You clever readers, you always come up with the most interesting questions! Here is one from Lucina:
Moniker/Name: Lucina
Your Question: I’ve run across several instances of funerals which the male family members attend and the females do not, and even of gatherings after the funeral which the females, even if present in the same house, do not attend. Was this common? Infrequent? Was it a choice, or an expectation? It surprises me, since it seems to me that females have always been expected to attend more closely to the rituals of mourning than men. I have hunted and hunted for references to tell me about this, and I can’t find them. Help?
Source of Question: Just curious
Here is a very interesting letter to the editor in The Monthly Mirror (1808) which speaks to this very issue:
Apparently, seclusion was very much the fashion while in observance of a departure. As to the etiquette or moreways/folkways of female attendance at actual burial or wake services, there is not a wealth of primary sources. The bulk of Reg Rom authors writing on the subject offer the blanket statement that women did not attend services due to their “delicate sensibilities,” however some accounts show that women were in attendance at certain services.
Most likely, from my research, a non-attendance was due to one of two reasons a). fashion (ladies of the haute ton claiming “delicacy”) b). practicality (women often attended to the bodies of deceased in lieu of an undertaker which was only becoming part of the culture around the 19th century. Sometimes, they also kept vigil. No doubt by the time the public internment rolled around they were exhausted). From a 1837 Gentleman’s Magazine review of Greswell on The Burial Service:
So, evidently it was primarily an upper class condition of constitution whereby women did not attend the burial. I have found no evidence that women weren’t allowed to attend burial services or wakes, in fact found that it varied greatly among the classes. Women of lower classes definitely appear in published reports of funerals. So, my educated guess is that is was mostly a choice to abstain from attendance (sometimes likely due to exhaustion) and common among the gentry, after a fashion of portraying the delicacy of the “weaker sex”…which as the above article tells us is ridiculous because often they participated in the more rigourous rituals of death and dying.
Here is a refresher on widow weeds:
Mourning custom: (for wearing black and abstaining from entertainments)
12 months for a husband or wife
6 months for parents or parents in law
3 months for a sister or brother, uncle or aunt
6 weeks for a sister in law or uncle or aunt
3 weeks – uncle or aunt, aunt who remarried, first cousin 2 weeks – first cousin (
1 week – first and second cousin, and husband or stepmother’s sister.
