1884

In the book’s historical account of women’s condition, 1884 is a narrow legal turning point rather than a resolution: France restored divorce, but the right remained difficult to obtain, and the surrounding legal and social order continued to constrain women. The year helps show how a change in the law could widen a formal possibility without undoing the material dependence and unequal standards that shaped married life.

Divorce Restored, but Restricted

Divorce had been abolished in 1826 during the Restoration. The Constitutional Assembly of 1848 refused to restore it, and it did not return until 1884. Even then, the law made divorce difficult to obtain. Its return mattered because it reopened an exit from marriage, but it did not create equal power within marriage or ensure that separation was practically available to every woman.

The book places this reform within a longer account of family law and social authority. The nineteenth-century legal system continued to reinforce the severity of the Napoleonic Code, while the bourgeois family was defended as an indissoluble social unit. In this setting, restoring divorce interrupted a long legal prohibition without displacing the ideal of a hierarchical household.

Unequal Legal Standards

The restored right did not erase the sexual double standard. A wife could obtain divorce if her husband committed adultery, but adultery remained a punishable offense only when committed by the wife. The difference reveals the limits of the reform: the law allowed a wife to respond to her husband’s infidelity while continuing to judge women’s sexual conduct more harshly than men’s.

This unevenness fits the book’s broader distinction between abstract rights and lived circumstances. Legal status alone does not determine women’s concrete position; economic roles, established customs, and family authority also shape what rights can mean in practice. In the account of 1884, divorce is therefore both a real legal change and an incomplete one.

A Partial Change in a Longer History

The restoration of divorce belongs to a gradual, uneven transformation of married women’s status in France. The book traces further reforms after 1884: restricted guardianship rights were granted in 1907 and fully granted in 1917, while the right to establish natural paternity was authorized in 1912. The married woman’s legal status was modified in 1938 and 1942, when the duty of obedience was abolished, although the father remained head of the family and equality between spouses had not been achieved.

Seen across this sequence, 1884 is neither an isolated victory nor a completed emancipation. It marks the return of a legal remedy after decades of abolition and refusal, while the difficulty of obtaining divorce and the unequal treatment of adultery preserve the larger contradiction: formal change advances, but legal and social arrangements continue to favor male authority.