Feudal age

In The Second Sex, the feudal age is neither a steady advance toward women’s freedom nor a uniform condition of subjection. Its changing laws and property arrangements sometimes allowed women to inherit, govern, and exercise public authority, yet marriage continued to place them under male guardianship. The period illustrates how women’s possibilities depended on institutions and material relations—and how rights gained in one sphere could coexist with dependence in another.

Feudal property and women’s uncertain status

As feudalism emerged from the upheavals of the early Middle Ages, the boundary between public authority and private property remained blurred. Feudal law initially denied women private rights because they lacked political and military capacity: a fief was understood as property held in return for military service, which women were not expected to perform. The arrangement tied the ability to own land to the ability to defend it by force.

That rule shifted when fiefs became hereditary and patrimonial. Around the eleventh century, feudal law accepted female succession where there was no male heir. But inheritance did not necessarily make a woman the independent holder of her land. A woman heir still required a male guardian, and her husband could hold the fief and enjoy its revenues. She could thus serve as the channel through which a domain passed between men rather than exercise authority over it herself.

Marriage, wardship, and the transfer of land

The stakes of inheritance made marriage a means of controlling property. An heiress represented land and a castle, and suitors could compete for her; girls could be married off while still very young. A lord might select a ward’s husband, while the woman’s children were expected to serve as vassals defending the lord’s holdings. In this account, the husband’s protective role did not secure the woman’s independence: it attached her to the domain and its male owner.

The structure also left women vulnerable to repeated changes in marital status. The Church permitted annulments on grounds that could be found in the complex prohibitions on marriage between relatives, and some women were repudiated four or five times in the eleventh century. Widowhood, rather than bringing lasting autonomy, could mean an immediate search for a new husband to defend the woman’s land. Feudal romances and chronicles show kings and lords arranging such marriages, while the customary authority of husbands extended into the marriage itself.

Limited authority outside marriage

Women’s position could be stronger when they were unmarried or widowed and held property in their own right. As royal power curtailed the rights of feudal lords, their authority to arrange vassals’ marriages and benefit from wardship declined. The conversion of military service into a monetary obligation further weakened the rationale for excluding women from possession: women could pay the financial duties attached to a fief even if they did not serve as warriors.

The resulting changes were uneven across regions. Women in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy remained subject to perpetual guardianship, while France recognized greater capacities for unmarried and widowed women. A woman who owned a fief could govern it, administer justice, sign treaties, and decree laws; some women also commanded troops and took part in fighting. These possibilities reveal that female incapacity was not an unchanging legal fact. They also remained conditional: access to authority depended substantially on property and marital status.

The persistence of marital power

The weakening of feudal wardship did not abolish women’s subordination within marriage. As the bourgeoisie developed, it retained the principle that marriage placed a wife under her husband’s guardianship and administration. He could control her property and oversee her conduct and correspondence; the wife’s capacities might be recognized in other settings, but marriage transferred authority to her husband.

The contrast between wealthy and poor households clarifies the material basis of this arrangement. Where substantial property was at stake, men had a strong interest in administering it, and a husband’s authority could be especially concrete. In conditions of shared poverty, by contrast, spouses who owned little could be joined more closely by common work and interests. The book therefore treats women’s changing status not as a simple story of legal progress, but as a history shaped by who owned property, who controlled marriage, and who held the power to act.

Historical significance

The feudal age exemplifies a central distinction in The Second Sex: formal capacity does not automatically produce practical independence. Inheritance could give a woman a claim to land while leaving its administration to a husband or guardian; the decline of one form of wardship could coincide with the persistence of marital control. Legal and economic arrangements, rather than biology alone, determined how far a woman could act as an independent subject.

This history also clarifies the book’s account of time and freedom. Where women were confined to maintaining domestic life, their labor repeated familiar tasks without opening new projects or futures. By contrast, governing a fief or exercising public authority involved decisions with consequences beyond the immediate household. The contrast links the period’s property relations to the broader argument that social institutions can confine women to repetition while reserving recognized action and historical agency for men.