'Til death parts us: women’s domestic partnerships in eighteenth-century Brittany.

This article investigates the legal provision for two adult, unmarried women to create a “perpetual society” with one another found in the customary code of 1725 for the French province of Brittany. This arrangement allowed women who shared a household to designate one another as primary heir and to protect their community property from the claims of others. Evidence of this arrangement demonstrates that single women in some places had options outside of marriage and the convent. The contracts filed by the women also reveal the extent to which this arrangement went beyond considerations of property to express both affection and loyalty. Available to siblings as well as to pairs of unrelated women, this union is likely not the equivalent of same-sex marriage. It does however broaden our knowledge of the meaning of marriage, partnership, and kin in early modern Europe.