Carole Pateman Quotes

The original pact is a sexual as well as a social contract: it is sexual in the sense of patriarchal – that is, the contract establishes men’s political right over women – and also sexual in the sense of establishing orderly access by men to women’s bodies.

The most dramatic example of the public aspect of patriarchal right is that men demand that women’s bodies are for sale as commodities in the capitalist market; prostitution is a major capitalist industry.

Similarly, women collectively are coerced into marriage although any woman is free to remain single. William Thompson compared women’s freedom to decline to marry with that of the freedom of peasants to refuse to buy food from the East India monopoly which had already cornered all the supplies; ‘so by male-created laws, depriving women of knowledge and skill, excluding them from the benefit of all judgment and mind-creating offices and trusts, cutting them off almost entirely from the participation, by succession or otherwise, of property, and from its uses and exchanges – are women kindly told, “they are free to marry or not”.

Women are not party to the original contract through which men transform their natural freedom into the security of civil freedom. Women are the subject of the contract. The (sexual) contract is the vehicle through which men transform their natural right over women into the security of civil patriarchal right. But if women have no part in the original contract, if they can have no part, why do the classic social contract theorists (again with the exception of Hobbes) make marriage and the marriage contract part of the natural condition? How can beings who lack the capacities to make contracts nevertheless be supposed always to enter into this contract? Why, moreover, do all the classic theorists (including Hobbes) insist that, in civil society, women not only can but must enter into the marriage contract?

The sexual segregation of the labour force, and the preservation of workplaces as arenas for fraternal solidarity, have remained remarkably stable during the twentieth century.59 Most women can find paid employment only in a narrow range of low-status, low-paid occupations, where they work alongside other women and are managed by men, and, despite equal-pay legislation, they earn less than men. Marriage thus remains economically advantageous for most women. Moreover, the social pressures for women to become wives are as compelling as the economic. Single women lack a defined and accepted social place; becoming a man’s wife is still the major means through which most women can find a recognized social identity. More fundamentally, if women exercised their freedom to remain single on a large scale, men could not become husbands – and the sexual contract would be shaken.

In Hobbes’ state of nature, when a male individual conquers (contracts with) a female individual he becomes her sexual master and she becomes his servant. Rousseau’s conjectural history of the development of civil society tells how women must ‘tend the hut’, and in La Nouvelle Héloise Julie superintends the daily domestic business at Clarens. The story has been told again more recently – this time as science – by the sociobiologists. E. O. Wilson’s story of the genesis of the contemporary sexual division of labour in the earliest stages of human history is held to reveal that the division is a necessary part of human existence. The story begins with the fact that, like other large primates, human beings reproduce themselves slowly: Mothers carry fetuses for nine months and afterward are encumbered by infants and small children who require milk at frequent intervals through the day. It is to the advantage of each woman of the hunter– gatherer band to secure the allegiance of men who will contribute meat and hides while sharing the labor of child-rearing. It is to the reciprocal advantage of each man to obtain sexual rights to women and to monopolize their economic productivity.4 That is to say, science reveals that our social life is as if it were based on a sexual contract, which both establishes orderly access to women and a division of labour in which women are subordinate to men.

In Zilboorg’s interpretation of the primal scene, women become sexual and economic slaves in the family. The co-operative socialist William Thompson provided a similar conjectural history of the origin of marriage. He argued that, ‘in the beginning’, men’s greater strength, aided by cunning, enabled them to enslave women. Men would have turned women into mere labourers except that they depend on women to satisfy their sexual, desires. If men had no sexual desire, or if the propagation of the species did not depend on men’s intervention in a form which also provided sexual gratification, there would have been no need for the institution in which ‘each man yokes a woman to his establishment, and calls it a contract.’ Women are ‘parcelled out amongst men, . . . one weak always coupled and subjected to one strong’.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is . . . however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to – though she may know that he hates her, . . . he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.26 At about the same time, in the United States, Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared that ‘society as organized today under the man power, is one grand rape of womanhood’.27

The domestic relations of master–slave and master-servant, relations between unequals, have given way to the relation between capitalist or employer and wage labourer or worker. Production moved from the family to capitalist enterprises, and male domestic labourers became workers. The wage labourer now stands as a civil equal with his employer in the public realm of the capitalist market. A (house)wife remains in the private domestic sphere, but the unequal relations of domestic life are ‘naturally so’ and thus do not detract from the universal equality of the public world. The marriage contract is the only remaining example of a domestic labour contract, and so the conjugal relation can easily be seen as a remnant of the pre-modern domestic order – as a feudal relic, or an aspect of the old world of status that has not yet been transformed by contract.

A (house)wife now performs the tasks once distributed between servants of different rank or undertaken by the maid of all work. Her ‘core’ jobs are cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing-up, laundering and ironing.44 She also looks after her children, frequently cares for aged parents or other relatives, and is sometimes incorporated to a greater or lesser degree as an unpaid assistant in her husband’s work. This aspect of being a wife is visible in many small shops or in the activities of the wives of clergymen and politicians, but the same service is provided, less visibly, to husbands in all kinds of occupations. A wife, for example, contributes research assistance (to male academics), acts as hostess (to a business man’s clients), answers the phone and keeps the books (for a small business man).45 However, as Christine Delphy has argued, to list the tasks of a housewife tells us only so much. The list cannot explain why exactly the same services can be bought in the market, or why a particular task is performed without pay by a wife, yet she would get paid for providing the service if she worked, for example, in a restaurant or for a firm of contract cleaners.46 The problem is not that wives perform valuable tasks for which they are not paid (which has led some feminists to argue for state payment or wages for housework). Rather, what 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 the patriarchal construction of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres.

The ‘family’, in the sense in which the term is used today, emerged only after a long process of historical development. The many figures that populated the family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually disappeared until the couple of husband and wife took the centre of the stage, and the marriage contract became constitutive of domestic relations.

Under coverture, a wife was required to live where her husband demanded, her earnings belonged to her husband and her children were the property of her husband, just as the children of the female slave belonged to her master. But perhaps the most graphic illustration of the continuity between slavery and marriage was that in England – as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge reminds us – wives could be sold at public auctions.

To win acknowledgment that women own the property in their persons thus seems to strike a decisive blow against patriarchy, but historically, while the feminist movement campaigned around issues that could easily be formulated in the language of ownership of the person, the predominant feminist argument was that women required civil freedom as women, not as pale reflections of men. The argument thus rested on an implicit rejection of the patriarchal construction of the individual as a masculine owner.