The abolition of a French wife’s duty to obey her husband was a limited but important legal reform, removing a rule that had made marital subordination explicit. Simone de Beauvoir presents it as a change in formal status rather than a completed emancipation: economic dependence, the father’s continuing authority in the family, and women’s unequal share of work continued to restrict their freedom.

Legal and Historical Background

Under the Napoleonic Code, marriage placed a woman under her husband’s authority in both personal and material matters. The husband determined where the family lived and held greater rights over the children; outside certain business circumstances, his authorization was required for his wife’s contracts. The legal order also treated adultery differently by sex: a husband could seek divorce and, in specified circumstances, confine his wife, while a wife had grounds to divorce him only if he brought a concubine into the home. These provisions made obedience part of a broader system of marital power, rather than an isolated rule.

The Code followed a revolutionary period in which women had briefly experienced greater freedom, but the reorganization of society under Napoleon restored strict subordination. The nineteenth-century legal system sustained that pattern. Divorce, abolished in 1826, was not restored until 1884 and remained difficult to obtain; even then, adultery was treated as an offense only when committed by a wife. Reforms proceeded unevenly: guardianship rights were granted with restrictions in 1907 and fully in 1917, and the right to establish natural paternity was authorized in 1912.

The Reform of 1938–1942

Changes in 1938 and 1942 modified the status of married women and abrogated the duty of obedience. The reform therefore removed a direct legal command that had defined the wife’s relation to her husband as one of submission. Yet it did not transfer full authority to the wife. The father remained head of the family and determined the place of residence, although the wife could oppose his choice by presenting valid arguments.

The legal formulation itself exposed the limits of the change: married women were described as having full legal powers, but those powers remained subject to the marriage contract and the law. De Beauvoir emphasizes the contradiction between the language of legal capacity and its qualifications. The reform altered the formal rule without bringing about equality between spouses.

Formal Rights and Material Dependence

The event belongs to a larger distinction between abstract legal rights and the practical ability to exercise them. De Beauvoir argues that a woman’s legal position cannot by itself determine her concrete situation: economic role and social custom also shape the power available to her. In her account, men retained better jobs, higher wages, greater chances of success, and disproportionate influence in industry and politics. Habit could also prevent formally recognized rights from becoming effective in everyday life.

That gap remained visible after the obedience requirement was removed. De Beauvoir’s later discussion of women’s independence distinguishes civic liberty from economic autonomy: a wife or mistress maintained by a man was not freed from dependence simply by possessing a ballot. Work, she argues, could give women concrete independence and allow them to act as subjects through their own projects, but employment alone did not secure liberation. Workers remained exploited, and women workers still carried domestic responsibilities.

Continuing Domestic and Social Constraints

The legal change did not redistribute the daily work of maintaining a household or caring for children. De Beauvoir describes childcare and housework as falling almost entirely on women, making it harder for them to combine family life with paid employment. Her account of a French peasant woman makes that burden concrete: alongside pregnancy and childcare, she tends animals and gardens, undertakes demanding farm labor, prepares meals, and manages household tasks, often with little leisure or time for her health.

Social expectations also continued to steer women toward marriage as a route to security. Parents often raised daughters for marriage rather than for independent development; women consequently received less specialized training and were less firmly established in professions, reinforcing the economic advantage of finding a husband. The removal of a legal duty to obey thus mattered, but it did not undo the material and customary relations that could keep a woman dependent.

Significance in De Beauvoir’s Argument

The reform illustrates De Beauvoir’s broader account of women’s situation as a conflict between freedom and imposed dependence. In her existentialist framework, a person realizes freedom through projects and movement toward an open future; oppression arises when that transcendence is constrained and the person is fixed in immanence. A legal provision could recognize a wife’s capacity without supplying the economic means, social arrangements, or freedom from repetitive domestic work that would make that capacity effective.

The abolition of obedience was therefore a real change in law but an incomplete change in lived relations. De Beauvoir treats it neither as proof that women were already equal nor as a meaningless gesture: it removed one explicit form of subordination while leaving the surrounding hierarchy in place. Its significance lies in that tension between a newly recognized legal power and the conditions that continued to limit women’s ability to use it.