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.