Be fruitful and multiply

Be fruitful and multiply is presented as a religious command whose social force extends beyond theology: it helps frame women’s reproductive capacity as an obligation and a basis for their subordination. The book sets that expectation against the historical organization of property, family, and law, and against the changes that made it increasingly possible for women to limit pregnancy and participate in economic life.

A Command Made into Social Order

The command’s importance lies not only in its religious formulation but in the institutions that make reproduction a woman’s prescribed duty. The book argues that patriarchal societies have used religion, law, custom, and inherited ideas to justify women’s subordinate status. Religious narratives and doctrines present social arrangements as divinely grounded, while the family and marriage regulate women’s lives through dependence and control.

This framework is not reducible to biology. The book rejects the idea that women’s social roles follow automatically from an immutable feminine essence; characteristics are shaped by situations. Reproduction matters materially, but the meanings assigned to it—and the duties attached to it—are historically organized. The command therefore functions as part of a broader system that treats motherhood as women’s natural calling rather than one possible dimension of life.

Reproduction, Property, and Marriage

The historical account links women’s reproductive role to the changing organization of family and property. In Rome, the rise of agricultural property and the private estate made the family a central social unit and placed women under guardianship. Marriage could transfer a woman into her husband’s authority, while legal arrangements governed her person and property. These rules made the family not simply a private sphere but a structure through which male authority and inheritance were maintained.

The book distinguishes formal status from lived power. Women’s position depended not only on legal rights but also on their economic role and practical authority within the household. This tension recurs in the history of marriage: even where a woman’s contribution to family life was respected, the household remained embedded in a wider order that assigned men control over law, property, and public authority. Reproductive duty thus operated alongside other institutions rather than as an isolated religious injunction.

The Napoleonic Code renewed this pattern by defining women chiefly through marriage and motherhood while sharply limiting married women’s autonomy. It imposed obedience to husbands, restricted women’s civil capacities, and gave husbands extensive authority over residence, children, and contracts. The book emphasizes the contradiction: motherhood did not itself secure a married woman’s independence, and the law reinforced the husband’s power over both her person and her possessions.

Change and Its Limits

The nineteenth century brought two developments that altered women’s situation: women’s participation in production and greater control over reproduction. The book describes reproductive control as a means by which women could reduce pregnancies and integrate them into their lives rather than remain subject to them. Together with access to economic roles, this change could strengthen women’s control over their own persons and provide a material basis for social and political claims.

Legal reform nevertheless proceeded unevenly. In France, divorce returned in 1884, but adultery remained a sex-specific offense: a wife could be punished for it, while a husband’s conduct was treated differently. Reforms to guardianship and paternity rights followed, and in 1938 and 1942 the legal duty of a wife to obey her husband was abolished. Yet the father remained head of the family, and the law’s declaration that a married woman possessed full legal powers was qualified by restrictions elsewhere in the same provision. Formal change had not achieved equality between spouses.

The book also warns against treating legal change as a simple, steady emancipation. During the French Revolution, women briefly experienced an anarchic freedom, but political exclusion and the later Napoleonic settlement restored restrictive structures. Much later, the French ban on abortion and near-suppression of divorce under laws of 1936 and 1941 show how the state could again reinforce reproductive and marital constraints. The command’s social force therefore persisted through institutions that could change form or reverse earlier gains.

Historical Meaning

The book’s broader conclusion is that women’s history has been written by men, who shaped the values, customs, and religions used to define women’s roles. It connects the assignment of reproductive duties to changing material interests: property systems, family organization, and political authority helped determine women’s status, while technical and social changes later made reproductive control more possible. Feminism, in this account, has not acted as a wholly independent force; women’s claims gained leverage when underlying economic conditions changed.

Be fruitful and multiply consequently appears not as a neutral description of women’s nature but as a command whose significance depends on its historical use. The book sets religiously justified expectations against women’s changing capacity to control reproduction and enter productive life. The resulting conflict is between a prescribed destiny organized around motherhood and the possibility of shaping one’s own existence under conditions no longer wholly governed by that destiny.