The Sexual Contract

An argument that the founding story of modern politics has a missing half, and that the half is not missing from the original texts but from how they have been read. Pateman shows that the contract theorists wrote about women's subordination openly, and that the tradition built on them learned not to see it.

Date: 1988
Author: Carole Pateman
Region: Australia, Britain and the United States
Language: English

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
Form: Treatise
Method: Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
Transmission: Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
Standing: Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Years back to what it answers: 226 years

One of the most cited works of feminist political theory, and the model for a whole genre of arguments about what a foundational story leaves out.

What the book says

A rereading of the social contract tradition arguing that the story everyone tells is half of a story. In the familiar version, individuals in a state of nature agree to form a civil order and thereby exchange natural freedom for civil freedom. Pateman points out what the seventeenth-century texts say and later readers pass over: the individuals making the contract are men, the arrangement they establish includes their authority over women, and the marriage contract that secures it is treated as prior to and outside the political agreement. Patriarchy is not therefore something the social contract overthrew; the contract replaced the rule of fathers with the rule of brothers, and modern civil society is fraternal rather than paternal. She then turns the analysis on contract itself. The employment contract, the marriage contract and the prostitution contract are all presented as free exchanges between equals, and in each the thing supposedly exchanged is a capacity that cannot in fact be separated from the person - so what is actually transferred is a right of command over a body, which is subordination described in the language of freedom.

What it argues

That the social contract established a specific form of political right over women and that the tradition's account of freedom cannot be understood without it. The historical claim is documentary: the classic texts discuss the subjection of women at length, and the standard modern readings simply omit those passages. The theoretical claim goes further. Contract is presented as the alternative to status and coercion, the form in which free and equal persons deal with each other - but a contract in which a person alienates the use of their own body or labour for a period does not transfer a detachable thing, because the capacity cannot be separated from the person supplying it. What the employer, the husband or the client obtains is command over a person for a time, and describing this as an exchange between equals is what conceals it.

What it answered

The Social Contract 1762Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The contract tradition entire, and its twentieth-century revival. The target is not only Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau but Rawls and the contemporary contractarians who took the device up again without noticing what the original contained. Her charge against the revival is that abstracting to parties behind a veil removes precisely the embodied and gendered facts that the original theorists had been explicit about.

What answered it

How to Make Our Ideas Clear 1878Charles W. Mills

Mills in 1997, by extension rather than refutation, and a substantial literature since arguing about whether the sexual and racial contracts are parallel structures, intersecting ones or aspects of a single arrangement. Contract theorists have answered that the device can be repaired - that nothing in the original position requires the parties to be male heads of households, and that Pateman is criticising seventeenth-century applications rather than the method. Liberal feminists have argued that contract has been the instrument of women's advances rather than the mechanism of their subordination, and that the argument proves too much.

How it argues

By close reading of the primary texts, which is what makes the book hard to dismiss. Pateman does not assert that the contract theorists were sexist by our standards; she quotes them describing the arrangement in their own terms and shows that the passages are structurally necessary to their arguments rather than incidental. The second half then applies the analysis to contemporary institutions - marriage, employment, surrogacy, prostitution - and those chapters are where the disagreement concentrates, because the move from the historical reading to the present-day conclusions requires premises the reading alone does not supply.

The moment

The late 1980s, with feminist political theory established enough to conduct a full-scale reinterpretation of the canon rather than a critique from outside it, and with contract theory dominant in Anglophone political philosophy after Rawls. Pateman had already written on political obligation and on participatory democracy; this book turned the same scepticism about consent onto the tradition's founding narrative.

How it travelled

As a template. The move - take a foundational story, show what its own texts say about who was excluded, and argue that the exclusion is structural rather than incidental - has been applied to race, to colonialism, to disability and to species, and the resulting literature is large. Within political theory the book is a standard reference in every discussion of consent, and outside it the analysis of the employment contract has been taken up in labour theory and in debates about surrogacy and sex work.

The strongest objection

That the argument against contract proves too much and would rule out arrangements women have fought for. If a contract that involves the use of a person's capacities is objectionable because the capacity cannot be detached from the person, then every employment relationship is subordination, and the conclusion applies to work most people regard as ordinary rather than exploitative. Liberal critics add that the vote, property rights, divorce and equal pay were all won through the language of contract and rights, which is an awkward record for a theory holding that the language conceals domination. Pateman's reply is that she is describing what contract does rather than denying that it has been useful, and the exchange turns on whether that distinction can be maintained.

Why read it

For the first half, which is the textual case and is the part that has changed how the canon is taught - the chapters on Hobbes and on the marriage contract are the strongest. The later applications are more contested and more dated in their examples. Read it after Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau rather than before; the force of it depends on already knowing the standard story.

Where to read it

First printed: 1988
First in English: 1988
Digitised: No

Pateman's earlier work on participation and on the problem of political obligation supplies the ground the book stands on; Contract and Domination (2007) with Charles Mills is where she qualifies and extends it.

Written in English and translated into several languages. In copyright.

Where it stands

Live and genuinely contested. Pateman's reading of the canon is now largely accepted as textual scholarship; her conclusions about contract as such remain a minority position that everyone in the field has to address.

On quoting this book

In copyright. Nothing is quoted.

Contested

Whether the sexual contract is a historical claim, a conceptual one, or a metaphor is not settled in the book and Pateman's formulations vary. Whether contract theory can be separated from the patriarchal form it took in the seventeenth century is the central dispute with contemporary contractarians. Whether the analysis of prostitution and surrogacy follows from the earlier argument or introduces additional premises is questioned by readers sympathetic to the historical case. And the relation between the sexual and racial contracts - parallel, intersecting or one - is a live argument that Pateman and Mills conducted with each other in print.