Feudalism

Feudalism appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s history as a system in which women’s status shifted with the changing relationship between land, military service, and political power, but inheritance did not by itself make women independent. As hereditary property created limited openings for female succession, the feudal domain continued to treat women as means of transmitting land and securing male authority. Later, the decline of military obligations weakened some forms of wardship, yet marriage preserved a durable distinction between women’s capacities outside marriage and their subordination within it.

Land, military service, and inheritance

In de Beauvoir’s account, Feudalism emerged from the upheavals of the early Middle Ages, when sovereign power and property rights remained closely intertwined. Until the eleventh century, political order rested heavily on force and property on armed power. A fief was understood as property held in return for military service; because women were deemed unable to perform that service, they could not initially hold feudal property in their own right.

The emergence of hereditary fiefs altered the rules. When there was no male heir, some daughters could inherit, and around the eleventh century female succession came to be accepted in the feudal system. But the inheritance did not transfer control to the woman. Military obligations remained, so a male guardian—usually her husband—held the fief’s title and enjoyed the use of its goods. De Beauvoir compares the woman’s position to that of the Greek epikleros: she served as the channel through which an estate passed, rather than as its autonomous bearer.

Heiresses and the authority of the domain

An heiress could represent a substantial estate, including land and a château, making her a prize in disputes among suitors. De Beauvoir describes girls sometimes given in marriage by their fathers or lords before they were twelve. A lord could select a spouse for an heiress because marriage served the interests of the domain; her children, too, were destined to become vassals who would defend its property. Under the husband’s supposed protection, the woman could thus be subordinated both to him and to the landholding power he represented.

Marriage and widowhood could repeat this transfer of authority. Because marriage among relatives was prohibited up to the seventh degree, and kinship could include spiritual as well as blood relations, grounds for annulment could be found; de Beauvoir notes that some women in the eleventh century were repudiated four or five times. A widow, meanwhile, was expected to accept a new master. In the examples she cites from epic literature, Charlemagne arranges marriages for the widows of barons who died in Spain, while the Duchess of Burgundy asks the king to find her a powerful husband so that her land can be defended. The arrangement presents remarriage less as a private choice than as a means of securing property and protection.

Unequal lives within the feudal order

De Beauvoir portrays feudal custom as giving husbands broad authority over wives, while treating women’s fidelity as a particular obligation. The warrior ideal placed women’s concerns below the business of combat, and literary accounts could explicitly exclude them from military counsel. Yet women’s lives were not confined to passive household roles: some women of the manor rode, hunted, and hawked, and when a husband was away, a wife might defend the seigneury. Their participation in the responsibilities of the domain did not, in her account, erase the gendered hierarchy that assigned them guardians and denied them equal authority.

Courtly love offered a different kind of reprieve. Because the feudal husband could be both guardian and tyrant, a wife might seek a lover outside marriage; poetry could idealize this love, but the custom did not substantially change women’s legal or social position. De Beauvoir treats courtly love as compensation for the harshness of official arrangements, not as a route to emancipation. Romantic ideals and women’s activity in the household or estate could coexist with the underlying authority of husbands and lords.

Wardship’s decline and marriage’s persistence

Women’s position improved in some places when royal power curtailed the rights of feudal lords. Lords progressively lost the power to choose vassals’ marriages and to profit from wards’ property; as military service was converted into monetary obligations, women could pay what they had previously been unable to perform through arms. Once a fief functioned more like patrimonial property than a military charge, the argument for excluding women from succession weakened.

The change was uneven. De Beauvoir notes that women in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy remained under perpetual wardship, while France accepted the principle that a daughter could be worth as much as a son. An unmarried or widowed woman who owned a fief could exercise substantial authority: she might administer justice, sign treaties, decree laws, and even command troops or fight. Before Joan of Arc, women soldiers already existed, so her military role was remarkable without being wholly unprecedented.

This increased capacity did not dissolve women’s subordination. As military service ceased to be a barrier, marriage remained a means of restoring male control: the husband continued as guardian, a pattern that survived feudal institutions and was carried into bourgeois law. De Beauvoir’s account therefore distinguishes the woman’s capacity to own or govern property when unmarried or widowed from her reduced position as a wife. Feudal inheritance could grant a woman access to power, but the institutions governing marriage and guardianship repeatedly placed that power in male hands.