Challenging Patriarchism in the Family: Law Reform and Female Protest in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe

Abstract

The article deals with the struggle of the European women’s movements for equal rights in the family in the nineteenth and twentieth century and the historical relationship of women with the law. The law codes of the Enlightenment restrained to different degrees married women’s autonomy to function as independent persons in the law and in consequence in society. They worked as a barrier besides the exclusion from political especially suffrage rights to rule women out from equal citizenship rights. It is not surprising that women started to protest against their experience of discrimination in law and tried to use it in turn as a motor for change.

Family law is decisive for women’s rights as it was here, where they had been restricted in the hardest possible way even in relationship to their own children. The struggles in the different European countries for equal laws in the family were remarkably similar in their historic patterns and in their connectedness to the efforts for women’s advancement. It is astonishing how much the legal discrimination against women across legal families and nations is part of all legal systems. It belongs to the basic conditions of the state orders of Europe, without this continuing to be perceived and described outside the history of women and as the basis of the political order of Europe.