The Sexual Contract

Introduction

The Sexual Contract appeared in 1988 with Polity Press and Stanford University Press. Pateman rereads Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and their critics and argues that the classical story of the social contract conceals a second, sexual contract by which men secure political right over women. She distinguishes the fraternal patriarchy of modern contract theory from the paternal patriarchy of Robert Filmer, and uses Freud’s Totem and Taboo as another version of the story. The later chapters apply the argument to the marriage contract, the employment contract, prostitution and surrogacy. The book became a classic of feminist political theory and inspired Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract (1997); Nancy Fraser and others criticised its model of domination.

Connections

Criticizes

• Leviathan1651 · Thomas Hobbes
• Two Treatises of Government1689 · John Locke
• The Social Contract1762 · Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Taken up in

• The Racial Contract1997 · Charles W. Mills

More works by Carole Pateman

• 1970Participation and Democratic Theory