Sexual Contract (Pateman 1988), Book Review

Myriam Tardif
ANT601 : Identities and Differences
Homa Hoodfar
Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman
Book Review, due Tuesday 14th of October

Introduction
Sometimes, you don't understand the importance of a book until you completed the last page and you finish it. This is exactly what happened to me while reading the Sexual Contract (1988) of Carole Pateman. Carole Pateman is a British feminist political theorist who was concerned about how differences are deal with in Western societies (more specifically Britain, United States and Australia), working on sexual differences, but also racial and class differences. Her goal while writing the Sexual Contract was to explore the classic text about the social contract theory (Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, etc.) that is now used to justify civil rights and freedom, to show that a crucial part of that contract has been hidden or was forgotten throughout history, and that our modern (patriarchal) society can't be understood without it: the sexual contract. Her book is both a critic of the contractarians and of the feminists that, she believes, organize most of their theories and claims inside the patriarchal contract concepts. She was writing at the time in a very active moment of the organized feminist movement, that we call the "third wave", in reference to the suffragettes movement that were fighting for the right to vote and citizenship (first wave) and the liberal feminist movement who was concern about legal and cultural inequalities between men and women (second wave). The third wave was a really conflictual moment, where a lot of different positions were taken and a lot of conflicts would arise. The Sexual Contract is based on Pateman's doctoral thesis and this is well-reflected in the structure of her essay. Even though she provided social sciences with a very useful conceptual framework, Sexual Contract has to be understood in its own context and we should acknowledge the importance we know it had on feminists and theorists since she wrote it. However, her book contains multiples flaws that should be acknowledge when reading it from our actual point of view.
Presentation
Pateman's thesis is that even though we are told that everyone has attained civil equality and freedom through the political fiction of the social contract, women are still subjugated and oppressed because they are women, that is to say, because of sexual differences. Hence, the feminists that tries to obtain equality through the language of contract are on the wrong path. There can't be equality through social contract theory since it excludes women in its very essence; and that fact is hidden because we lost the story of the sexual contract. Hence her goal is to recover it by exploring in depth the texts of the social contract theorist such as Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes, in order to understand the actual patriarchal structures of modern western societies and institutions. "To tell the story of the sexual contract is to show how sexual difference, what is it to be a 'man' and a 'woman', and the construction of sexual difference as political difference, is central to civil society" (Pateman: 1988: p.16). But what is the sexual contract? The sexual contract is a pact made by men to ensure the members of their fraternité-community (the brotherhood) the men's sex right over women's bodies. This pact still have impact now, because even if women were incorporated to the social contract since they were recognized as individuals (which was not so long ago), they were absent at the very origin of the contract.
First chapter, "Contracting in" is working in the book as her introduction and main thesis, where she exposes the idea I just presented. She explains briefly the main vision of social contract where the sons overthrow the father-like authority and start then to perceive themselves as free and equals, in a civilian freedom. But, she states that this is an illusion whose function is to vehicle patriarchy, and that to understand why it is an illusion in order to focus instead on power relations in modern democracy, we have to understand the story of the sexual contract.
She then present briefly, and at some extent in a very confused way, her literature review about patriarchy, in chapter 2 "Patriarchal confusion". She addresses this chapter specifically to feminists (one of our two main public, alongside social contract theorist) by claiming that the contemporary discourses on patriarchy are misleading since they are using patriarchal categories. Pateman states that equality can't be obtain through contract theories, and that because contract theory subjugate difference by rendering it as a contract between gender-neutral individual. That structure is then masking the fact that women are subjugated as women, this is why equality could not be overcome by a contract-fiction based on equally fictive gender-neutral individual. This is where she explain that modern civil society has a patriarchal structure tied to capitalism.
In chapter 3, "Contract, Individual, Slavery", Pateman explore the contradiction of the contract theories that are claiming that only free individuals can take part in the contract; but then who are considered the free individuals? At least, not women – that are not considered as individuals, because they had to be subjugated by men in the state of nature – nor slaves. However, even if women can't take part in the social contract, they are required to enter into the marriage contract; but then again, to do so they had to be recognized as individuals. She questions the paradigm of contract as the one of free agreement by talking of the contradiction of slavery: "that the humanity of the slave must necessarily be simultaneously denied and affirmed" (Pateman: 1988: p.60). She states also that in modern Anglo-american countries, a lot of people that are legally free lives in conditions that bears the resemblance of the slave contract; what she calls the "civil slavery" (Idem.: p.62). She pursue with a discussion of unfree slave and free wage workers; the difference being the first is socially dead (no citizenship), and that then they can't enter contracts. But when they obtained citizenship, did their conditions changed? Why? Rousseau argues that the slave contract is impossible, because there couldn't be any contract that created subjugation: apart from the sexual contract.
Chapter 4, "Genesis, Fathers and the Political Liberty of Sons", explains that the original contract is a fraternal pact, to maintain a sexual right over women's bodies, by exposing the contradiction in the common belief that fraternité is universal. She then examine why women are excluded from political participation on behalf of their lack of something and exclusion from the individual category. She states that to understand this, we have to understand the conjugal rights (men sex' rights) prior to the father rights. Hence, the origin story would be more accurate by conceptualizing a "primal scene" – the husband raping his wife – prior to the parricide scene.
In chapter 5 and 6, "Wives, Slaves and Wage Slaves" and "Feminism and the Marriage Contract", Pateman talks about the fact that wives are not only wives, but housewives that were socially dead, like slave. Now that they have citizenship, can wives be compared to civil slave; because the marriage contract and the slave contract are both fix on a life-time period. There is a sexual division of labour where housework is not even considered as work, where men are the 'breadwinner' and provides protection, and women provides sex, reproduction, and housework, hence the burden of the double working-day for working women. She then explores how Marriage contract institutes an asymmetrical relation of power between husband and wives, because of the fact that it is not a written contract (no conditions), and that it is based on conjugal rights (men sex' rights). Especially as women, to enter the marriage contract, has to be rendered "gender-neutral": sexual difference must become irrelevant.
Chapter 7, "what is wrong about prostitution?", her evidence-based chapter, explains that what is wrong about prostitution is the subordination of women through men sex rights over their body; a power that is asserted daily through activities like capitalist market of available women bodies for men like prostitution, pornography, sexual assaults, surrogacy mother, etc. Chapter 8, "The end of the story?" is her conclusion. Hence, she repeats that the contradiction of contract theory are the same than the contradiction about slavery; that the recognition of women as autonomous, but gender-neutral individual goes with sexual mastery of men through their men sex rights over women bodies. Then, she opens with personal thoughts about what should be done next in order to attain some collective and universal freedom for all. Pateman suggest that collective liberation of women should be thought of the liberation of women as women, that sexual difference should be acknowledge, and mutual autonomy and freedom of women and men should be obtain through the collective choices of limits in order to prevent oppression regarding of sexual differences, and other differences.
Analysis and Evaluation
As I said while I was commentating chapters 7 and 8 during last class, when considered contextually, we see what a huge impact this work had on contemporary feminist thinking. While listening to the lecture she gave when she received the Jungan Skytte 2012 Prize (Pateman: 2012), I realized that to truly understand her argument (how to democratize democracy), you have to consider her work globally. From her readings of the social contract theories, she understood three dimensions of the original contract. First, she was interested by the fact that not everyone has the same abilities regarding political participation, and even if some said it was because they were apathetic (not interested), she argued that some social groups, in this case classes, were raised with more knowledge of the political processes (capital social), hence the participation. Then she wrote the Sexual Contract, looking at how sexual differentiation affected political participation of women. Third, but not last, she explored the Racial contract and the implication of white supremacy on the political implication of non-white in Western world, through the historical implication of the settler contract (colonisation) and the slave contract. She insisted on the fact that in order to dismantle power dynamics and hierarchies inside modern states, we needed the whole story: to understand how politically and historically was constructed the subjugation based on class, sex and race. Looking globally at her work, can we argue now that Pateman's work could be considered as some of the first inquiries about intersectional theory? Those were really important new ideas at the time (the 90s), with the work of black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins, bell hook and Audrey Lordre. I think it is important to keep that and mind and to read the Sexual Contract in that lens. Maybe she could have explained these ideas more accurately in her book, but I think it is inseparable from her political project of "democratizing democracy" (Pateman: 2012).
Even though all the demonstrations make sense once you look back at the book when finished, I think that the presentation of her arguments could have been more logically constructed. Especially when the major goal of your argument is to deconstruct the social contract theorists, when it is not that clear for scholars (even less non-scholars) that are not in political science what the importance of it is. Though, I think this is why it is interesting for anthropologist to read her book, is to realise that even in the Western world there is myth/story that have the function of an 'origin story' and that still justify the organization of our societies. Pateman is referring at her work as "problem-based investigations" (Pateman: 2012), instead of theory-based writings. It might be not really evident to see that in the Sexual Contract for someone used to read ethnographies, but what she means is that she didn't start from the theory of the social contract and then tried to apply it on the world. It is more the other way around. Growing up in the 70s, she was in relation to the different feminists' movements and their demands to dismantle sexual differentiation-based inequalities. This is where her interest is coming from. In her book, it is conveyed in her chapter on prostitution and that's where the shoe pinches. Probably we have to consider her point of view in its context (90s), but having added more empirical and contextual data, maybe it would have look less universalizing and it would appear less outmoded. Obviously, she couldn't knew the transformations that occurred during the last thirty years, about prostitution, the understanding of sexuality and identity (trans movements, intersex persons, queer movements, etc.). But, she could had made it clearer the difference between her abstract reflection based on social contract theorist, and her empirical reading of her contemporary era; that could have been best rendered if she had used an ethnography methodology concerning her chapter on prostitution, because she don't give any voices to those women.

Conclusion
In the end, did she succeeded in convincing us of the importance of the sexual contract? I think she did, but she didn't succeeded in making those ideas mainstream yet. Probably it has a lot to do with her reading style and because of her chosen audience. She is a scholar and she is not writing for the 'civil society' about which she is so interested. It would be interesting though to research if she ever gave presentation or lectures outside the academia. It is really striking to see now women reading feminist literature and saying that it feels like 'middle-ages', since they are now totally free and liberated. Looking back at the Sexual Contract, this makes a lot of sense to me, since the political fiction of the social contract – even if people don't necessarily call it like that – is still really present, and that women have the impression of being liberated, because incorporated. At the end, this is exactly the point of Pateman. Even if citizenship and legal equality is given to women, this is not changing anything to their subjugation since their equality is given to them on a gender-neutral basis (but in fact masculine, as she demonstrates), as free and equal individuals. Rather, if we look at the condition of women as women, the situation didn't changed on every aspect. Obviously it didn't changed much if we look at the oppression based on sexual differentiation, like rape culture (or cultures), sexual objectification of women in representation (ads, media, popular culture), social capital, symbolic power, sexual division of labor, gender representation, etc. As I stated earlier, I think that her point would have best travel within era if contextualized, and this is where anthropologist comes to the table (at the kitchen table). Feminist anthropologist, like Nicole Claude-Mathieu, Sherry Ortner, Gayle Rubin, and many, many more, are needed to explore and contextualise women conditions and lived experiences as women, and this task can only be undertaken while acknowledging and using the work of feminist political and social theorist that provides useful conceptual framework, just as Carole Pateman did.

References
Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Standford University Press. Standford, California. 264p.

Pateman, Carole. (2012, September). « Question, evidence, political theory ». Lecture presented at the Johan Skyttte Prize 2012, Uppsala University, Sweden. Accessed online on 7th October 2014




Please consider that my first language is not english and that there is probably some mistakes that I am not aware of.
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Myriam Tardif, Sexual Contract