The Sexual Contract

With the concluding chapter of The Sexual Contract, Pateman makes three significant points that suggest further directions for political philosophy and political thought. The first point is that the sexual contract is merely an interpretation of the original contract—one that casts a new light on social contract theory and calls all contractual relations and civil society into question. Two, she suggests that further interpretation of the original contract and civil society require an analysis of the slave contract beyond what The Sexual Contract provides. The third, and perhaps most enduring, point is that regardless of what further interpretation happens, we must abandon contract theory and its attendant political fictions if we wish to realize democracy, socialism, and freedom. 

The following passage encapsulates the first significant point in the concluding chapter:

To retrieve the story of the sexual contract is not, therefore, merely to add something to the standard accounts, to add a chapter to the story of the social contract. The sexual contract is part of the original contract, and to tell the whole story is to transform the reading of the texts, which can no longer be interpreted from within the patriarchal confines established by the classic contract theorists themselves. And if the texts are reinterpreted, so, too, must the contractual relations of civil society be reexamined (222).

From there, Pateman lays out what the sexual contract has illuminated about contractual relations and civil society. The sexual contract brings to the fore that in all contracts to which women are party, it is their bodies that are the subject of the contract (224). Furthermore, the sexual contract interpretation illuminates the reason why women’s bodies are the actual subject of the contract: because civil freedom is for men, it “includes right of sexual access to women and, more broadly, the enjoyment of mastery as a sex” (225). Together, these two claims suggest that modern patriarchy is about domination—raced, sexed, and/or classed—in all forms of relationship.

The categories that determine the direction of dominance in the contractual relationship suggest that another direction for consideration of contract is the slave contract. This would entail simultaneous racial, sexual, and class analyses that consider where these categories meet. Pateman comes close to considering the implications of the slave contract and the sexual contract working together, though she stops short of considering the implications for Black women and Black men and the impact that racism and patriarchy together might have on them (Pateman would go on to coauthor a work called Contract and Domination with Charles Mills, whose 1997 The Racial Contract drew on Pateman to critique the white supremacist ideology underpinning contract theory). Pateman does acknowledge that the authors of social contract theory are all white men. She writes, “The men who (are said to) make the original contract are white men, and their fraternal pact has three aspects: the social contract, the sexual contract, and the slave contract that legitimizes the rule of white over black (221).” With this acknowledgement, she calls back to the Rawlsian idea of “desired solution” that she discusses with respect to the sexual contract. By examining the slave contract insofar as it concerns the comparison to the marriage contract, she points out the limitations of those comparisons. The conclusion she reaches, however, is:

The contradiction of slavery lies at the heart of the construction of civil society in the classic contract theorists' simultaneous denial and affirmation of women's freedom, and continually reappears because freedom as autonomy is still coupled to sexual mastery. The embrace of the sexual contract by the critics of contract is readily apparent in the legacy that Rousseau and Hegel gave to socialism (230).

Here, she brings together the three dimensions of modern patriarchy without outright revealing how they interact: Considering the three in tandem is a suggested further direction. Pateman lays the foundation for this suggestion in several previous chapters. In Chapter 1, she warns feminists and socialists against joining hands with contractarians since contract theorists so easily justify slavery in contractual terms. In Chapter 3, she points out contractual defenses of slavery and how the contractual character of capitalism has been able to transform slavery into wage labor. In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, she emphasizes the inadequacy of dual systems approaches.

Thus, in the final chapter, she writes:

Socialist critics of contract, followed by many feminists, focus on the inadequacy of juridical equality in a context of social inequality. There is no doubt about the inadequacy, or the cogency of their criticisms, but the combination of public equality and private inequality, as the story of the sexual contract shows, is not a contradiction of modern patriarchy. Juridical equality and social inequality - public/private, civil/natural, men/women - form a coherent social structure. If the complicity of feminists and socialists with contract is to end, attention must turn to subordination and the contradiction of slavery (229).

Again, she suggests that further exploration of the slave contract is necessary so that feminists and socialists can learn about the character of modern patriarchy and the relations of subordination that create the interlocking systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. From consideration of the racial and socioeconomic aspects as they relate to the marriage, prostitution, and surrogacy contracts, Pateman untangles the political fictions that are present in all three.

One such fiction is the idea of property in the person, which surfaces in the language of “labor power.” Again, Pateman points feminists and socialists to further examination of the slave contract in reconsidering their tacit acceptance of the idea of property in the person. The relation of subordination created through modern patriarchy requires that “human beings act as if they could contract out labour power or services rather than, as they must, contract out themselves and labour to be used by another” (231). The requirement is born out of a need to resolve the contradictions inherent to slavery in a contract society, since contract theory both denies and presupposes the “individual” freedom and equality of the subjugated. 

However, it is precisely “individual” and “freedom” that are the other political fictions integral to contract theory. The notion of “individual” is patriarchal in and of itself, created in the image of the white, male contract theorists. Therefore, what it means to become an “individual” is to replicate white men. Furthermore, Pateman calls into question the meaning of “freedom” under modern patriarchy. She writes that “in modern civil society individual freedom is unconstrained– and order is maintained through mastery and obedience” (232)—that is, the mastery of white men over all others. What it means to replicate white men is to form relations based on the idea that domination must characterize the relationship.

Therefore, Pateman argues that we must abandon the idea of contract as the basis of social relations altogether. Socialists and feminists cannot assimilate contract to their aims because the very point of contract is contrary to their goals. She succinctly states at the beginning of the chapter, “The original contract is merely a story, a political fiction, but the invention of the story was also a momentous intervention into the political world; the spell exerted by stories of political origins has to be broken if the fiction is to be rendered ineffective” (219). The emphasis on political origins is itself a patriarchal endeavor, designed to “express the specifically masculine creative power, the capacity to generate, to give birth to, new forms of political life” (220), ultimately reaching “'the desired solution' - the political solution he has already formulated” (226). Any political origin that the conjectural histories of classic and contemporary contract proponents point to serves to justify the present circumstance: relations of domination and subordination, the characterizing feature of modern patriarchy. Therefore, “[n]ew anti-patriarchal roads must be mapped out to lead to democracy, socialism, and freedom” (233).

Thus, Pateman wraps up her entire analysis of contract doctrine by demonstrating how her analysis provides a new perspective from which to consider contract, how this perspective points to other ways of considering contract and, how her analysis indicates that contractual relations cannot create a free society and that new political possibilities must therefore be explored. Despite what she has shown, she closes the book on a cynical note. She writes, “The political fiction is still showing vital signs and political theory is insufficient to undermine the life supports” (234). This recalls her analyses in earlier chapters where she points out the inadequacies of dominant interpretations of contract from various points on the political spectrum. At the same time, it underscores her suggestion that new vantage points of contract doctrine will further undermine contract’s existence by revealing the force required for contractual relations (232-33). 

In the decades since its publication, The Sexual Contract has attracted both praise and criticism. One shortcoming of the work that Pateman herself acknowledges—that it does not extensively explore the way race interacts with sex in contractual relations—has since inspired Charles W. Mills’s The Racial Contract, which applies many of Pateman’s ideas to race. The two later collaborated on Contract and Domination, in which Pateman expanded on Mills’s arguments about colonialism and Mills expanded on Pateman’s work on the sexual contract, to varying conclusions (Mills is more reluctant than Pateman to jettison the idea of contract wholesale).

One of the more contentious elements of The Sexual Contract has been Pateman’s discussion of prostitution. Feminists who favor the legalization of sex work have criticized Pateman for ignoring the activity’s subversive possibilities or the liberation some women find in it. Pateman has in turn responded that such critiques misunderstand the core of her argument, which is not about the motivations or experiences of individuals, but rather about the structure and function of prostitution writ large (Pateman, Carol. “The Sexual Contract Twenty-Five Years Later: A Response.” History of the Present, vol. 3, no. 2, 2013). The debate perhaps reflects a broader tension between Pateman’s analysis and the postmodern feminism that emerged in the 1990s and has since grown in popularity. Like Postmodernism generally, this feminism is suspicious of “totalizing” narratives, including radical feminism and Marxism’s sweeping theories of oppression, and instead privileges subjective experience.