L'esclavage de la femme mariée

The lawyer Giorgio Quartara provides an historical overview of marriage law for the Feminist Congress of Marseilles in 1933. He argues that women are legally enslaved by marriage in the West and, more provocatively, that contemporary understandings of marriage are inherited from the barbarian tribes which sacked the Roman Empire. Proposing the Roman system of marriage as a preferable alternative, Quartara, borrowing from John Stuart Mill, outlines the "personal" and "proprietary" forms of slavery encountered by the contemporary married woman. Quartara details marriage law in a comparative international context, citing numerous Western nations, to conclude that the insistence of controlling women's property and reproductive capacity is a holdover from medieval Europe.