ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the health, both physical and psychological of widows in contemporary Britain. In many ways, the documentation of the experiences of widowhood which followed the Second World War stimulated the development of a whole body of research concerned with death, dying and bereavement. However, since the late 1970s, interest in widows as a specific group of bereaved individuals has been overtaken by the desire to broaden research concerning death-related issues into other areas of loss. Consequently, in a recent publication entitled 'Death, Dying and Bereavement' (Dickenson and Johnson, 1993), widows are not even referred to in the index despite widowhood being one of the numerically most frequent results of death. Nevertheless, the position of widows is in many ways unique, despite the processes associated with bereavement being similar across a range of losses. It will be argued here that factors affecting the grieving process amongst widows are, and always have been, inextricably linked to the consignment of women to the 'private' sphere, where they are conveniently forgotten, and to the domination of the 'public' sphere by men. It will further be suggested that post-war social policy provision for women who are widows operated actively to reinforce women's subordinate position in society. The 'Beveridge blueprint' for social policy in post-war Britain effectively defined women as the economic dependents of men in social and ideological terms whilst leaving them in practical terms, whether they worked outside of the home or not, severely under-insured in the event of their male partners' premature deaths.
