French married-women status reforms (1938–1942)

French married-women status reforms of 1938–1942 altered the legal position of wives without establishing equality between spouses. The repeal of the wife’s duty of obedience was a significant change, but family authority remained uneven: the father continued as head of the family, and the law’s language granting wives full legal powers was limited by the marriage contract and other legal provisions.

Earlier legal subordination

The reforms followed a long history in which a married woman’s legal rights and practical authority did not necessarily coincide. Under the Napoleonic Code, marriage subjected a wife to her husband’s authority over her person and possessions. He determined the family residence, had greater rights over the children, and generally had to authorize her contracts. The law treated adultery differently according to sex: a wife’s adultery could expose her to confinement, while a husband faced consequences only if he brought a concubine into the home. The wife’s grounds for divorce were correspondingly narrow.

The nineteenth-century legal record showed that changes in marital status could be delayed or restricted. Divorce, abolished in 1826, was not restored until 1884 and remained difficult to obtain. The 1884 law allowed a wife to seek divorce if her husband committed adultery, but adultery remained a criminal offense only for wives. A wife’s guardianship rights were granted with restrictions in 1907 and fully recognized only in 1917; the right to determine natural paternity was authorized in 1912. These piecemeal changes preceded the broader revisions of 1938 and 1942.

What the reforms changed—and retained

In 1938 and 1942, France abrogated the wife’s legal duty of obedience. This ended an explicit rule of marital subordination, but it did not make husband and wife equal in authority. The father remained head of the family and continued to determine the place of residence. A wife could oppose his choice only by presenting valid arguments, so the reform qualified rather than displaced the husband’s continuing family authority.

The revised legal formula declared that a married woman had full legal powers, then limited those powers by the marriage contract and the law. Simone de Beauvoir emphasizes the contradiction between the broad grant and its qualifying clause: formal recognition of capacity did not itself remove the restrictions attached to marriage. Her account therefore treats the reforms as a change in legal status, not as the completion of equal rights between spouses.

Legal rights and lived conditions

The distinction between rights on paper and effective freedom is central to de Beauvoir’s analysis. She argues that an individual’s freedom depends on concrete possibilities for acting and pursuing projects, while women were often placed in a situation that treated them as secondary and constrained their independence. Legal revision could matter, but its consequences were limited when economic relations, family authority, and established customs continued to shape what women could actually do.

That gap also appears in her account of married women’s working lives. Child care and housework remained overwhelmingly women’s responsibility, while the use of birth control was neither universal nor consistently practiced and abortion was officially forbidden. For rural wives, participation in productive labor could mean a day divided among fieldwork, animal care, cooking, household management, pregnancy, and child care. The reforms changed an important legal obligation without, by themselves, redistributing this labor or removing the material constraints on women’s independence.

Significance and limits

The reforms are a turning point in the legal history presented by The Second Sex because they repealed a direct statutory expression of wifely obedience. Their limits are equally important: the continuing authority of the father, the qualified wording of wives’ legal powers, and the persistence of unequal domestic and economic conditions meant that formal legal change did not amount to achieved marital equality. In de Beauvoir’s framework, the measure of emancipation is not a declaration alone but the real capacity to exercise freedom and shape one’s future.