Understanding the Meaning of Being a Widow

Widowhood is a tragic experience that transcends all economic, political and geographical boundaries. The basic phenomenon can be defined as a situation that occurs when a woman has lost her husband to death and has not remarried. Still, the real life of a widow, meaning what their life is like after the loss of their husband, should be understood as a complex combination of emotional, social and economic difficulties of varying degrees that can also by accentuated by their culture and tradition.

For example, in many regions, the cultural stigmas of widowhood is not merely about a state of loss or an emotional state of grieving and mourning. Widowhood is a new social identity that comes with immense stigma and discrimination.[1]

Widows within parts of Asia, for example, are considered to be the primary reason for their husband’s death, regardless of the cause—and are therefore treated quite cruelly as undesirable.[2] Often, their families evict them, leaving them penniless, without any family support or welfare systems to sustain them. This common practice treats widows like they are a hardship on their community, a burden not only for the family but for the entire village, and one that needs to be expelled. [3]

With no access to savings and no job training, many widows in Asia are left to struggle daily just for survival. “In some Asian cultures, when a woman’s husband dies, she is often stripped of her dignity, her worth, and her human rights,” said K.P. Yohannan, founder of GFA World. “Many of these widows are deprived of their home, their property, and their possessions—leaving them destitute.”[4]

In another part of the world, the African cultural view of widows can hardly be considered any less discriminatory and oppressive. In Nigeria, for example, widows may be accused of practicing witchcraft and are subject to rituals in order to prove themselves innocent.[5] These practices humiliate the women and leave them prey to ongoing mental and physical abuse. In this way, some cultures magnify a widow’s pain—adding social stigma to the loss and grief they are already experiencing from losing their husband and increasing the challenges and sufferings they already have to face.

The challenges faced by widows across much of the rest of Africa is no different. In many countries, a widow loses her rights to inheritance and can also be subjected to dehumanizing rituals. Indeed, the World Bank shows that women in more than a few African nations acquire social and financial rights exclusively through marriage—only to lose them all once they are left alone. As a result, the widows are often abused and exploited since they have no legal protection or social foothold.[6]

However, these cascading problems are not restricted to just the developing countries in the world. Even among wealthier nations like the United States of America, the Social Security Administration has come under fire for not doing enough to make sure that widows get all of their maximum benefit options when facing financial difficulty. The decades-long struggle to expand benefits for military widows—such as Cathy Milford’s 20-year crusade to end the U.S. widow’s tax on survivors of servicemen and women killed in action—helps illustrate larger societal issues behind their financial insecurity and the need for widows legal rights.[7]

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