The Sexual Contract

The Sexual Contract, published in 1988 by Polity Press, is an examination of social contract theory through a radical feminist lens. While acknowledging that the original contract itself is a political fiction, Carole Pateman claims that the original contract is a sexual-social contract that secures patriarchy and relations of sexually differentiated domination and subordination in modern civil society. However, dominant interpretations repress the sexual contract so that civil society appears to be post- or anti-patriarchal. By analyzing the conjectural histories of classic and contemporary contract philosophers, she draws out the original agreement between men as a sex that transforms patriarchy from its traditional, paternal form to its distinctly modern, fraternal form.

Not only is modern patriarchy fraternal, but it structures all civil society, including private domestic relations and public capitalist relations. The split between private and public spheres (where the private sphere is considered nonpolitical) obscures the sexual contract and its origins in the private sphere. Illuminating the sexual contract, however, shows that the private and public spheres are interwoven and mutually dependent. All contracts, including the original agreement and actual contracts in private and public institutions, create relations of domination and subordination (as is a defining feature of patriarchy) but conceal these relations through notions of individual, freedom, equality, and property in the person. An examination of contracts that women are party to—the marriage, prostitution, and surrogacy contracts, as well as the slave contract and employment contract as far as they concern the other three—illuminates the patriarchal ordering of modern civil society and the contradictions inherent to contract theory. 

(For ease of discussion, this guide uses Pateman’s terminology for sex work and sex workers—“prostitution” and “prostitute,” respectively—throughout. Although Pateman does find parallels between prostitution and work, the term “sex work” would, in her analysis, elide the distinctly sexed nature of prostitution as well as its power dynamics. For more on this distinction, see the entry on prostitution in the Index of Terms.)

Pateman breaks down The Sexual Contract into eight chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the subsequent analysis by explaining what social contract theory is and staking the claim that the original contract is a sexual-social contract. Pateman also acknowledges that her analysis includes critiques of socialist and feminist theories that attempt to assimilate contract theory to their aims. In Chapter 2, there is an extended discussion of dominant interpretations of patriarchy and why they are inadequate. Pateman points out assumptions undergirding dominant interpretations and how they have informed classic, contemporary, and feminist political theory in three distinct periods of debate about the meaning and origin of patriarchy.

In Chapter 3, Pateman examines the contractual defense of slavery and its relation to the marriage contract. She illuminates how the contradiction of slavery that haunts contract theory is central to the marriage contract as well. Chapter 4 examines classic contract stories to draw out the sexual contract that secures modern patriarchy and transforms it from paternal right to fraternal right. Central to this examination is the debate between classic patriarchalists and contract theorists that allows contract theory to be interpreted as the defeat of patriarchy. Chapter 5 is an in-depth analysis of the marriage contract and its relation to other domestic contracts and the employment contract. This analysis shows how the private and public spheres are mutually dependent and structured by a sexual division of labor. In Chapter 6, Pateman looks at feminist approaches to the marriage contract that draw on socialist and contractarian theory. She argues that such approaches are inadequate because they rest on patriarchal assumptions.

In Chapter 7, Pateman moves on to the prostitution and surrogacy contracts, demonstrating that the prostitution contract affirms patriarchal right in the public sphere and that the surrogacy contract returns patriarchy to its classic paternal origins. Finally, in Chapter 8, Pateman summarizes her analysis and suggests future directions for political theory, including the abandonment of contract theory as a whole to explore new political possibilities that secure women’s autonomy and equality.