ABSTRACT
What is a widow?1 The shortest answer to this question seems to be ‘a woman who has outlived her husband’. But this definition is not as straightforward as it may at first appear. How to describe, for instance, a woman who has outlived her spouse and subsequently remarries? Is she still a widow or has she left widowhood behind her? In social terms, a remarrying woman will usually no longer be considered a widow, but in legal terms she may still have rights pertaining to widowhood, such as a widow’s pension. If the term ‘widow’ is restricted to women who do not remarry after their husband is deceased, it appears that although this definition may apply to contemporary western widows, historically and crossculturally speaking it would be more correct to say that the death of her spouse is only one prerequisite for a woman to be called a ‘widow’. In his contribution to this book Van der Toorn tells us that in Assyria the term widow was only associated with a woman ‘if her husband and father-in-law were dead and she had no son’ (see p. 23). A widow, therefore, was not just any woman who had outlived her husband. The term was reserved for formerly married women who had neither male protection nor means of financial support and who were thus in need of special legal protection, although this may have been a question of association rather than strict definition. Also, as Kuiper remarks in his discussion of widowhood in Dutch society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a small group of widows belonging to the nobility, douarières, were distinguished from the majority of widows.
