Ancien Régime

The Ancien Régime appears in The Second Sex not as a uniform condition for women but as a historical order structured by property, work, class, and marriage. Some women exercised substantial economic and practical autonomy, especially in trades and rural labor; marriage, however, could place a woman's person and property under male authority. The period's significance lies in this unevenness: women's concrete opportunities depended not simply on abstract rights, but on their material role and their place in the family.

Work, Property, and Unequal Autonomy

The account emphasizes that working-class women could enjoy forms of independence unavailable to many women of higher status. During the Ancien Régime, a woman could run a business and exercise the capacities needed to practice her trade. Women worked as laundresses, shop assistants, and in other occupations, at home or in small businesses. Their earnings and productive roles gave them greater freedom of behavior and made them partners in their households. Their oppression, the account argues, was chiefly economic rather than sexual.

Rural women's position combined recognized importance with severe burdens. Their work was necessary to household and agricultural life, and shared goods and interests could give them authority within the home. Yet their labor often resembled that of a servant: they worked in the fields and managed domestic tasks, while pregnancy and childcare added further responsibilities. The contrast between their contribution and their constraints shows why social standing alone cannot describe women's circumstances.

Marriage and the Power of Property

Across the historical account, marriage repeatedly turns women's legal and practical capacities into objects of male control. In earlier Roman arrangements, the shift toward patriarchal family structures made women subordinate to patrimony and the family group. Later legal practices likewise restricted married women's ability to manage property or act independently. The extent of this dependence was not simply a judgment about women's abilities: the account links it to the interests of families and property holders.

That connection is especially clear in the account of married women under the Ancien Régime. A husband directed the household and could control a wife's behavior and property; her legal acts required his authorization. What she brought to marriage was treated as dowry, and because marriage was indissoluble, she could not recover that property during her husband's lifetime. Her children, too, were placed under paternal authority. The result was a sharp gap between having rights in the abstract and possessing the means to act on them: property that a woman could not administer offered little practical power.

Class and the Limits of Historical Change

The account resists treating the period as one unbroken condition of female dependence. A woman who worked in a trade or shared productive labor could gain concrete autonomy; a wealthy woman, by contrast, might pay for leisure with submission. In small rural communities and among artisans, shared work and poverty could make the marital bond more reciprocal, since neither spouse possessed the resources that would allow one to dominate the other as a property owner. The relation between economic role and freedom is therefore central to the portrait of the period.

At the same time, this variation does not amount to equality. The wider argument treats women's subordination as a historically maintained relation in which mutual dependence does not automatically redistribute power. As the account observes, even when both sides need one another, the subordinate party's dependence can reinforce the advantage of the party able to control the terms of that need. Women's productive contribution could improve their position without dismantling the structures that privileged men.

From the Ancien Régime to Modern Law

The French Revolution did not simply erase the inherited arrangements. The account describes working women as having enjoyed meaningful economic independence before the Revolution, while noting that the political movement and its gains were largely controlled by men. Later, the Napoleonic Code renewed and strengthened marital subordination, restricting married women's civil and political capacities. Thus the transition away from the Ancien Régime was not a straightforward passage from dependence to freedom; old hierarchies could be reorganized and preserved through new legal forms.

Change came gradually and remained incomplete. Divorce, abolished during the Restoration, was restored in 1884, but access to it remained difficult, and the law continued to treat women's and men's adultery differently. Reforms in 1938 and 1942 abolished the wife's legal duty of obedience, yet the father remained head of the family, and the legal formula granting married women full powers still qualified those powers by marriage and law. This longer chronology frames the Ancien Régime as part of a persistent struggle over whether formal recognition could become effective independence.