WIDOWHOOD AND PATRIARCHY IN 17TH-CENTURY FRANCE

Widows in early modern societies have often been seen as women whose positions as heads of household allowed them access to status and autonomy denied other women in patriarchal societies. The experiences of widows from middling order urban families in early modem France suggests that a more complicated dynamic shaped the situation of such women. Like their contemporaries in other social classes and in other countries, they did acquire legal rights but legal entitlements alone could not guarantee them independent lives. They experienced many difficulties widowers escaped, indicating that female heads of household were anomalies in a patriarchal society. Economic disabilities and cultural practices, particularly tied to the management of property, seriously circumscribed the potential for independent decision making the law seemed to offer widows. Moreover, widows were embedded on several levels in a network of male kin ties that repeatedly constricted their capacity to determine their own lives by placing them under the continued supervision of their male relatives.