In her The Sexual Contract, Pateman reveals how women are marginalised systematically through the unwritten sexual contract which erased women from public life, confining them to the hidden and underprivileged domain of the ‘private’. Through this, she also demonstrates how the subliminal codification of this contract not only oppresses women, but also illuminates why even in liberal democracies, where women are constitutionally equal to men, yet their political participation and value continues to be subordinate to the interests of men.

Pateman argues that the social contract tradition unwittingly, or rather surreptitiously, created a ‘sexual contract’ repressing its ‘story’ from the political theory canon.1 She calls into question the narrative which the social contract tells itself, that of a story of ‘freedom’, explaining that this freedom was in fact predicated on a binary: of men’s ‘freedom’ and women’s ‘subjection’.2 According to Pateman, what was drawn up was a legitimising of men’s dominion of civil freedom, and consequently their dominion over ‘women’s bodies’.3 She explains how the tradition of ‘paternal’ rule or patriarchy did not end with the social contract, which sought to free individuals from the rule of the sovereign or the right of the ‘father’. The social contract did not free everyone absolutely, but rather reconstituted the patriarchy to the rule of ‘fraternity’, or of men.4 Therein lies the fiction of the social contract, which necessarily produced a sexual contract, to legitimise not only a rule of men, but also their rule over women. By obscuring the ‘sexual contract’, Pateman not only implies that women have been subordinated by the social contract unwittingly, but that its omission is calculated, contributing to their disappearance from all matters public and political.

Pateman identifies another way the political canon has marginalised women; that is, the distinction of the public and private. She explains how the creation of the social contract was also accompanied by the codification of the ‘public sphere’ to which ‘civil freedom’ were given to the fraternal. Women were confined to the private, which were ‘not seen as politically relevant’.5 Subjects such as marriage and marriage contracts were in equal parts also institutions pertaining to women and therefore not a public matter. For Pateman, they were necessarily confined and not treated as valuable or within the domain of men, because under the sexual contract, their bodies did not have rights; their bodies belonged to men. It is not in the jurisdiction of the public and the ‘free’, and therefore forfeited by default to their husbands. Pateman argues, ‘the employment contract...uphold men’s right as firmly as the marriage contract’.6 She explains further that because of this distinction, it enslaves women, and underprivileges the spheres in which discussions on rights do not take place. Women are expected to complete domestic duties and childrearing for example,7 but its confinement to the private renders such work, unpaid and unrecognised. Through the public and private distinction, women are not only confined to a hidden realm, but they are also enslaved to the rule of men under which their rights, labour and means for their emancipation are systematically obscured by the ‘patriarchal construction’ of the private and public.8

Pateman also locates women’s disappearance and continued marginalisation from public life through the legacies of the private and public. In examining socialists and liberals, she observes that despite their ideological differences ‘the fundamental assumption’ which they can agree upon, is that ‘private/natural sphere...is irrelevant to political life’.9 Pateman is critical about liberal democracy which engages in this ‘contractarianism’,10 where women rights and the advocacy for it, is predicated on amassing as many rights as men to gain legitimacy and equality within the political structures. For Pateman, engaging in this risks forgetting the premise under which contracts were drawn up. She points to the ‘individual’ as foundational not only to the contracts, but its very terms were also instrumental to the subjugation of women. In such a way, Pateman describes this as an act which ‘acquiesce[s]’ women and further obscure them in ‘patriarchal construction[s]’.11 She suggests that rather than locating political equality through the acceptance of these rights as an ‘individual’, they should also see possibility for emancipation in the ‘rejection’ of it.12

FOOTNOTE

1 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Oxford, UK: Stanford University Press, 1988), 1.

2 Ibid., 2.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 3.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 4.
7 Ibid., 128.
8 Ibid., 15.
9 Ibid., 13.
10 Ibid., 14.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 15.

REFERENCES

Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract. Oxford, UK: Stanford University Press, 1988.