How to Have a Lover When You're a Married Woman in Early Modern Paris

We typically understand early modern women’s heterosexuality in reference to patriarchal norms, with husband’s murdering their adulterous wives. That, however, was only a minor facet of the historical reality. This paper examines how workingwomen were able to publically have both a husband and a lover. In the neighborhood legal archives of early modern Paris I have come across four cases of a woman’s adultery. They all concerned artisanal couples who ran shops or workshops, for this social group made up the bulk of the non-elites in legal archives. The case were not prosecutions for adultery; it only enters the witness testimonies as context. The main legal issue was a variety of infractions, often committed by the lover. What is stunning is that in three of the cases the adultery was accepted by the husband; in the fourth, the adultery was just a side issue. I examine three facets of early modern culture that enabled the women here to publically have a lover while married: husbands dependence on their wives’ management of the family business; neighbors’ sense of “privacy” even though no privacy physically existed; and young men’s inability to enforce patriarchal heterosexual norms in the city, unlike in the countryside. These help explain why, when a woman continued her management of the business and engagement with the marriage, husbands did not complain about any lover quietly on the side. Married workingwomen were thus, to a significant extent, surprisingly free of patriarchal heterosexual norms in this respect.