While courtly love might ease woman’s lot, it does not modify it substantially. Ideologies like religion and poetry do not lead to female liberation; woman gains a little ground at the end of the feudal age for other reasons entirely. When the supremacy of royal power is imposed on feudatories, the lord loses a large part of his rights: his right, in particular, to decide on his vassals’ marriages is progressively suppressed; at the same time, the feudal lord loses the use of his ward’s property; the benefits attached to wardship fall into disuse; and when the service of the fief is converted to a monetary fee, wardship itself disappears; woman was unable to perform military service, but she was as capable as a man of paying the financial obligations; the fief is then little more than a simple patrimony, and there is no longer any reason for the two sexes not to be placed on an equal footing. In fact, women in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy remain subjected to a perpetual wardship; but France accepts, in Beaumanoir’s words, that “a girl is worth a man.” Germanic tradition gave women a defender as a guardian; when she no longer needs a defender, she goes without a guardian; as a sex, she is no longer taxed with incapacity. Unmarried or widowed, she has all the rights of man; property grants her sovereignty: she governs the fief that she owns, meaning she dispenses justice, signs treaties, and decrees laws. She is even seen playing a military role, commanding troops, taking part in fighting; before Joan of Arc there were women soldiers, and however surprising La Pucelle is, she is not shocking.
Nonetheless, so many factors converge to thwart woman’s independence that they are never all abolished simultaneously; physical weakness is no longer an issue; but feminine subordination remains useful to society in cases where the woman is married. Thus marital power outlives the feudal regime. The paradox still being perpetuated today is established: the woman most fully integrated into society is the one with the fewest privileges in the society. In civil feudality, marriage has the same features as in military feudality: the husband remains the wife’s guardian. When the bourgeoisie is formed, it observes the same laws. In common law as in feudal law, the only emancipation is outside marriage; the daughter and the widow have the same capacities as the man; but by marrying, the woman falls under the husband’s guardianship and administration; he can beat her; he watches over her behavior, relations, and correspondence and disposes of her fortune, not through a contract, but by the very fact of marriage. “As soon as the marriage is consummated,” Beaumanoir says, “the possessions of each party are held in common by virtue of the marriage and the man is the guardian of them.” It is in the interest of property that the nobility and the bourgeoisie demand one master to administer it. The wife is not subordinated to the husband because she is judged basically incapable: when nothing else prevents it, woman’s full capacities are recognized. From feudality to today, the married woman is deliberately sacrificed to private property. It is important to see that the greater the property owned by the husband, the greater this servitude: the propertied classes are those in which woman’s dependence has always been the most concrete; even today, the patriarchal family survives among rich landowners; the more socially and economically powerful man feels, the more he plays the paterfamilias with authority. On the contrary, shared destitution makes the conjugal link reciprocal. Neither feudality nor the Church enfranchised woman. Rather, it was from a position of servitude that the patriarchal family moved to an authentically conjugal one. The serf and his wife owned nothing; they simply had the common use of their house, furniture, and utensils: man had no reason to want to become master of woman who owned nothing; but the bonds of work and interest that joined them raised the spouse to the rank of companion. When serfdom is abolished, poverty remains; in small rural communities and among artisans, spouses live on an equal footing; woman is neither a thing nor a servant: those are the luxuries of a rich man; the poor man experiences the reciprocity of the bond that attaches him to his other half; in freely contracted work, woman wins concrete autonomy because she has an economic and social role. The farces and fabliaux of the Middle Ages reflect a society of artisans, small merchants, and peasants in which the husband’s only privilege over his wife is to be able to beat her: but she pits craftiness against force to reestablish equality. However, the rich woman pays for her idleness with submission.
In the Middle Ages, the woman still retained some privileges: she took part in local meetings in the villages, she participated in the primary meetings for the deputies’ election to the Estates-General; her husband could exercise his own authority only over movables: his wife’s consent was necessary to alienate real estate. The sixteenth century sees the codification of the laws perpetuated throughout the ancien régime; by that time feudal habits and customs had totally disappeared, and nothing protects women from men’s claims that they should be chained to the household. The influence of Roman law, so condescending for women, can be perceived here; as in Roman times, the violent diatribes against the stupidity and fragility of the sex were not at the root of the code but are used as justifications; it is after the fact that men find reasons to act as it suits them. “Among all the bad characteristics that women possess,” one reads in the Songe du verger,*
I find that there are nine principal ones: To begin with, a woman hurts herself as a result of her own nature; second, women are by nature extremely stingy; third, they are driven by sudden whims; fourth, they are bad by their own volition; fifth, they are impostors. Women are known to be false, and according to civil law a woman may not be accepted as a witness to a will. A woman always does the opposite of what she is commanded to do … Women accuse themselves willingly and announce their own vituperation and shame. They are crafty and malicious. Saint Augustine said that “A woman is a beast who is neither firm nor stable”; she is hateful, to the confusion of her husband; she nourishes wrongdoing and stands at the beginning of all the pleas and tensions; and is the path and road of all iniquity.
Similar texts abound around this time. The interest of this one is that each accusation is meant to justify one of the provisions of the code against women and the inferior situation in which they are kept. Naturally, any “male office” is forbidden to them; the Velleian decree of the Senate is reinstated, depriving them of all civil capacity; birthright and masculine privilege place them second in line for the paternal inheritance. Unmarried, the daughter remains under the father’s guardianship; if he does not marry her off, he generally sends her to a convent. An unwed mother has the right to seek out the father, but such a right merely provides for the costs of lying-in and the infant’s food; a married woman becomes subject to the husband’s authority: he determines the place of residence, directs the household, repudiates the adulteress wife, shuts her up in a monastery, or later obtains a lettre de cachet to send her to the Bastille;* no deed is valid without his authorization; everything the wife brings to the marriage becomes part of the dowry in the Roman meaning of the word; but as marriage is indissoluble, the husband has to die before the wife can recover her property, giving rise to the adage “Uxor non est proprie socia sed speratur fore.”† As she does not manage her capital, although she has rights to it, she does not have the responsibility for it; it does not provide any substance to her action: she has no concrete grasp on the world. Even her children belong to the father rather than to her, as in the time of the Eumenides: she “gives” them to her spouse, whose authority is far greater than hers and who is the real master of her posterity; even Napoleon will use this argument, declaring that just as a pear tree is the property of the owner of the pears, the wife is the property of the man to whom she provides children. The status of the French wife remains as such throughout the ancien régime; little by little jurisprudence will abolish the Velleian decree, but not until the Napoleonic Code does it disappear definitively. The husband is responsible for the wife’s debts as well as her behavior, and she is accountable to him alone; she has almost no direct relations with public authorities or autonomous relations with anyone outside her famil
y. She looks more like a servant in work and motherhood than an associate: objects, values, and human beings that she creates are not her own property but her family’s, that is, man’s, as he is the head. Her situation is far from being more liberal in other countries—it is, on the contrary, less liberal; some maintained guardianship; and in all of them, the married woman’s capacities are nonexistent and moral standards strict. All the European codes were drafted on the basis of canon, Roman, and Germanic law, all were unfavorable to the woman, and all the countries recognized private property and the family, deferring to the demands of these institutions.
In all these countries, one of the consequences of the “honest wife’s” servitude to the family is prostitution. Hypocritically kept on society’s fringes, prostitutes fill a highly important role. Christianity pours scorn on them but accepts them as a necessary evil. “Getting rid of the prostitutes,” said Saint Augustine, “will trouble society by dissoluteness.” Later, Saint Thomas—or at least the theologian that signed his name to Book IV of De regimine principium—asserted: “Remove public women from society and debauchery will disrupt it by disorder of all kinds. Prostitutes are to a city what a cesspool is to a palace: get rid of the cesspool and the palace will become an unsavory and loathsome place.” In the early Middle Ages, moral license was such that women of pleasure were hardly necessary; but when the bourgeois family became institutionalized and monogamy rigorous, man obviously had to go outside the home for his pleasure.
In vain did one of Charlemagne’s capitularies vigorously forbid it, in vain did Saint Louis order prostitutes to be chased out of the city in 1254 and brothels to be destroyed in 1269: in the town of Damietta, Joinville tells us, prostitutes’ tents were adjacent to the king’s. Later, attempts by Charles IX of France and Marie-Thérèse of Austria in the eighteenth century also failed. The organization of society made prostitution necessary. “Prostitutes,” Schopenhauer would pompously say later, “are human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy.” And Lecky, a historian of European morality, expressed the same idea: “Supreme type of vice, prostitutes are the most active guardians of virtue.” Their situation and the Jews’ were often rightly compared:1 usury and money lending were forbidden by the Church exactly as extra-conjugal sex was; but society can no more do without financial speculators than free love, so these functions fell to the damned castes: they were relegated to ghettos or reserved neighborhoods. In Paris, loose women worked in pens where they arrived in the morning and left after the curfew had tolled; they lived on special streets and did not have the right to stray, and in most other cities brothels were outside town walls. Like Jews, they had to wear distinctive signs on their clothes. In France the most common one was a specific-colored aglet hung on the shoulder; silk, fur, and honest women’s apparel were often prohibited. They were by law taxed with infamy, had no recourse whatsoever to the police and the courts, and could be thrown out of their lodgings on a neighbor’s simple claim. For most of them, life was difficult and wretched. Some were closed up in public houses. Antoine de Lalaing, a French traveler, left a description of a Spanish establishment in Valencia in the late fifteenth century. “The place,” he said, was
about the size of a small city, surrounded by walls with only one door. And in front of it there were gallows for criminals that might be inside; at the door, a man appointed to this task takes the canes of those wishing to enter and tells them that if they want to hand over their money, and if they have the money, he will give it to the porter. If it is stolen overnight, the porter will not answer for it. In this place there are three or four streets full of small houses, in each of which are prettily and cleanly dressed girls in velvet and satin. There are almost three hundred of them; their houses are well kept and decorated with good linens. The decreed price is four pennies of their money, which is the equivalent of our gros … There are taverns and cabarets. It is not easy to recognize these houses by daylight, while at night or in the evening the girls are seated at their doorways, with pretty lamps hanging near them in order to make it easier to see them at leisure. There are two doctors appointed and paid by the town to visit the girls every week in order to discover if they have any disease or intimate illness. If the town is stricken with any sickness, the lords of the place are required to maintain the girls at their expense and the foreigners are sent away to any place they wish to go.2
The author even marvels at such effective policing. Many prostitutes lived freely; some of them earned their living well. As in the period of the courtesans, high gallantry provided more possibilities for feminine individualism than the life of an “honest woman.”
A condition unique to France is that of the unmarried woman; legal independence is in stark and shocking contrast to the wife’s servitude; she is an oddity and so customs hasten to withdraw everything law grants her; she has total civil capacity: but those laws are abstract and empty; she has no economic autonomy, no social dignity, and generally the spinster remains hidden in the shadow of the paternal family or finds others like her behind convent walls: there she knows no other form of freedom but disobedience and sin—just as decadent Roman women were emancipated only by vice. Negativity continues to be women’s lot as long as their emancipation remains negative.
In such conditions it is clear how rare it was for a wife to act or merely to make her presence felt: among the working classes, economic oppression cancels out sexual inequality; but it deprives the individual of opportunities; among the nobility and bourgeoisie, the wife is abused because of her sex; she has a parasitic existence; she is poorly educated; she needs exceptional circumstances if she is to envisage and carry out any concrete project. Queens and regents have that rare good fortune: their sovereignty exalts them above their sex; French Salic law denies women the right of access to the throne; but they sometimes play a great role beside their husbands or after their deaths: for example, Saint Clotilda, Saint Radegunda, and Blanche of Castile. Convent life makes woman independent of man: some abbesses wield great power; Héloïse gained fame as an abbess as much as a lover. In the mystical, thus autonomous, relation that binds them to God, feminine souls draw their inspiration and force from a virile soul; and the respect society grants them enables them to undertake difficult projects. Joan of Arc’s adventure is something of a miracle: and it is, moreover, a very brief adventure. But Saint Catherine of Siena’s story is meaningful; she creates a great reputation in Sienna for charitable activity and for the visions that testify to her intense inner life within a very normal existence; she thus acquires the necessary authority for success generally lacking in women; her influence is invoked to hearten those condemned to death, to bring back to the fold those who are lost, to appease quarrels between families and towns. She is supported by the community that recognizes itself in her, which is how she is able to fulfill her pacifying mission, preaching submission to the pope from city to city, carrying on a vast correspondence with bishops and sovereigns, and finally chosen by Florence as ambassador to go and find the pope in Avignon. Queens, by divine right, and saints, by their shining virtues, are assured of support in the society that allows them to be men’s equal. Of others, a silent modesty is required. The success of a Christine de Pizan is due to exceptional luck: even so, she had to be widowed and burdened with children for her to decide to earn her living by her pen.
Altogether, men’s opinion in the Middle Ages is not favorable to women. Courtly poets did exalt love; many codes of courtly love appear, such as André le Chapelain’s poem and the famous Roman de la Rose, in which Guillaume de Lorris encourages young men to devote themselves to the service of ladies. But against this troubadour-inspired literature are pitted bourgeois-inspired writings that cruelly attack women: fabliaux, farces, and plays criticize women for their laziness, coquetry, and lust. Their worst enemies are the clergy. They incriminate marriage. The Church made it a sacrament and yet prohibited it for the Christian elite: this is the source of the contradiction of the querelle des femmes.* It is denoun
ced with singular vigor in The Lamentations of Matheolus, famous in its time, published fifteen years after the first part of the Roman de la Rose, and translated into French one hundred years later. Matthew lost his “clergy” by taking a wife; he cursed his marriage, cursed women and marriage in general. Why did God create woman if there is this incompatibility between marriage and clergy? Peace cannot exist in marriage: it had to be the devil’s work; or else God did not know what he was doing. Matthew hopes that woman will not rise on Judgment Day. But God responds to him that marriage is a purgatory thanks to which heaven is reached; and carried to the heavens in a dream, Matthew sees a legion of husbands welcoming him to the shouts of “Here, here the true martyr!” Jean de Meung, another cleric, is similarly inspired; he enjoins young men to get out from under the yoke of women; first he attacks love: