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Carole PatemanThe Sexual Contract
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Wives, Slaves and Wage Slaves”
Pateman argues that the marriage contract illuminates the ways that the employment contract is the sale of one’s person or labor (as opposed to the sale of one’s labor power) and cannot truly be separated from the person. In other words, the recovery of the sexual contract clarifies that contract is the creation of a relationship of subordination. Pateman begins posing questions about the marriage contract, particularly regarding the similarities and differences between the conjugal labor contract and other domestic labor and employment contracts. Because contractual relations gain meaning from their contrast to the private sphere, the marriage contract’s difference from contracts between men in the public sphere reflects the sexual division of labor enshrined in the original contract.
One comparison that is significant to the contract discussion from the 17th century onward is that of a wife to a slave. The history of coverture laws, wife-selling, state-sanctioned violence against married women, and the denial of married women’s bodily integrity suggest that the husband owns property in his wife; therefore, she is akin to a slave. However, there are limitations to the slave comparison, so Pateman also considers the comparison to servants. The fundamental difference in the wife/servant comparison is that only women become (house)wives. Furthermore, the recent invention of the nuclear family has made other domestic servants absent from the family configuration, so the wife becomes the only servant in the family. Being a wife means being an unfree laborer who is subject to the command and will of a husband.
Another important comparison is that of the subordination of wives to their husbands and the subordination of workers to capitalists. This is a popular comparison among feminists and socialists, but it overlooks the patriarchal structuring of capitalism. This approach merely attaches patriarchy to existing analyses of class, thereby overlooking the way that the original contract enshrines sexual difference and allows the patriarchal division of labor not only in the home, but in the workplace as well. While the housewife is a sexual subject with no property in her own person, the worker is a masculine figure who can supposedly sell his labor power. Thus, the fundamental difference in the marriage contract and the employment contract is the assumption about what is being sold: labor or person (in the case of the wife) versus labor power ostensibly disentangled from person (in the case of the worker).
However, the marriage contract and the employment contract are interdependent. From the late 19th century onward, work became the key to male citizenship, with work outside the home framed as a masculine privilege supported by and in opposition to the wife’s labor in the home. The (male) worker is seen as the protector of his dependents, including his wife. Even in the event that women enter into employment contracts and work outside the home, women’s wages are therefore lower, as they are considered supplemental to the husband’s “family wage.” Furthermore, paid employment for women is seen as detracting from their femininity and womanhood, while for men, paid employment contributes to their masculinity. In short, male sex-right structures both the conjugal home and the workplace.
Thus, understanding modern patriarchy requires examining how domestic contracts shed light on employment contracts in the public sphere. In the late 19th century, the employment contract was separated from servant/domestic contracts, giving rise to the question of how a free worker differs from servants and slaves. According to contractarians, employment differs from unfree labor based on four qualifications: one, that the worker is on free and equal footing with his employer; two, that the employment contract is temporally limited; three, that a wage (as opposed to protection) is the token of free exchange; and four, that the worker contracts his labor power as opposed to himself or his labor.
Pateman casts doubt on these distinctions by demonstrating that a wage is not easily distinguished from protection and that the separation of one’s labor power from one’s person is a political fiction. Therefore, not only do feminist and socialist critiques use of the terms “labor power” and “exchange” incorrectly assume that subordination arises from exploitation (as opposed to subordination being the relation that makes exploitation possible), but they also overlook that the employment contract itself creates a relationship of subordination because it is not the sale of one’s labor power. It is the sale of oneself to an employer, i.e., becoming an unfree laborer.
In conclusion, a housewife’s womanhood determines her labor, but the sexual division of labor also extends into the workplace or the public sphere. Therefore, the subordination of wives is not identical to the subordination of other domestic servants or workers in the public sphere, but there is much to be gleaned from the mechanics of the marriage contract as it relates to the employment contract. This analysis requires remembering the sexual contract and its role in the creation of modern patriarchy and of relationships of subordination that extend beyond the conjugal home.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Feminism and the Marriage Contract”
Pateman demonstrates the ways that feminist critique of the marriage contract holds hands with rather than subverts the construction of modern patriarchy in contract theory. She does so through detailed explanations of Thompson, Mill, Kant, and Hegel’s theories of the marriage contract, from which many contemporary feminists draw their critiques. When the sexual contract is brought into view, it illuminates how these men’s theories consolidate modern patriarchy. Feminist oversight of the sexual contract, then, leads to the endorsement of contract, which Pateman argues is fundamentally incompatible with the feminist dream of women’s equality as women.
Most feminist criticism argues that the marriage contract is not “pure” contract because of the unequal terms on which a marriage is entered. Therefore, the goal is for women to take their place as “individuals.” William Thompson laid the foundation for this argument, claiming that the marriage contract is coercive because it is the only hope women, who have been deprived of economic and political opportunity, have of survival. Once women have secured civil and political rights, they would have no reason to subject themselves to men, whose “sexual desires,” Thompson argues, “led them to set up ‘isolated breeding establishments, called marriage’” (159). Thus, not only does Thompson’s argument advocate for sweeping political and economic changes (namely, the dissolution of capitalism and the emergence of co-operative socialism), but it also requires a radical change in the notion of sexual difference and what it means to be a masculine or feminine sexual being.
John Stuart Mill also attacks the marriage contract. He agrees with Thompson on several points, including that argument that marriage is coercive because of women’s limited choice, the emphasis on the institution of marriage as opposed to individual marriages, and the claim that becoming a wife equates to becoming a slave. However, he differs from Thompson in denying the connection between a wife’s conjugal domination and her position as a housewife and economic dependent. For Mill, the solution is to reform marriage law to bring the marriage contract in line with other contracts, such as a business contract where each party can negotiate the terms and division of powers. The problem is that Mill, like classical contract theorists, assumes that sexual difference necessarily leads to a sexual division of labor and that women will “naturally” choose domestic servitude even when they have equal opportunity in education and choice of occupation.
Thus, when feminist critiques following those of Thompson and Mill propose making marriage purely contractual by treating each party as sexually undifferentiated, they miss the role of the sexual contract in the original contract and remain “caught in the contradiction that the subjection of wives is both rejected and presupposed” (168). The debate between Kant and Hegel illuminates this simultaneous rejection and presupposition. Immanuel Kant argues that everyone has reason and the capacity to participate in civil life. At the same time, he claims that human capacity is sexually differentiated and that women lack civil and political reason. He makes the argument about “personal right,” saying that property in the person cannot be separated from the individual owner. When the sexual contract is brought into view, it becomes clear that Kant’s “individual” excludes women and that “personal right” is the right of a husband as a civil master.
Alternatively, Hegel rejects the doctrine of the social contract and Kant’s marriage contract. Instead, he advocates his own marriage contract, which still accepts the sexual contract and assumes that women cannot be “individuals” and that wives must necessarily be subjected to the wills of their husbands. He acknowledges that the marriage contract is different from other contracts in that if it were purely contractual, it would undermine civil society. Marriage, then, is actually a non-contractual association that provides the foundation for civil life by preparing men for participation in the public sphere. Since women must be incorporated into and separate from civil society, marriage, too, must originate in contract. The meaning of civil society—the law of male sex-right, or modern patriarchy—depends upon the recognition of patriarchal right that a husband receives from his wife in the home. Thus, women have no part in the social contract, but they are integral to the sexual contract on which the social contract depends.
Therefore, the original contract requires that women play a role in civil society—a role that is embodied in the sexual contract—but through a different path than men. Their incorporation as women versus as “individuals” ensures that modern patriarchy relies on the subjection of women for any sense of what it means to be men, or “individuals.” Thus, the feminist embrace of contract on the basis that women be acknowledged as “individuals” is a problem because “individual” is a patriarchal category. It necessitates that women aspire to replicate men, and it is therefore the defeat of women as women and the consolidation of modern patriarchy. The victory of contract theory overall is the victory of “the patriarchal construction of sexual difference as mastery and subjection” (187), and it is only possible through repression of the sexual contract that forms an integral half of the original contract.
Chapter 7 Summary: “What’s Wrong with Prostitution?”
Chapter 7 demonstrates the ways that the prostitution and surrogacy contracts uphold the sexual contract. Contractarians defend both because of the extension of “individual” to women. However, it is precisely this extension that continues to transform and uphold patriarchal right while making contract seem post- and/or anti-patriarchal.
Much of the discourse regarding prostitution presents it as merely another form of wage labor that can be universalized and sexually undifferentiated. Such discourse ignores the fact that (and the reasons why) most prostitutes are women. At the same time, prostitution is seen as a problem about women. Both sides of this contradiction obscure men’s role in the prostitution contract, but when the sexual contract is brought to light, it becomes evident that the prostitution contract is one of the ways in which men uphold the law of male sex-right, or modern patriarchy. Two assumptions undergirding the discourse on prostitution are that, like patriarchy, it is a universal feature of human society, and that “prostitution originates in men’s natural sexual urge” (198).
Feminist historical studies have shown that prostitution in the contemporary sense developed in Britain, the US, and Australia around the end of the 19th century. Legislation in these countries transformed prostitution from a freelance, female-controlled activity to a professionalized, male-controlled industry within patriarchal capitalism. The sexual urge argument begs the question of why men demand satisfaction of their appetite for sex in the form of public access to women’s bodies in the capitalist market. The story of the sexual contract, then, illuminates that prostitution is a part of the construction of what it means to be a man. It ensures that men can exhibit their masculinity by contracting the use of a woman’s body and exercising their patriarchal right through the sex act.
While contractarians attempt to present the prostitution contract as sexually undifferentiated and like any other employment contract, significant differences exist between the prostitution contract and the employment contract to show that sexual difference is in fact significant. Whereas, an employment contract is entered by a capitalist and a worker, the prostitution contract is between a woman and a worker, i.e., a man. Furthermore, unlike an employer, the man who enters the prostitution contract is interested in the sexed body of the woman and sexual access to that body. Therefore, the woman’s body and sexual access to that body is the subject of the contract. Contractarians would argue that this places too much emphasis on the body rather than the services, but such an argument relies on the political fiction that labor power can be separated from the person and that human embodiment is merely incidental to a relation of freedom and subordination. Pateman argues that there is an integral relationship between the body and the self, and they are, therefore, inseparable. Thus, the construction of masculine and feminine sexual identities, which are a part of the self, are inseparable from the body. Entrance into the prostitution contract is specifically about sexually differentiated embodiment that allows men to affirm their masculinity through engaging in the sex act. Women’s bodies on sale as commodities upholds the terms of the original contract, particularly the affirmation that men are women’s sexual masters.
The surrogacy contract also brings up important concerns regarding the transformation of women into “individuals” in a way that upholds modern patriarchy. Like prostitution, it is often discussed as a problem about women. Also like prostitution, emphasis on economic coercion and class inequality draws attention away from what is being contracted and exchanged. Contractarians defend surrogacy on the grounds that surrogacy compensates the mother for the use of the property in her person, not the use of her person itself. This basis not only obscures and denies the significance of women’s possession of a “unique, physiological, emotional, and creative capacity” that men do not have (215), but it also appropriates that capacity, making the surrogacy contract the means through which “the creative force of the male seed” is now the physical genesis of human life (216). The woman’s womb is merely the empty vessel that creative force can fill. In this way, the surrogacy contract is the transformation, yet again, of patriarchy through a return to its literal meaning of father-right.
Thus, prostitution and surrogacy contracts demonstrate the ways that the contractarian extension of “individual” to women is not as subversive to patriarchy as it appears. Rather, it is the transformation of patriarchy, which is only evident when the sexual contract is remembered as an integral half of the original contract.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, Pateman discusses the contracts that women are party to—marriage, prostitution, and surrogacy contracts—and the inadequate interpretations of these contracts. These three contracts reflect the constructed role that women play in civil society based on the sexual contract, and they illuminate the political fiction of “property in the person.”
What it means to be a “man” depends upon the constructed meaning of “woman” in both private and public spheres. In the private sphere, these sexually differentiated meanings take place in the marriage contract. The marriage contract is a private domestic relation that “reflects the ordering of nature embodied in the original contract. A sexual division of labour is constituted through the marriage contract” (118). This is evident in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, where conquered (read: contracted) women become the servants of their male conquerors, i.e., husbands, and daily domestic duties become the responsibility of women (118). Historically, the law has enshrined this patriarchal understanding of what it means to be a wife. For example, coverture doctrines existed until the late 19th century that made married women civilly dead (119). Under coverture, a married woman was “required to live where her husband demanded, her earnings belonged to her husband and her children were the property of her husband” (121). There have also been laws that sanctioned marital rape in the US, Australia, and Britain (123). In addition, there was the law of consortium, which “confirmed that a wife stood to her husband as a servant to a master” (126). Under the law of consortium, men could sue for their “loss through wrongful injury of the wife's ability to work in the home” (127)—an ability comprising housework, childcare, and sexual services.
Therefore, Pateman concludes:
[W]hat being a woman (wife) means is to provide certain services for and at the command of a man (husband). In short, the marriage contract and a wife’s subordination as a (kind of) labourer, cannot be understood in the absence of the sexual contract and patriarchal construction of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres (128).
The woman’s labor as a housewife is necessary to support the man’s labor as a “worker” in the public sphere. His construction as a “worker” “presupposes that he is a man who has a woman, a (house)wife, to take care of his daily needs” (131). In other words:
The civil/public sphere does not come into being on its own, and the ‘worker,’ his ‘work’ and his ‘working class’ cannot be understood independently of the private sphere and his conjugal right as a husband. The attributes and activities of the ‘worker’ are constituted together with, and as the other side of, those of his feminine counterpart, the ‘housewife’ (135).
Thus, what becomes evident is that men’s private mastery over women in the conjugal home makes possible men’s participation in the public sphere. However, the mastery over women is not confined to the private sphere. It is present in the public sphere as well, as the differentiation of men’s and women’s wages in employment contracts demonstrates. Because the sexual division of labor structures the capitalist market, women who enter paid employment receive lower wages than men because women are assumed to be wives and their wages supplemental to the family income that the man, or husband, is earning (138). Furthermore, women’s entrance into the labor force does not diminish their workload in the home or make men more inclined to help with domestic labor (140), and women face sexual harassment and sexual domination in the workplace from men (142).
Thus, even when women are not wives, they are still subject to the sexual division of labor. this is nowhere more evident than in prostitution and, in some respects, surrogacy. Regarding prostitution, Pateman notes the “patriarchal assumption that prostitution is a problem about women” (193). This assumption “ensures that the other participant in the prostitution contract escapes scrutiny” (193). Therefore, Pateman brings the sexual contract into view to demonstrate that prostitution in its contemporary form arises from men’s need to define their masculinity through sexual access to women’s bodies. This creates the demand for women’s bodies to be sold as commodities in the capitalist market for that public affirmation (194). To make this clear, she provides a succinct definition:
Prostitution is the use of a woman's body by a man for his own satisfaction. There is no desire or satisfaction on the part of the prostitute. Prostitution is not mutual, pleasurable exchange of the use of bodies, but the unilateral use of a woman's body by a man in exchange for money (198).
Therefore, entrance into the prostitution contract is specifically about sexually differentiated embodiment (207). Both what it means to be “man” and what it means to be a “woman” are affirmed through the “sexual use of a woman for a given period” (207), in which “men gain public acknowledgement as women’s sexual masters” (208). Therefore, the role that the female prostitute plays is the civil subordinate to the male civil master.
A similar consideration of men’s civil mastery and women’s roles arises with regard to the surrogacy contract. Like prostitution, it is considered a woman’s matter, obscuring the man’s role in the contract and what exactly is the subject of the contract. When the sexual contract is brought into view, surrogacy emerges as “a new form of access to and use of women’s bodies by men” (210)—one that transforms men’s patriarchal right to once again be synonymous with paternal right. In the surrogacy contract, women’s bodies become analogous to the empty vessels of classic patriarchalism that men use to create a new piece of property in the form of a child (214). Women’s unique bodily capacity to bear children, then, is not only appropriated and transmuted to secure men’s political genesis, but actual physical genesis is now appropriated too (216-17). Thus, the woman’s role is to be the empty vessel through which a man can affirm his masculinity by accessing the woman’s body to produce new life and by having property and right over what he produces.
However, dominant interpretation of the contracts that women are party to do not indicate that the use of the woman’s actual body is the subject of the contract; instead, these interpretations construe the contractual subject as the use of her services. All three of the contracts therefore also illuminate the political fiction of ‘property in the person” on which contract theory relies in order to obscure the sexual contract constituted by the unfettered use of women’s bodies for men’s sense of themselves in the civil world. Pateman writes:
The claim that labour power is contracted out, not labour, bodies or persons, enables proponents of contract to argue that the employment contract, like other contracts about property in the person, constitutes a free relation. When feminists argue that a husband appropriates the labour power of his wife in exactly the same way that a capitalist appropriates the labour power of a worker, they are implicitly joining hands with contract (142-43).
She also goes on to say that “the contractarian argument is unassailable all the time it is accepted that abilities can ‘acquire’ an external relation to the individual, and can be treated as if they were property” (147). In Chapter 7, she explains that “There is an integral relationship between the body and self. The body and the self are not identical, but selves are inseparable from bodies” (206), so it is “[p]recisely because subordinates are embodied selves [that] they can perform the required labour, be subject to discipline, give the recognition and offer the faithful service that makes a man a master” (206). Further, sexual differentiation is integral to that embodied self. Men contract wives, prostitutes, and surrogates precisely because they embody womanhood and therefore have the capacity to provide what men require to be recognized as civil masters: access to these female bodies, not access to the disembodied labor power or services of those bodies.
For marriage, “[t]he recognition that a husband obtains from a wife is precisely what is required in modern patriarchy; recognition as a patriarchal master, which only women can provide” through affirmation of men’s conjugal right to receive sex and housework from their wives (179). For prostitution, it is the public affirmation of men’s right to have “access to a woman, even if her body is not directly used sexually” (199), and the “buyer obtain[s] unilateral right of direct sexual use of a woman’s body” (204). For surrogacy, what men obtain is the “right over the unique, physiological, emotional, and creative capacity, which is to say, of herself as a woman” (215). Thus, what these three contracts reveal is that women’s entrance into contracts is not a matter of exploitation, but rather a matter of subordination, and this subordination depends on the sexual difference between men and women. Further, the “exchange” that happens in the contract is for men’s right over women, which is an affirmation of the sexual contract that is integral to the creation of civil society. Defenses of these three contracts based on the idea that it is not the patriarchal right over women, but rather the right over their labor power or services, are inadequate: Those particular labor powers and services cannot be separated from the women themselves, as they are entirely dependent upon their designation as women.
Through her analysis of these contracts, Pateman therefore builds on her critique of conceptualizing gender equality as the extension of the category of “individual” to women. The supposedly sexless “individual” of classical liberal theory is in fact male and therefore cannot accommodate female embodied experience. Women who participate in public life do so as women (i.e., in ways that depend on female embodiment) even as this difference is suppressed under the fiction of property in the person. Alternatively, women who aspire to be “individuals” may in some sense “become” men—a suggestion that has arguably become more relevant with the declining accuracy of Pateman’s observation that “few women are to be found in highly paid positions in the professions or business” (132). In suggesting that women who become “individuals” in this sense replicate men, Pateman hearkens to “difference feminism,” which, as its name suggests, highlights the differences between men and women. While these differences are not necessarily innate—apparent psychological differences, for example, may be the result of differences in socialization—difference feminism tends to argue that societal institutions are themselves patriarchal and that a woman who becomes (for example) a CEO therefore only does so by denying her womanhood.
