and to do so quickly. In general, widowers were far more likely to remarry than widows; French statistics indicate that 50 percent of widowers remarried, as opposed to 20 percent of widows.

The Elderly. Widowhood was a clear legal status, but “old age” in the early modern period is harder to define. For women, the best marker might be menopause, which usually occurred somewhere in a woman’s forties; the mean age at which women in northwestern Europe bore their last child was forty. Because life expectancy was less than in modern times, however, even if people stopped having children before forty they still had offspring in their households for most of their later years of life. Older men and women whose children had all left home generally continued to live on their own as long as possible. Evidence from England indicates that middle-class children were more likely to assist their elderly parents by providing them with servants so that they could stay in their own households rather than taking them in; the elderly lived with their married children only among the poor. Though earlier periods are often romanticized as a time when the elderly were cherished for their wisdom and experience, this concept was not necessarily so. In many parts of Europe, parents made formal contracts with their children to assure themselves of a certain level of material support, or included clauses in their wills. In her advice book for women written in 1407, the French author Christine de Pizan reminds young women that “you owe honor to the elderly, so it follows that at all costs you must avoid mocking them and doing or saying injurious, derisive, or outrageous things, or bad things of whatever kind. Do not displease or find fault with them, as some wicked young people do who are very much to be reproached for it, who call them ’old boys’ or ’old biddies’.”

Support of the Elderly. Older women were generally more in need of public support than older men, in part because their spouses were less likely or able to care for them than were the wives of older men, who were generally younger or had no way to leave an ailing spouse. Younger relatives were also more willing to take in elderly men than women; older women often formed joint households with other elderly female relatives or simply acquaintances to pool their resources and expenses, a practice almost unknown among men. The higher percentage of elderly female welfare recipients may have also been partly the result of the fact that there were simply more older women than men around. Despite the dangers of childbirth, female life expectancy seems to have been gradually growing longer than that for men throughout this period; by the eighteenth century in France, female life expectancy at birth was about thirty-four and male about thirty-one.

New Challenges. Aging brought physical as well as economic changes, and there is evidence that these were viewed as more of a problem for women than men already in the sixteenth century. Postmenopausal women were widely believed to experience increased sex drive, which might even lead them to seek demonic lovers in order to satisfy themselves. They were believed to emit vapors from their mouths that could cause nursing women’s milk to dry up or animals and children to sicken. They were thought to be especially concerned with the lessening of their physical attractiveness, for a Spanish physician’s remedies to combat wrinkles were all directed to women. At the very end of life, both men and women were viewed as physically and mentally infirm; many illustrations of the ages of man show the man in the seventh (and last) stage as bent over and supported by a cane, and in William Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, the character Jacques describes this stage as “second childishness and mere oblivion.”

Sources

Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, eds., Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Longman, 1999).

Joan Larsen Klein, ed., Daughters, Wives and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

Joel T. Rosenthal, Old Age in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).