[ANON POST] Women's Rights in 1810s-1820s France

[orange_fell]

The setting is Paris during 1810s-1820s in our world

Comments

[mmebahorel]

What the Napoleonic Code leaves out is the legal right (and prevalence) of a marriage contract. There is no way this marriage would have taken place without one because the woman is bringing in significant property

[mmebahorel]

Rereading, I think I sound a little harsh in response to your Second Character, 3rd Question. My apologies - it is one of those things that is not terribly obvious to a modern middle-class reader/writer. Fernand Braudel has a good explanation of the lack of banking in France in The Identity of France volume 3. It's not available on Google Books, unfortunately, or I'd link it.

Other usual resources for you may include Work and Revolution in France by William Sewell, A History of Private Life vol. 4 ed. Perrot, Ariès, Duby, Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and its Discontents in Nineteenth Century France by Patricia Mainardi (this one should be very useful for Character 1), Childhood in Nineteenth Century France by Colin Heywood if Character 2 is indeed working class, and not French but useful, The Employments of Women by Virginia Penny. This last is actually American from the 1860s, but it's tremendously useful for a modern reader/writer in determining the many different kinds of work that were actually available in an only

[mmebahorel]

The links look very useful. Thanks. On the second character, I haven't fully decided on her backstory. I've been leaning towards her being from a bourgeois family who had fallen on hard times. She can read and write, but has no work experience. I asked about her opening a bank account because I'm toying with the idea of her becoming a published author, likely using a male pen name, a few years after her parents die. When I accidentally came across the 1964 law about married women, I started to wonder what the laws were for single women.

[mmebahorel]

I'll add From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth Century France by Rebecca Rogers and Women Art Critics in Nineteenth Century France: Vanishing Acts by Wendelin Guentner

[anonymous]

Don't know any of the legalities, or what kind of hoops one would have had to jump through to get a divorce in France in those days, but I do know that, legal or not, there was still a MAJOR social stigma to getting a divorce. If there were children involved, they would become pariahs as well. I knew that was the case here in America, but I was quite surprised when my great-grandmother, who lived in Marseilles in the 1880s, told me that it was every bit as bad there. It started to loosen up somewhat in the 1920s, while it remained stigmatized in the States until the late 1960s - except in Hollywood, of course. The movie industry and its people have always been a law unto themselves.

[anonymous]

Thanks. I'm just trying to determine given a bad situation what her options are and how likely each option is to succeed. I'm not surprised about feelings about divorce given the time period and the fact that it becomes illegal in the next regime (1816) It will remain illegal until 1884. It hadn't occured to me that any children would also become pariahs.