Merry widows? How attitudes to bereaved women have changed

Merry widows? How attitudes to bereaved women have changed

Societies around the world have always had a problem with a wife who no longer has a husband. But what does the W word mean in the modern era?

?width=620&quality=85&fit=max&s=1bf68bc3e09f1d7f7799180c09a05e7e
Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson play a sex worker and a widow in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande. Photograph: Future Publishing/Getty Images
Louisa Young
Sat 25 Jun 2022 10.00 EDT
Last modified on Sun 26 Jun 2022 00.08 EDT

There’s a downside to “till death us do part” – it does. For example, 60s model Jan de Souza, co-host of Tramp nightclub with her husband Johnny Gold, died recently: of loneliness, her obituary said. He’d died a year earlier, after 50 years of marriage. It recalls the perfect little poem by Henry Wotton, Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton’s Wife:

He first deceased; she for a little tried

To live without him, liked it not, and died.

Is it romantic? Or is it shocking that a widow might die of loneliness? It has been known for decades by science (and for aeons by art) that loneliness is bad for our health: as damaging as 15 cigarettes a day, or alcoholism. Lonely people are 50% more likely to die prematurely than those with good relationships. Stress affects you more with no one to help you; financial and health problems are yours alone, and everyday obstacles take a bigger emotional toll. It reduces your immunity, and increases inflammation, which can contribute to heart disease. And there’s nobody to nag you to go to the doctor.


?width=300&quality=85&fit=max&s=e104fde63ee0aef04134cb8d4b6b47aa
Jan de Souza, a 60s model who died this month after 50 years of marriage to Johnny Gold, who died a year ago. Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images

Then Friday was International Widows Day (June 18). But what even is a widow, in these days of declining marriage? It’s a woman whose husband has died, yes. Or a woman whose wife has died. Or the partner who she’s lived with for years? Strictly, no, but actually, of course. We don’t want to be churlish. Fiancé? Hm, maybe. That was my situation: I slipped a ring on his finger while he was in his final coma, and the vicar said at his funeral that it counted in the eyes of God, but it certainly wasn’t anything legal. How about ex-husband, or wife – father or co-parent of her children? Perhaps they maintained a good and close family relationship. Does that count? It kind of should do. Or, partner she’s never lived with? What if she’s young, and they were always going to get married – is she a widow?
. . . . . . .

As our lives become socially freer, and habits change, widowhood seems almost an old-fashioned concept. But it carries on. Covid, displacement and new wars increase the numbers, and widows of all kinds are often left unseen, unsupported and unmeasured. There are more than 3 million widows in the UK; 258 million worldwide. Officially. Including all those unmarried widows, just as bereft as their on-paper sisters, there are exponentially more. Across the world, the security of widows often depends on the generosity of their husband’s families. Must she shave her head? Marry her brother-in-law? Obey contradictory customs and laws? Be seen as carrier of misfortune or disease? Be excluded from family and society? In ancient Greece, a husband could leave his wife to whoever he wanted. Still now, from the Home Counties to religiously restricted societies, she can be a dangerous proposition: neither virgin nor wife, but a sexually experienced woman who belongs to nobody. God forbid she be free.


?width=620&quality=85&fit=max&s=efd43ab3b19e1f19600b1f9b636beede
There’s a great deal of cultural freight on the woman whose partner is dead. So what is she to do?
Nathan Gunn (Danilo) and Sarah Tynan (Hanna Glawari) in The Merry Widow by Franz Lehar at the London Coliseum. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

. . .
?width=300&quality=85&fit=max&s=d6a4ed12dfff9fd9402560e865e44719
The Wife of Bath defies convention as a widow in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images


Louisa Young’s novel Twelve Months and a Day is out now

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/25/merry-widows-how-attitudes-to-bereaved-women-have-changed