Financial rights of wives
What is the issue?
Financial rights within marriage and at its dissolution are central to women’s economic security, yet they are often overlooked in both law and policy. Hurra focuses on three main aspects:
- Spousal support – the obligation of a husband to provide financial support to his wife and children during marriage and sometimes after divorce.
- Shared matrimonial assets – how property and wealth acquired during marriage are divided between spouses when the marriage ends.
- Recognition of unpaid care work – whether the law acknowledges that unpaid domestic work and caregiving contribute to the accumulation of wealth and should therefore be reflected in financial settlements.
Across the Arab region, women usually receive no or limited financial support after divorce; inadequate spousal support, also known as spousal maintenance or alimony, and no recognition of unpaid care work and women’s contribution to the matrimonial wealth of the family, which renders them vulnerable and incapable of claiming their financial rights in the family.
In Lebanon, this discrimination is also inconsistent: 15 separate personal status laws, each administered by its own religious court, govern marriage and divorce depending on a citizen's religious affiliation. These parallel legal systems place women at differing levels of disadvantage when it comes to asset accumulation, alimony, and child support, meaning two women from two different religious groups with comparable marriages and years of unpaid care work can leave divorce with entirely different financial outcomes, simply based on their sect.
In Morocco, the same gap shows up differently: the law's default position is separation of property, so unless a couple has signed a specific agreement, a judge is left to assess each spouse's contribution, disregarding the wife’s unpaid care work completely when dividing the wealth accumulated during the marriage. Unpaid care work is not recognised as a financial contribution, leaving many women starting over with nothing after years spent raising children and running a household. This gap is now central to Morocco's ongoing reform of its family code, which proposes formally recognising the contributions of a wife's unpaid care work to the wealth and property accumulated during marriage.
Spousal support in practice
Weak justice systems, long delays in court, and limited enforcement mechanisms mean that even when women have a legal right to support, they may not be able to realise it. The result is that:
- Women may be pressured to stay in harmful or abusive relationships for fear of losing financial support.
- After separation or divorce, women and their children can fall into extreme poverty, especially if the woman has been out of the paid labour market for many years.
- The burden of providing for children often falls on mothers alone, without adequate support from former spouses or the state.
This is not only a personal tragedy for the women affected; it is also a structural driver of the feminisation of poverty.
Shared matrimonial assets and unpaid care work
Until recently, very few civil society organisations in the region focused on the question of how marital assets should be shared at divorce. The dominant assumption was that property belongs to the person in whose name it is registered, usually the husband, regardless of the contributions made by the wife through unpaid care and domestic work.
Some North African countries – including Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria – have taken steps to recognise shared assets in law. However, there is often a significant gap between what is written in legislation and what happens in practice. Women may not be aware of their rights, judges may be reluctant to apply new provisions, and social norms may continue to treat the husband as the “real” owner of property.
From a feminist perspective, recognition of unpaid care work is central to economic justice. Wives who are not in paid employment are often described as “not contributing” financially, but in reality, they are enabling the household to function and allowing others to participate in the paid labour market. Islamic concepts relating to effort, toil, and contribution to family life can be used to support legal recognition of this work.
International and regional human rights law
International human rights law, including CEDAW General Recommendations, calls for equality in the ownership, acquisition, management, administration, enjoyment, and disposition of property in marriage and at its dissolution. This includes recognising non‑financial contributions to the family economy.
Regionally, there are opportunities to draw on instruments such as the Maputo Protocol and to connect with broader work on women’s economic rights. Hurra’s work in this area aims to bridge global standards with local legal and religious frameworks in ways that are credible and locally grounded.
What Hurra members are doing to reform the financial rights of wives, during and after marriage
The Hurra Coalition is working to ensure that wives, both within and after marriage, have equitable access to wealth and are not at risk of poverty or destitution. Our collective efforts include:
- Representation: bringing the economic realities of rural and low-income women to the attention of policymakers, demonstrating how equal property rights drive national economic prosperity.
- Resilience: supporting women and girls with financial literacy training and legal aid to help women secure spousal support, alimony, and property rights.
- Reform: advocating for the legal recognition of "shared matrimonial assets," leveraging the Islamic principle of Al-Kad wa al-Sa’aya (Effort and Toil) to ensure women’s unpaid care work is valued as a financial contribution.
The Hurra Coalition is leading evidence-based research on the financial rights of wives, with a focus on spousal support and the fair distribution of matrimonial wealth upon the dissolution of marriage. Members are implementing joint advocacy activities and webinars to build mobilisation and allyship in support of these rights.
In Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, and Bahrain, members are running national advocacy and awareness campaigns that raise women's awareness of their legal rights, train lawyers to provide legal aid in these cases, deconstruct longstanding reductionist interpretations of classical religious jurisprudence on these matters, and introduce progressive, evidence-based jurisprudence to counter them.