France: An End to Tears?

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Woman is given to man to bear children; she is therefore his property, as the tree is the gardener's.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

Since 1840, when the Code Napoléon was enacted as France's basic civil law, married Frenchwomen have enjoyed all the legal privileges one might expect from the Emperor's opinion of them. Novelist George Sand watched in despair in the 19th century while her husband squandered her immense dowry and made her ask permission to spend the money she earned from her books and plays. A present-day French woman told her lawyer that her husband had just sold her store, and now wanted a divorce. What could she do? "Cry, madame, cry," she was advised.

Some of madame's tears would be wiped away by sweeping changes in marriage laws proposed last week by Charles de Gaulle's Cabinet. What the government had in mind, beamed Information Minister Alain Peyrefitte, was "a veritable emancipation of women." Under the new bill, a married woman for the first time will be able to take a job or open a bank account without her husband's permission. She will have the legal right to help decide where her children can go to school, to veto his plans to sell her property, and retain her own possessions if there is a divorce.

Actually, through a delicate balance of finesse and commanding personality, many Frenchwomen are already freer than the laws would indicate. Madame de Pompadour, after all, ruled France from the boudoir of Louis XV, and fully three-quarters of all French blue-collar workers voluntarily (so to speak) turn over their weekly pay envelopes to maman, who passes back a few francs for Gauloises and wine. Economically, French housewives are growing increasingly independent. With the growth in popularity of household time-savers like the automatic washer and le sandwich, some 30% of all married women find the time and energy to hold jobs outside the home, roughly the same proportion as in the U.S.

Moreover, since 1945, Frenchwomen have been enfranchised, and the nation's 17 million eligible women voters outnumber the men by 2,500,000. Women are among le grand Charles's strongest supporters, a fact not lost on government leaders aware that a presidential election is only six months away.