Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Widows: The Last Feminist Taboo

Widows: The Last Feminist Taboo

Schipper, Mineke

Hardcover

Death & DyingGeneral World HistoryWomen's Studies

Publisher Price: $24.95

PREORDER - Expected ship date January 19, 2027

ISBN10: 1908906693
ISBN13: 9781908906694
Publisher: Westbourne Press
Published: Jan 19 2027
Pages: 288
Language: English

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.

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Women's Studies

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