ABSTRACT
As a Women’s Studies tutor in the late 1980s, I looked for accounts of western women’s experiences of bereavement in order to introduce students to aspects of gender and ageing. Little material about women’s grief seemed to be available. Closer examination of the ‘classic’ literature of death and dying which emerged from the late 1950s onwards revealed that many of its general statements about the nature of loss have an unacknowledged gendered basis in research among widows. There would seem to be a parallel here with much pre-1970s sociological and anthropological research which drew on interviews with men to provide a more general account of aspects of social life (Oakley 1974, Ardener 1972). What is different, however, is the gender of the interviewees whose testimonies are taken to represent both male and female experience.
