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The Ivorian Civil code was voted in October 1964 to promote monogamy and an unprecedented patriarchal family model. Its laws were printed in the national newspaper Fraternité. Two photographs published on the same pages render the visual imagination behind those legislative changes. They take women as a primary object to represent “modernity”: a rural portraiture symbolizing the “past” is abruptly opposed to a housekeeping and consumerist woman. This article outlines how officials pictured desirable futures. The latter was brought forward despite the very low number of Ivorian women who could actually afford it and despite its bending of female gender norms in Ivory Coast.‪