Three generations of women in one family are the characters in this intimate historical study of what it meant to be a widow in sixteenth-century Mexico City. Shirley Cushing Flint has used archival research to tell the stories of five women in the Estrada familyâ€"a mother, three daughters and a granddaughterâ€"from the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1520 until the 1580s.