Widows

The Last Feminist Taboo
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 feminisms last great taboos, and the story of women the world has long refused to see.

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 husbands 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