#a friend in my costumer circle said she wished she'd had a better way to signal her bereavement when her father died (she was 17)

[marzipanandminutiae]

I was just looking into the notion that widowers only had to mourn for 1 year after their wives' deaths, during the Victorian era, while widows had to mourn for two. because I've heard that a lot, but it seems to jive more with the Pop History version of the era where mourning existed because Imposing Rules On People Is Fun and All Marriages Were For Money than with the real version, inhabited by real people who idealized love matches and theoretically practiced formal mourning to show that they were going through something and needed gentle treatment

what I've gathered from a brief search for period sources seems to be:

one source from 1839 mentioned the "widows = 2 years; widowers = 1 year" thing

every other source I read (about 7, from various points in the era) implied or stated that the minimum normal period of mourning for widows and widowers was the same

That's a small sample size, but I still think it's significant

men's clothing could often be harder to visibly alter to reflect mourning, relying heavily on things like black cufflinks and collar studs that could be trickier to notice at first glance than. you know. a bonnet with a black veil over someone's face

a lot of sources talking about mourning clothes were fashion magazines aimed at women, and thus would be more likely to talk about women's mourning attire than men's

so my takeaway is that while some people at some parts of this 60-year period felt it acceptable for widowers to mourn for half the period of widows, many others at other times expected any bereaved spouse regardless of gender. obviously, in a highly misogynistic society, women's adherence to ettiquette could be much more scrutinized than men's; a widower who married six months after his wife's death would be looked askance at, but probably not subject to as much censure as a widow who did the same. and obviously, things don't go according to plan and the formal mourning system could of course backfire- forcing a woman into months of social seclusion for an abusive husband, for example

but.

the overall goal was to convey "handle with care" to the outside world. for many people, widowers were expected to need as much care as widows- and therefore to mourn for the same length of time