Divorce and the Family Law: Post-War History

Abstract

The Italian republic was established with a commitment to equality which was simultaneously contradicted in the very document that insisted upon it. This fundamental ambiguity was given further weight by the existence of an out-of-date law on the family. Seen to endorse a set of well-delineated discriminatory norms between men and women, this almost immediately became a focus of political agitation for those groups committed to advancing the cause of women’s emancipation. Divorce however, for a range of other reasons discussed earlier, was effectively dropped from political platforms until much later. When the campaigns for legal reform took off in the sixties the parliamentary histories of these separate but related laws became increasingly linked, but at the beginning of the republic, the relevance of divorce was denied. Once the right to divorce exists, the areas a divorce law seeks to regulate — care and control of children, disposal of property, the right to maintenance of one spouse from the other — are similar to those areas tutored by the codified family law. Both are evidence of the boundaries of the legal family. Here more weight has been given to divorce because of its wider political implications.