Introduction / Rudolph M. Bell and Virginia Yans -- Single women in Ireland / Anne Byrne -- Virgin mothers: single women negotiate the doctrine of motherhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain / Eileen Janes Yeo -- Social and emotional well-being of single women in contemporary America / Deborah Carr -- Widows at the Hastings: gender, citizenship, and the Montreal by-election of 1832 / Bettina Bradbury -- Business widows in nineteenth-century Albany, New York, 1813-1885 / Susan Ingalls Lewis -- "His absent presence": the widowhood of Mrs. Russell Sage / Ruth Crocker -- "Great was the benefit of his death": the political uses of Maria Weston Chapman's widowhood / Lee V. Chambers -- The United Daughters of the Confederacy, Confederate widows, and the lost cause: "we must not forget or neglect the widows" / Jennifer L. Gross -- Modernity's miss-fits: blind girls and marriage in France and America, 1820-1920 / Catherine Kudlick -- The times that tried only men's souls: women, work, and public policy in the Great Depression / Elaine S. Abelson -- Globablization, inequality, and the growth of female-headed households in the Caribbean / Helen I. Safa.