Wife and Mother in the Development of Law

Introduction

Marianne Weber published “Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung” in Tübingen in 1907, a few years after the German Civil Code had come into force, in a book of more than five hundred pages. The first chapter describes the position of women among peoples without states and then turns to the theories of an original “mother right”: against Bachofen’s “ingenious fantasies” and against the theory of development that Engels had distilled from Morgan and Bachofen and that Bebel had spread among a wide readership, she argued that there is no evidence of a general early stage of mother right and that marriage law grew largely out of patriarchal authority. Further chapters follow marriage in the ancient world – among them Egypt, the Jews, the Arabs and Islam, and Rome – in medieval Germanic law and in the modern codes from the Prussian General Code onwards. The fifth chapter examines the marriage law of the Civil Code – personal relations, parental authority, matrimonial property – and shows how it subordinates the wife; the last discusses the critique of marriage, divorce and sexual relations outside marriage. The Neue Deutsche Biographie calls the book a methodically reflected, universal-historical view of the legal position of women.

Connections

Criticizes

• Mother Right1861 · Johann Jakob Bachofen

More works by Marianne Weber

• 1913Woman and Objective Culture