With the eye of an anthropologist and the passion of a feminist, Mineke Schipper has put the spotlight on the much-neglected subject of widowhood in her newest book, Widows; A Global History. Her extraordinary account of how women whose husbands have died have been treated across the globe for millennia was an eye-opener for this reviewer who had erroneously believed the practice of Sati in India was the pinnacle of injustices heaped on widows.
Schipper’s meticulous examination of the cultural history of husband-less women across the world is disturbing. Soon after the passing of their husbands, these women were looked at both with sympathy and suspicion. They were forced to wear grotesque clothes and were isolated for fear that their presence would infect the soil and water. They had to resort to loud lamentations to make their grief look raw, intense and convincing.
Often, the deaths of husbands were blamed on them, they were accused of practising witchcraft, and had to undergo trials by water or fire to disprove the idea that they were witches. The onus of driving away their husbands’ spirits and keeping the villages unpolluted was also on them.
In the worst-case scenarios, they were strangled and buried or burnt alive with their dead spouses. If they were allowed to live, they were subjected to extended mournings of up to two to three years, during which time they had to shave their heads, starve themselves, wear the bones and hair of their husbands as ornaments, and forced to have sex with known relatives or unknown men as part of humiliating purifying rituals. Often, they were denied the right to inheritance, their children were snatched from them, and they were left to fend for themselves.
{{/usCountry}}In the worst-case scenarios, they were strangled and buried or burnt alive with their dead spouses. If they were allowed to live, they were subjected to extended mournings of up to two to three years, during which time they had to shave their heads, starve themselves, wear the bones and hair of their husbands as ornaments, and forced to have sex with known relatives or unknown men as part of humiliating purifying rituals. Often, they were denied the right to inheritance, their children were snatched from them, and they were left to fend for themselves.
{{/usCountry}}In India, widows often found their way to Varanasi or Vrindavan, where they had to wear white, go bald and become “invisible”. In Europe, they wore black dresses and veils of varying lengths to conceal their bodies and exude an air of chastity. Their umbrellas had to be black too. Often the black dye used to colour the veil, made of stiff crepe fabric, was so toxic that “many a woman…ended up in a coffin through the wearing of crepe”, Schipper quotes from a gazette published in 1898. Widows were not allowed to attend weddings and their “shadow was considered life-threatening”.
Schipper gives the glaring example of Queen Victoria to make her point. “During her lifetime, Queen Victoria was the widow-par-excellence when it came to lifelong mourning attire. Following the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861, she spent 45 years wearing only black until her death in 1901, occasionally topped with a white veil or headdress…” The Queen also wore a gold locket that contained her dead husband’s hair.
Schipper’s accounts are heart-wrenching. On the west coast of Africa, widows were socially excluded for six months and confined to a hut built on their husband’s grave. They had to guard his body until only the bones were left. Dayak widows from Indonesia had to wear heavy, silver earrings in stretched earlobes – hanging right down to their shoulders. In other cultures, the bones of the beloved were, after a period, dug up and worn by women. Sometimes this was done even with skulls.
According to a 2021 UN estimate, there are 258.5 million widows or “vidhua” (Sanskrit), “viduata” (Latin), “witwe” (German), “veuve” (French) and “weduwe” (Dutch) in the world. Of these, one in 10 lives in extreme poverty. To recognise the challenges these husband-less women continue to face, the United Nations observes June 23 as International Widows’ Day. The author admits that even she was unaware of this day until she began researching this subject.
Schipper, Emeritus Professor of Intercultural Literary Studies at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, is the author of several academic books, including Naked or Covered: A History of Dressing and Undressing Around the World and the internationally acclaimed Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet: Women in Proverbs from Around the World.
Following the publication of Never Marry… in 2004, Schipper promised herself that she would do a detailed book on the plight of widows. Tragically, by the time she began her research, she had herself become one.
“I lost my own love on 7 April 2020, after a long and exciting life together. That summer, I leafed through unread stacks on my desk. In the mail was the contract for this book, signed by my publisher… I looked up at the surprising date of their signatures: 7 April.”
The author emphasises that no widower was expected to mourn his wife’s death, leave alone join her pyre or be buried with her. In fact, it was only a matter of time before he took on a new wife even as there was a competition among the many wives of the departed as to who would be the chosen one to accompany the dead husband. This was an issue of prestige for the wives, and sometimes the dying husband chose the wife he would wish to take along. She was a “gift” along with his other prized possessions such as jewels and armour.
The author lists a few proverbs and jokes from across the world about dead wives, even as newspapers continue to carry cartoons belittling widows. Schipper mentions one such cartoon featuring a heavily built widow dating a bony man. The caption reads: “Can you keep a secret? Then I’ll tell what my husband died of.”
LISTEN: Change starts with mothers; Mineke Schipper on the Books & Authors podcast
Though the author’s exhaustive research on widows spans continents, she asserts that “nowhere else in the world was a wife so dependent on her husband as in India”. She quotes 14th century Moroccan explorer Ibn Batutta’s eyewitness account of a Sati in progress. He writes about women sometimes trying to escape their extraordinarily painful death, and how they were chased down, sometimes half burnt, and pushed back into the pyre. She also quotes an Englishman, Richard Hartley Kennedy, who witnessed the Sati of a woman he knew. He too includes painful details of two huge wooden blocks being placed to block escape, and the hasty addition of more inflammable material.
However, this shocking sexism was not exclusive to the Indian subcontinent. “Witches” were being killed right until the 18th century in Europe and colonial North America. About 50,000 women perished in this way.
To put the lid on the widow versus widower debate, Schipper quotes Patricia Okoye, the author of “Widowhood”: “Dead or alive, the man is the winner in this gender-blind culture.”
For men, the loss of a life partner translates as a newfound freedom. For women, however, it is a huge loss of status even today. Widows are stripped of power, property and children, and every attempt is made to exclude or control them.
The author gives two recent examples from India: Champa Devi, a 70-year-old widow, was beaten to death in Udaipur by her neighbours as she reportedly cast an evil eye on their son. Another widow, because of her “presumed sexual availability”, was abused by her brother-in-law. When the matter was reported to the local body, her widowed father-in-law was appointed as her guardian. When the father-in-law too exploited her sexually, the local body refused to believe the widow’s version. The humiliated woman took her life.
Schipper makes the important point that “women have also meekly played into this projected ideal of submissive devotion”, and that they should stop fearing what others might say or think. She encourages women to talk about their achievements as only a gradual process of habituation would make talented women less terrifying to men. They should take the lead to create a more
equitable society and let womanhood heal, she asserts.
Schipper’s research is impeccable and impressive but the text sometimes seems repetitive, especially in the first few chapters. Still, this global cultural history of widowhood that helps you understand the power dynamics of a man’s world is a highly recommended read.
Lamat R Hasan is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.