In the past twenty years, legal reform has significantly reformulated the legal regulation of marriage and family, which has long been under contestation from feminist critics. Gender-neutral laws have replaced gender-specific laws which privileged sons, husbands and fathers. Does this suggest that marriage and family are free and equal institutions in law, that marriage and family have stopped being patriarchal institutions, and that they begin to be equal relationships that are freely-chosen? In reality, this does not seem to be the case. Does the fact that women remain unequal in marriage and family indicate a huge gap between law and society, and therefore suggest that we cannot change society through law? This article offers a review of feminist legal reform and a reality check. It argues that the gap between law and society cannot adequately explain the difficulties of this reform, and suggests that a turn to substantive equality is the key to real change. It begins by identifying two trends of feminist legal reform: neutralization and domesticization, that is, to replace gender-specific treatments with gender-neutral treatments, and to replace state intervention with private decisions. Two of the remaining gender-specific legal treatments are marriage-presumption of paternity and marriageable ages. Both of these legal treatments presume a male standard, that is, mandatory motherhood and marriage as an institution of mandatory motherhood. Aside from this, the reality under neutral laws is an unequal one: most children adopt their fathers' surnames, most wives live in their husbands' domiciles, and most foreign wives naturalize. There is little difference between legal patronymy and parents' choice, legal patrilocality and a couple's choice, marital expatriation and a wife's choice. Women are still subordinate to men. Oppressions have been transformed rather than abolished: inequality becomes the result of free choice, and privatization exempts the state from its anti-discrimination responsibility. The gap between law-in-books and law-in-action does not offer satisfactory explanations, and it might lead us away from an alternative imagination of the law. The women's movement also has difficulties in dealing with intersectional oppressions. Lessons can be learned from legislations on disability and aboriginal rights, which embrace substantive equality. It is concluded that the status quo is unequal, and a turn to substantive equality will enable us to reveal the invisible cage of formal equality and combat interlocking oppressions.