Widows and Widowers

Widows and widowers are women and men who have survived the death of their spouse. Widowhood may be conceptualized as both a life transition and a personal status. Widowhood is a transitional event because the loss of a spouse is typically accompanied by high levels of psychological distress as the newly bereaved person adjusts to life without one's spouse. Yet widowhood also may be conceptualized as an enduring social role or identity, just as “married person” is a social role. Although the transition to widowhood is often associated with grief, depressive symptoms, and declines in physical health, most bereaved spouses are resilient and return to preloss levels of functioning within two years following their loss.

The likelihood of becoming widowed and of remaining widowed and the consequences of spousal loss vary widely by gender, age, and sociohistorical context. Gender is one of the most powerful influences on the experience of widowhood. In all developed and nearly all developing nations, women are more likely than men to outlive their spouse, reflecting men's higher rates of mortality and the tendency of women to marry men slightly older than themselves. Widowhood is also an older women's issue; life expectancy has increased steadily over the past century, and spousal loss overwhelmingly [Page 990]befalls older adults. As such, widowhood has important consequences for the physical, economic, and psychological well-being of older adults.

Gendered Patterns of Widowhood

Highly visible images of distraught widows and widowers often feature the young—the youthful brides of fallen soldiers in the Iraq war or the junior executives who lost their wives on September 11. Yet widowhood today is a transition overwhelmingly experienced by people age 65 and older. Of the 900,000 people who become widowed annually in the United States today, nearly three-quarters of them are age 65 or older. Widowhood patterns mirror mortality patterns. The death rate, or the number of all people who die in a given year per 100,000 people in the population, increases sharply beyond age 65 (see Figure 1). Life expectancy at birth today is 76 for men and 80 for women, so women are much more likely than men to outlive their spouse.

Women also are more likely to remain widowed, given widowers' greater propensity to remarry. Among people age 65 to 74 in 2006, 26.3#x0025; of women and just 7.3#x0025; of men are widowed. These proportions jump to 58.2#x0025; of women and 20.5#x0025; of men age 75 and older (see Figure 2).

Figure 1 Death Rates by Age (All Causes), United States, 2004

Source: Deaths: Final Data for 2004 (August 21, 2007), by National Vital Statistics Reports, 55(19), pp. 1–119.

Widows are far less likely than widowers to remarry because of the death of opposite sex peers. Among men and women age 65 and older in the United States, the sex ratio is 1.5 women per every man. By age 85, this ratio is more than 3 women per every man. As a result, few widows have the opportunity to remarry. Additionally, cultural norms encourage men to marry women younger than themselves, so widowed men may opt to remarry a younger woman, whereas older widows do not typically have access to a similarly expanded pool of potential spouses. Recent studies also reveal that women in contemporary Western nations have a weaker desire to remarry; many women report that they do not want to resume the homemaking and caregiving chores that often accompany marriage.

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