Dr. Rachel Fuchs, Arizona State University

Distinguished Foundation Professor of History

and

President, Pacific Coast Branch – American History Association

“Mothers and Magistrates: Paternity Searches in Modern France”

The Napoleonic Civil Code of 1804 forbad paternity suits throughout the nation. Finally, more than a century later, in 1912, legislators changed the law, and permitted paternity suits. Women had to bring proof of a man’s paternity. What kind of proof did they have in an era without blood groupings and genetic testing? What the twentieth-century French magistrates permitted as proof of paternity, and the ways that women demonstrated their independence and strength in bringing paternity suits, reveals how women and men negotiated paternity. It further shows women’s relationship with the law, and the transition from the patriarchal family to the modern family of the twenty-first century. Two of Dr. Fuch’s publications on this subject will be available for sale and autograph at the lecture.