Conjugal duty

Conjugal duty names the expectation that sex within marriage is an obligation rather than an encounter freely chosen by both partners. The book places this rule within a larger structure of unequal rights: marriage offers women protection and social standing, but the price is often the surrender of individual preference, while the language of duty makes that surrender appear legitimate.

Definition and Marital Exchange

In the account of patriarchal marriage, men are the ones who take or choose wives, and women’s preferences are treated as secondary because sexual service is understood as part of what marriage requires of them. Marriage is presented as protection against men’s freedom, but that protection comes at a cost: a woman must give up the particular love she might choose in order to secure a man’s support for life. The resulting exchange is not simply private. It links sexual expectations to the institution’s economic and social promises, and assigns the woman a position in which obligation can take precedence over desire.

The contrast is between a particular relationship, grounded in two people’s freely chosen attachment, and marriage as a social institution organized around general roles and duties. The book’s criticism is not that intimacy within marriage is impossible; it is that the institution can claim a right over the body, making the sexual relation instrumental rather than mutual. Conjugal duty thus exposes how a formally intimate bond can reproduce the broader imbalance between a husband’s recognized authority and a wife’s constrained agency.

The Experience of Obligation

The wedding night concentrates this conflict. Because it is treated as a decisive test, the first sexual encounter can become an ordeal rather than a gradual discovery between partners. The book describes how a wife’s uncertainty about pleasure, combined with the husband’s fear of either offending her or failing to awaken her desire, can leave him seeming clumsy or libertine. Under those conditions, conjugal duties may become repugnant to the wife rather than an expression of shared affection.

The consequences are not presented as inevitable features of women’s sexuality. The book notes that many women become mothers and grandmothers without experiencing pleasure or even arousal, and that some seek medical certificates or other pretexts to avoid intercourse. It also reports that many wives in the United States considered the frequency of intercourse too high and wished their husbands desired it less often, while few wanted it more frequently. The tension between these reports and women’s broad erotic possibilities supports the book’s central point: marriage, when it claims to regulate women’s erotic lives through duty, can suppress the very desire it purports to organize.

Consent, Freedom, and Legal Power

The book distinguishes obligation from consensual intimacy. When love or desire produces the willing agreement of both partners, physical love can draw its dignity from the pleasure they give and receive in recognition of each other’s freedom. By contrast, marriage converts an exchange that should arise spontaneously into rights and duties. The husband may approach sex as the performance of an obligation; the wife may experience herself as subject to a right exercised over her. The issue is therefore not merely the couple’s feelings but the institutional framing that can make consent subordinate to marital entitlement.

That framing has historical and legal dimensions. The book describes Roman marriage with manus, in which a wife came under her husband’s authority and was treated as his daughter, with his power extending over her person and property. Later arrangements could leave property under guardians’ control while still placing a wife’s person within the husband’s authority. In its account of the Napoleonic Code, the book likewise describes a wife’s duty to obey her husband and the law’s unequal treatment of adultery: a husband could seek to confine his wife for adultery, while his wife had grounds for divorce only if he brought a concubine into the home. These examples locate sexual obligation in a wider history of marital power rather than presenting it as an isolated custom.

Reproduction and Unequal Labor

Conjugal duty belongs to a broader pattern in which women’s reproductive and domestic work is treated as a private responsibility. The book distinguishes women’s productive capacity from their reproductive role, warning against reducing women either to workers or to a function of reproduction alone. The burden of pregnancy varies with social arrangements: it is heavier when pregnancies are imposed and women must raise children without help, and lighter when women can choose whether to have children and receive support during pregnancy and childcare.

In the period the book describes, reproductive control remains incomplete. Birth control is neither universally available nor consistently practiced, abortion is officially forbidden, and women may face health risks from unregulated methods or the strain of repeated pregnancies. Childcare and housekeeping also remain largely women’s work; in France, the antifeminist tradition makes men’s participation in household chores seem demeaning to them. These conditions intensify the unequal burden of marriage: sexual expectations cannot be separated from the reproductive risks and unpaid domestic labor that women are expected to carry.

The Limits of Formal Change

Legal reform changes some of the conditions surrounding marriage without establishing equality between spouses. In France, divorce is restored in 1884, but adultery remains a criminal offense only when committed by the wife. A wife’s guardianship rights are restricted in 1907 and fully granted only in 1917; recognition of natural paternity follows in 1912. Reforms in 1938 and 1942 abolish the wife’s duty of obedience, yet the father remains head of the family, and the wife’s legal powers continue to be qualified by the marriage contract and law. The book’s distinction between abstract rights and concrete circumstances clarifies why abolishing a formal duty does not by itself undo dependence or unequal domestic expectations.

Conjugal duty is therefore both a sexual expectation and a sign of the unequal structure of marriage. Its force comes not only from explicit law but from the economic dependence, reproductive burden, and customary division of labor that shape women’s choices. The book’s alternative is an intimacy founded on reciprocal freedom: desire should not be converted into an enforceable marital service, and a relationship cannot be equal while one partner’s obligation takes precedence over the other’s consent.