Modern French law long treated wives as legal dependents

Evidence

Roman law placed the woman in the hands of her husband loco filiae; at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Bonald declared that the woman is to her husband what the child is to the mother; until the 1942 law, French law demanded a wife’s obedience to her husband; law and customs still confer great authority on him: it is suggested by her very situation within the conjugal society. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1109

Categorization

• DEFINE: Loco filiae is a legal term worth preserving — wife as daughter in Roman law.
• XREF: connects to: French women gained legal bodily autonomy only decades after 1949; French marital law required women to obtain husbands’ authorization for contracts; French law treated the married woman as a servant, not an associate (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Egypt’s mid-nineteenth-century adoption of French civil law restricted shari’a to family law #expands (0.72) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 326