A condition unique to France is that of the unmarried woman; legal independence is in stark and shocking contrast to the wife's servitude; she is an oddity and so customs hasten to withdraw everything law grants her; she has total civil capacity: but those laws are abstract and empty; she has no economic autonomy, no social dignity, and generally the spinster remains hidden in the shadow of the paternal family or finds others like her behind convent walls: there she knows no other form of freedom but disobedience and sin just as decadent Roman women were emancipated only by vice.