Abstract
Opposing Patriarchy aims at portraying the changing society in Pre-Unification Italy by studying the relationship between law and society itself with a particular attention to the legal status of women in the Kingdoms of Sardinia and Lombardy-Venetia. The “lives of ordinary men and women in their everyday relations with the law” (1) are effectively brought into focus thanks to a wide and significant selection of case studies that makes the depiction of the society in question very lively and engaging. As the Introduction specifies, the study has an interdisciplinary approach which combines social, legal, and gender history in order to trace women’s legal status during the Restoration period and the decades that lead to the Italian Unification (the book covers the period up to 1865, year of the enactment of the first civil code, the Pisanelli Code). The Introduction aptly frames the topic of the book and its historiographical context while asserting its original contribution, which consists in shedding new light on the “role of women in the social and familial context” (10) in a time period not yet investigated from this standpoint.
Central to Delmedico’s book is the concept of law in action, applied in particular to legal marital disputes, focusing on the discrepancies between law and private acts, and their outcomes. Marriage is indeed key to understand and describe the role of women in the first half of the nineteenth century. Opposing Patriarchy analyzes the three “states of being” of women (married, widows, nuns) that were the most prevalent together with two other conditions, that of spinsters and of separated women, which conduct literature of the time helps bring into focus.
The book relies on three kinds of sources. Statutes, acts, and codes are fundamental to frame the legal system in place in the states taken into consideration by the study. The archival materials are of crucial importance: court transcripts primarily, but also wills and dowries which prove quite precious in tracing the status of women within their familial and social network. Finally, journals of jurisprudence represent another relevant and quite original source for Delmedico’s work. These journals, as the author points out, deserve more consideration from scholars because of their important function: “they were meant to guide judges, lawyers and jurists in approaching and understanding the ratio behind the decisions made by courts; and to help them handle similar cases” (16).
Opposing Patriarchy is composed of two parts. The first part, “The Italian Peninsula in the Pre-Unification Period,” as Chapter One (“Building the Nation State: Italian society between old prerogatives and modernity”) illustrates , addresses the status of women in pre-Unification Italy, highlighting its legal and social implications and pointing out the changes it underwent during the various historical phases, from the Napoleonic era to Restoration to Risorgimento. The different social status that characterized men and women during the previous centuries is largely confirmed in the nineteenth century, as Delmedico writes. Moreover, of primary importance in this time period is the close tie between “family and its assets” (31): Napoleon’s family law, which ruled that daughters could inherit too, was revised during the Restoration phase. There was great concern for the preservation of the family patrimony and for the separation of social classes. Even women’s participation to the public sphere, especially during the Risorgimento, which was certainly an element of great significance, did not alter the fact that women were confined to the domestic space: in fact, it is in the nineteenth century that the concept of “domestic woman” was born (42). The very women who fought next to men for the liberation from foreign oppressors often went back to resume their role as wives and mothers, instead of claiming their emancipation.
During the Ottocento, physicians, moralists, as well as jurists still overwhelmingly considered women inferior to men as in the previous centuries. Chapter Two (“Ideals of Women in Men’s and Women’s Writings”) analyzes the long tradition of women’s subjugation to men, traced back to the Classical era. The chapter reflects on how women were viewed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century with the help of writings by philosophers, educationalists, moralists, and then moves to highlight the peculiarities of the nineteenth century. Interestingly, in spite of the fact that it was repealed, the Napoleonic code gave women ground to challenge the existing laws and start (sometimes successful) legal disputes. Women’s legal status, however, remained largely unchanged: even jurists such as Romagnosi, who deemed that women had to be valued, still believed they needed guidance. Nevertheless, education, which notably played an important role within the political and cultural scene of nineteenth-century Italy, helped women improve their status, as the chapter highlights. The role of educators of their children, which mothers increasingly assumed during the century, gave women a more prominent position in society, although they remained mostly relegated to the domestic sphere.
The legal status of women in the Italian Peninsula is addressed in Chapter Three (“Women and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century Italian Peninsula”), which closes the first part of the book, with an extensive discussion of the institute of dowry through the centuries, from the Romans to the 1800s. The chapter asserts that “with the exception of inheritance rights, women’s status remained basically unchanged” (121). In fact, even the Pisanelli Code, the first Civil Code of the Kingdom of Italy, if largely relying on the Napoleonic Code, supported the “marital status” of women as a “necessity,” as the reading of the jurist Domenicantonio Galdi confirmed (121). This is how the closing lines of the first part of Opposing Patriarchy mark the situation: “while creating the Italian nation and aiming at ‘fare gli italiani’ [forging Italians], once again lawmakers neglected the ‘italiane’ [Italian women]” (124).
The second part of Delmedico’s book, “Women and Marriage between Civil, Criminal and Canon Law: The Cases of the Kingdoms of Sardinia and Lombardy-Venetia,” focuses on laws and legal practices related to the institution of marriage. The three chapters that constitute this part of the study very effectively exemplify how, through marriage regulation, authorities (both political and religious) ultimately aimed at maintaining the social order, imposing respect for hierarchy and controlling the transmission of wealth. Chapter Four in particular (“Women and Men beyond Marriage”) addresses cases involving marriage promises and their “importance in society for both the betrothed and their families,” seduction, “viewed as closely related to infanticide,” and extramarital affairs, “considered a major challenge to social order” (127). The case studies examined show how affairs and concubinage were never a private matter, but rather acts which had social, not only moral, implications. Hence the close intervention of institutions.
The following chapter focuses on “legal disquisitions” related to “women, marriage, and the transmission of property” (also the title of Chapter Five) both through dowries and inheritance. Delmedico underlines how the case studies analyzed help bring into focus the “expectations, mentality, and behavioural patterns of nineteenth-century society” (155). The court sometimes ruled in favor of women, especially if there was an interest in splitting up large patrimonies. Moreover, women were allowed to discuss the value of their dowry. Following Cesarina Casanova, Delmedico writes that, within a family, “the real position of each member was the result of a continual negotiation” (180). And this was often true for women as well, as the case studies show. The chapter exemplifies an element which the book as a whole aptly illustrates, namely the “contradiction between written law, law in action, and jurisprudence” (181), thus underscoring the nuanced reality in states such as the Kingdoms of Sardinia and Lombardy-Venetia.
Finally, Chapter Six (“Ending Wedlock”) deals with the legal situation of women in the event of their husband’s death or of a separation (consensual as well as nonconsensual). If generally women were not allowed to inherit their husband’s substances, Delmedico shows how in some cases in the Kingdoms of Sardinia and Lombardy-Venetia widows were allowed to accede to their spouse’s patrimony, even if not in need. In the two states in question women could also enjoy the usufruct of a portion of the family estate thanks to legal codes introduced in the nineteenth century. This kind of ruling seemed to acknowledge “that women actively contributed to the household” (194).
The typology and variety of sources, the approach that reconciles an excursus through the centuries on women’s social and legal status with a focused analysis of cases regarding ordinary people, as well as the time period chosen for the study, make Opposing Patriarchy a truly original and important historiographical work on the Ottocento. While grounding its structure on historiography which studies the connections between family, law, and wealth (Paolo Ungari’s and Manlio Bellomo’s works are acknowledged by Delmedico as seminal to her book), Opposing Patriarchy rightly claims a “new identity” (8) for its approach. Delmedico’s study has the great merit to address the complex, contradictory and yet fascinating dynamic that contributed to the “decline of the patriarchal family” (215) in the nineteenth century, dynamic which has been enhanced by the introduction of new civil codes but also by lawsuits initiated by women. The study successfully depicts the changes characterizing women’s legal status during the Ottocento (including the regressions brought about by the Restoration phase and also by the Unification, in some respects) offering “a revised interpretation of the nineteenth-century images of womanhood” (18).
The second part of the book in particular, with a selection of case studies to illustrate the complex and changing scenarios of nineteenth-century society regarding social practices and expectations in matter of marriage, represents a precious contribution to gender, social, and legal history of the Ottocento. The significant case studies presented clearly show how the written law was often (and successfully) challenged by the law in action and the protagonists of these challenges were mostly ordinary women. Interestingly enough, sometimes the importance attributed by institutions to family and social order (but also the concern for the concentration of wealth in the hands of few) played in favor of women in court, as Delmedico argues in her conclusion. While reflecting on the significance of social and legal practices and mostly on their protagonists presented in the book, the author concludes that “these women and these men, these anonymous and ordinary people, might not have had a prominent role in their world during their lifetimes […] but, nevertheless, contributed to the making of our present” (218).