Bryant Romano Assignment 2
The introduction of “civil society” as mentioned by Carole Pateman in the book The Sexual Contract, displays a change of interpretation which men have disguised the social contract to politically and by form of law to control women. Such interpretation gives a disguise of freedom towards women in believing or trusting men. It was not always the case when much was set forth from within the realm of what is naturalistically their right. Yet, the extension of such rights, to be equally leveled at the status of men, comes with a limit even if the woman would be stamped by taking the last name of the husband. That the idea of patriarchy itself, not diminished, would transform in a “modern form of patriarchal social order” (Pateman 1).
A social civil structure placed by men, at which it is not valuable for them at that time, to then ignore without importance the quarrel between the women’s natural sphere and the public civil sphere within society. The natural sphere, also known as a private one, more in favor towards the women, within the views of society, sets women to enter in a marriage of what one could say of emotional feeling. Yes, it may seem to be the case that a woman has gained an equal place aside the husband, that the husband has given her his last name because of love. That as a loving wife who will bare to have the many children, nonetheless unknowingly, will become a hiddenly dominated, of which she will encounter from the man. Once entered at such phase, so begins the stage of what one could explain as a public civil sphere. Where it is determined of what “civilized society’s” expectations are from the wife through the eyes of men. A stroke of penmanship that places the woman to have no voice and saying except for the sole purpose of using the body at any way possible. Such assumptions then place the women to be in a contractual marriage, a sort of mandated fulfilling of a somewhat similar slave. Having unwanted sex, doing the chores, caring and baring as many as children the man says and how ever treatment the man might feel towards her, baring the maltreatment just because that’s what’s society has placed and at the same time ignores.
The fusion of women at a world that “is and is not civil society”, demonstrates how men have found a form to still possess women as possessions that can be manipulated to their own selfish desires without the consent of the women.
