Assignment 02
As I read Carole Pateman’s writing in “The Sexual Contract”, it was clear that women were put into very low standards to men. Through the fields of ‘civil society’, which contains nothing but in my opinion, insecure elite, narcissistic, dominating men, they would create an original contract that merely excluded women on her rights. It was also clear that in the only incorporation a women had in the civil society was to comply and obey as a wife and a women, she was to please her man when he wanted to, because “rape didn’t exist within a marriage”, and do her job as a wife especially having his child. Because she was excluded in such contract, the man had all the rights to the women’s body. As contract theorist Locke would lay his statement that “every man has a property in his own person” (pg. 13).
Many social contract theorists would argue and believed that men owned their property also through women, women were not considered equal to a man. It seemed that marriage contract was more to avoid that woman’s weren’t just their slaves but their wife, in other words in my opinion, a marriage contract was a cleaner way to do it. Although entering marriage through a marriage contract, women were still excluded on their rights, Pateman would write “what it means to be an ‘individual’, a maker of contracts, and civilly free, is revealed by the subjection of women with the private sphere” (pg. 11), in other words women were categorized as in the natural but private sphere, which indicated what was private; where a woman a placed in a place where she is mostly likely not seen and not validated, but yet natural to the civil society still excluded the woman to having the same power as a man through the contract, they apparently were not considered “individual”. The only right a woman had was her child, a child who will then eventually have a contract to obey his mother.
It seems beyond me that what is naturally in listed for us as a human being, is controlled by such contract. Women are the ones who should be validated not only for their womanhood but also just primarily as human beings, it becomes more clear as to why many feminist have fought to break down the issue on woman’s right on their body, choice and what they should do after during marriage, in participation on politics have become a strong and vocal on what’s right.
