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.As this case suggests, widowhood redefined a colonial woman s eco-nomic and familial relationships.The demands on women as wives andas widows could be quite contradictory.Being a widow was not simply amatter of no longer being a married woman.Widows were at once never-married women, married women, and men.Widows resumed all the legalrights of femes sole and assumed male rights and responsibilities within anintricate web of communal standards of gender, wealth, and status.Theiridentities were forged dialogically.Prescriptive literature advised widowsto select and widows indeed selected aspects of masculine and femi-nine, paternal and maternal roles.Widows thus crossed gendered bound-aries to fulfill their responsibilities or to take advantage of the ambiguityinherent in those roles.The cases of Mary Bateman and Margarite Perryunderscore the importance of widows actions as legatees, legators, and ex-ecutors.They reflect the meanings of family as widows constructed themwithin the constraints of law, custom, property, and the competing wishesof their kinfolk.These women responded to their familial responsibilitiesby engaging in economic battles generally reserved for males.They sym-bolized the ways widows, often described in English law as relicts, couldmanipulate the system to their and their daughters advantage.The English settlers brought with them traditional beliefs about the eco-nomics of the family.Inheritance provided productive wealth for the nextgeneration, preserved the household, controlled the family structure, andtransferred authority from one generation to another.In economies ofscarcity, English inheritance law sought to perpetuate male lineage, andmale testators often used their bequests to maintain a traditional socialstructure based on male control over land and its resources.This meantgranting all land to the eldest son.When men possessed sufficient land,custom encouraged them to bequeath it to all their male heirs and theirpersonal property to their daughters.In the early stages of colonization,the abundance of land allowed patriarchs to ignore the custom of primo-geniture and to bequeath to all sons land sufficient to support their fami-lies and to maintain their class standing.Indeed, at times, estates werelarge enough for wives and daughters to receive landed bequests along Widows and the Household 81with their personal goods although that occurred infrequently.If menlacked extensive land, the women likely only received personal goods.4Moreover, in cities, land lost much of its family significance as otherforms of property became critical to family sustenance money, personalgoods, stock, and lease holds property not traditionally associated withmale ownership.5A close reading of the language used in early colonial laws reflects theassumption that testators were male.Widows could devise their estates,and the 1692 Acts and Laws passed in Massachusetts recognized that pro-prietors could be male or female.Yet, they declared that any person, inhis own proper right in Fee Simple, can devise by his Last Will and Tes-tament.all such Lands, Tenements and Hereditaments to and amonghis Children or other, as he shall think fit at his pleasure. Additionally,when Massachusetts lawmakers explained how the unbequeathed surplusof an estate would be distributed among the heirs, they described whatwives and children not husbands and children would receive.6 Theystated that it is found by experience that some Men dying, having madetheir Wills,.that the wills are Concealed and that their wives andchildren therefore suffer.Finally, a 1700 act providing for children who not having a Legacy given them in the Will of their Father or Mother insisted that such children receive their lawful portion of the estate pro-vided, Such Child or Children have not had an equal proportion of hisEstate bestowed on them by the Father in his Life-time. 7Yet, women s control of wealth was not entirely dependent on male rel-atives.Widows not only improved the value of the estate their husbandsleft them but often had their own estates to bequeath, even if small.Suchwealth may have motivated, even compelled, widows to execute their ownwills.Widows helped to actively produce and reproduce the economythrough their bequeathing patterns.They did not simply react; rather,they actively structured the family and the family economy in particularways.In distributing property from one generation to another, colonialwidows put an ambiguous female imprint on a decidedly paternal society.Recall that John Bateman referred to Mary as his relict. The OxfordEnglish Dictionary defines that word in several ways, and each definitionsignifies how Anglo-American authors defined widows place in society.The first use of relict as a widow of a man appeared in 1545.Begin-ning in the mid-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the nuclear familybegan replacing large kin networks just as private property and householdproduction began replacing the communal enterprise.Thus, the individual 82 Widows and the Householdfamily and its head assumed new standing, and English women s roleswithin the family became increasingly constricted, with women identifiedprimarily through their relationships to men.8 The head of the householdrepresented the family in all matters economic as the family became themodel for the well-ordered and hierarchical social structure.The husbandruled the unified household as the king ruled the country.9However, certain things in the house pertained to the authority of thehusband and in other things he gave over his right unto the woman. 10The specific tasks they performed enabled the household to survive as aninterdependent unit.As Thomas Tusser, author of one of England s mostpopular books on the household, penned:Take weapon away, of what force is a man?Take housewife from husband, and what is he then?11Wives fulfilled necessary and important roles as helpmeets to their hus-bands.When death disrupted the complementary relationship, some ofthose ideals changed as other, more complicated meanings of relict suggest.Widowers were never referred to as relicts of their deceased wives, be-cause their wives death did not alter their status.Men remained headsof households, property holders, and, often, citizens.12 There was no needto advise them on how to manage their passage from one marital stateto the next because the death of a wife, at most, inconvenienced a wid-ower.The definition of relict as a deserted or discarded person (1592)or the remains of one deceased (1649) signaled a profound transforma-tion for a woman subsumed into the person of her husband.A widowwas not a whole being but a fragment.Yet, Tusser s belief that If widow,both housewife and husband may be, 13 turned the legal construct of amasculine unity of person into a cultural construct of a feminine unityof person.The important responsibilities thrust on English wives by theirhusbands death meant that widowhood signified a change in a woman svery being.As titles in English society separated the elite from the ordi-nary and the superior from the inferior,14 so, too, did relict separate wid-ows from other women and men.Defining that role concretely provedas elusive as did determining whether a widow should remarry or not
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