The Sexual Contract

The bifurcation of civil society is central to Pateman’s argument about the sexual contract and why it has been/must be repressed in dominant interpretations of the original contract and contract theory. The split takes three forms in contract theory—natural/civil, private/public, and woman/man—but, as Pateman demonstrates, the three forms are basically identical in that they rest on the premise that political difference follows from sexual difference. Furthermore, the split entails mutual interdependence that gives meaning to civil society.

In Chapter 1, Pateman briefly mentions the reasons why dominant interpretations of the contract story do not consider the sexual contract. One significant reason is the public/private split. She notes that conventional approaches to the classic contract texts offer an inadequate picture of the distinctive features of civil society (3). That is, they ignore the private sphere because it is seen as politically irrelevant (3), and they therefore do not consider the political implications of marriage and the marriage contract at all, let alone in relation to contracts in the public sphere. Thus, one of her aims with the recovery of the sexual contract is to show how the public and private spheres are mutually dependent (4).