Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1988)

Posted: Wed, Feb 11, 2026

Today

  • A quick reminder about grades: Please ignore “percentage” + we value improvement
  • Contrast Hobbesian vs. Lockean contracts
  • Work through Pateman’s critique

Some lingering questions

From our in-class simulation

  • Family in the state of nature?
  • # of participants in “contracting convention” (so to speak)?
  • Multiple groups/alliances getting bigger—internal ruling structure?
  • Dissenters to the social contract chosen by majority? [Kelly]

Pateman’s puzzles

  • Reproduction in the state of nature??
  • Parts of the natural state seem to carry over into civil society—e.g., conceptions of marriage, family, reproduction, human differences, etc., as natural even in civil society.
  • Why contract in particular?

Pateman’s working assumptions

  • The human beings in the state of nature cannot be the first and last generation.
  • The natural state vs. civil society distinction is transfigured into a private sphere vs. public sphere distinction.
    • If the private sphere is not merely state of nature “preserved in a jar” (so to speak), then what contract governs it and its relationship with the public sphere?
  • Contracts not only exchange goods but create social relations.
    • E.g., employment contract: men ⇒ employer & employee

Pateman’s dark retelling of the story [CW: rape]

Scene #1: Consensual cisheterosexual sex in the state of nature ⇒ Woman is pregnant and gives birth to Child

  • Assumption: Pregnancy and childcare add a survival disadvantage in the natural state.
  • What’s the relationship of Child and Woman and Man?
    • Is there any self-interested reason for Man to assume a parental role?
    • Marriage: Political (Hobbes) or pre-political (Locke)?
    • Does Man necessarily rule? Locke, § 82.

Scene #2: Nonconsensual sex?

  • Man successfully threatens Woman with death ⇒ Woman surrenders to Man.
    • Sexual contract: Woman contracts away sexual access and reproductive capacity in exchange for life and protection ⇒ Woman is subsumed under Man’s personhood [coverture].
    • Not merely an exchange of goods but creation of social relations.
  • Woman is pregnant and gives birth to Child.
    • Child is further subsumed under Man’s personhood.

Scene #3: Voluntary sexual contract?

  • Smart Woman anticipates this—what would Man need to offer in exchange for protection during pregnancy and childrearing?

Data points

  • If the social contract creates the private vs. public sphere but governs only the public sphere, then there must be another contract regulating the private sphere and its relationship to the public sphere.
  • If civil society has a patriarchal structure which must be created and regulated by contract, then it is difficult to make sense of why women would agree to it in the state of nature.
  • The sexual contract creates the patriarchal family and women’s submission to men within it.

Pateman’s hypothesis: “The assumption must necessarily be made that, by the time the social contract is made, all the women in the natural condition have been conquered by men and are now their subjects (servants). If any men have also been subjected and are in servitude, then they, too, will be excluded from the social contract. Only men who stand to each other as free and equal masters of ‘families’ will take part” (p. 49).

  • Could the social contract story be rewritten to ensure gender equality? [Sophie, Aditi]

Pateman’s diagnosis: Contract as a conceptual framework is necessary for this because it blends the boundaries of freedom and submission. [Priya, Oliver]

  • If I own my person, then how I dispose of myself is my freedom, including the freedom to contract into a submissive relationship with another (e.g., employment contract).
  • Limits on this freedom (e.g., voluntary slavery or modern sweatshop) “can . . . be maintained only by modifying or rejecting contract doctrine” (p. 66).
  • Women’s subordination to men is freely chosen.