Widowers and their sisters-in-law: family crises, horizontally organised relationships and affinal relatives in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The period around 1800 was characterised by a remarkable intensification of horizontally organised relationships and horizontally structured interactions such as sibling relations and cousin marriages. At the same time, in-laws stepped onto the historical stage. The aim of this contribution is to shed light on the importance of affinal relatives – above all that of deceased wives’ sisters as preferred spouses – and to reconstruct the difficulties that widowers had to cope with in terms of domestic organisation.As nineteenth-century marriage dispensation records reveal, the number of marriage applications by widowers and their sisters-in-law was particularly high in the German-speaking world. And though research has already been carried out on the broad-based societal and political debate in Great Britain touched off by the “Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill” of 1835, this same constellation within the Catholic context has so far received relatively little attention. Very often, the death of a wife caused the entire household to slide into a situation of crisis, especially if small children were present. In a large number of the cases in which this happened, the wife’s sister ended up moving into the widower’s household. She took care of the household and the children and also took on agricultural and/or business-related responsibilities.In many cases, it was an obvious next step for widowers and their sisters-in-law to plan their marriage. During the 1830s and 1840s, however, it was very difficult for such bridal couples to obtain the necessary papal dispensation. Therefore, the extensive source material from this period provides revealing insights into the domestic organisation of widowers’ households. It also highlights a close intertwining of social, economic and emotional aspects – for which reason the legally mandated separation of the couple in the case of a rejected dispensation application could become a dramatic matter indeed.