"Legal liberty in marriage is durable love in the household; indissolubility of marriage is habitual love outside of the household."—Id.
With respect to inheritance and dowry, the author expresses himself thus:
"To inherit at the death of the mother, because maternity and certitude are two equipollent terms, and to receive a support from the father, because paternity and doubt are two inseparable terms; such is the true law of Nature."—Id.
In De Girardin's opinion, woman has the same rights as man to liberty and equality; the sexes are equal, not through similitude but equivalence of faculties and functions; man produces, acquires, woman administers, economizes; it belongs therefore to man to provide for the expenses of the household. It is his duty, on uniting himself to a woman, to settle on her an inalienable dower that will permit her to perform her maternal functions properly, and to escape from the vices that frequently result from want and abandonment.
To the objection that the wages of the working people are insufficient to satisfy this duty, the generous publicist replies: Well, raise the rate of wages by excluding from industrial occupations the women and children that lower it by competition with men. And if this measure be not sufficient to balance receipts and expenses, increase the wages, for "there is no consideration weighty enough to make me admit that, in order not to diminish the profits of some men, others shall be eternally condemned to insufficient wages; and that to shelter some women from violation, others shall be necessarily devoted to prostitution."—Id.
In comparing the lot of the wife under the two systems, De Girardin expresses himself thus:
"Under the system of paternity, the wife, loaded with the gifts of fortune, sinks under the weight of an idleness which most frequently inflames and disorders her imagination. She does not know what to do to employ her time. Woman does nothing because man does everything.
"The wife who has brought no dowry and received no dower, sinks under the weight of a toil contrary to nature which obliges her, through economy, to separate herself from her child a few days after giving it birth, and to put it away from her to nurse, for the consideration of five or six francs a month; to go to work in one direction while her husband works in the other, and not to rejoin him till evening, when each returns from the workshop which has kept them absent from their household all day: if this is what is called the family, is it indeed worth all the stir that is made about it?
"Under the system of maternity, on the contrary, the richer a woman is, the further she is removed from idleness; for not only has she her children to nurse, to rear, to instruct, and to watch over, but she has also to administer her fortune which will one day be theirs.
"To preserve this fortune, to increase it still more: here is wherewith to occupy her leisure, to calm her imagination, to place her under curb. It is wrong to suppose women not qualified for the management of business; they excel in it, however little may have been their practice or application.