The Sexual Contract

Pateman sums up her argument by making several key points about contract theory, the oversights of critics and contractarians, and further directions for the path to a truly free and equal society. The story of the original contract is a political fiction that expresses the masculine capacity to generate political life. For a free society in which women are autonomous citizens to emerge, the story must be cast aside: The origin of modern patriarchy in terms of historical study is open to continual re-interpretation, and the political fiction is told from the perspective of white men. The sexual contract is an interpretation that casts readings of the original contract stories in a new light. This reinterpretation calls the whole of civil society into question because it requires a reexamination of all contractual relations. 

Representations of contract as the enemy of patriarchy and the individual as owner have led feminists to seize upon the language of contract, failing to appreciate the paradoxes and contradictions of women’s incorporation into civil society. Thus, “an exploration of contracts about property in the person to which women must be a party—the marriage contract, the