The Napoleonic Code institutionalized women’s legal subordination for a century

Evidence

During the liquidation of the Revolution woman enjoys an anarchic freedom. But when society is reorganized, she is rigidly enslaved again. From the feminist point of view, France was ahead of other countries; but for the unfortunate modern French woman, her status was determined during a military dictatorship; the Napoleonic Code, which sealed her fate for a century, greatly held back her emancipation. Like all military leaders, Napoleon wants to see woman solely as a mother; but, heir to a bourgeois revolution, he does not intend to demolish the social structure by giving the mother priority over the wife: he prohibits the querying of paternity; he sets down harsh conditions for the unwed mother and the illegitimate child. Yet the married woman herself does not find recourse in her dignity as mother; the feudal paradox is perpetuated. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 252

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘sacrifice’ and patriarchal-legal-history themes in the reader’s prior sources on sumptuary law and gendered control. — connects to: French women gained legal bodily autonomy only decades after 1949; Medieval women enjoyed civic privileges that later centuries stripped away. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 211; French marital law required women to obtain husbands’ authorization for contracts (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• French civil law kept married women legally subordinate well into the 1940s #corroborates (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 276
• Modern French law long treated wives as legal dependents #corroborates (0.88) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1109
• Christian doctrine institutionalized women’s subordination despite early egalitarian impulses #expands (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 204
• Colonial nonintervention in women’s customs mirrored the metropole’s denial of women’s rights #complicates (0.72)