Contracting In
Carole Pateman describes that its is a masculine attribute for civil freedom and it depends on patriarchal right (pg.2). It is my interpretation that she means because the contract is written by men, women weren’t considered as an individual to add into it. Pateman claims that women naturally have no freedom nor are born free. My guess is that women are incorporated into a civil society, but only by their husbands. Pateman discusses how women are included in the sexual and marriage contract but not the civil society contract. It seems that if woman are only identifiable by their husbands. So in a way they are in civil society just indirectly, more as a subordinate than an individual.
Pateman states that no one can at the same time be a citizen and human property. So where do women lie? There lies some sort of exploitation here. In the text it states that workers and wives can be exploited because they are both are subordinates under the employment and marriage contract. It’s as though women are constituted as property and not an individual. The text states that even sons are given rights in a civil society due to their birth right into the patriarchy.
Pateman discussed that women aren’t left out in the state of nature because it would defeat the purpose of the sexual contract. She claims that there is a ”private sphere” within the context of the civil society that is separate from civil society. Woman are included in the private sphere and men are included in the civil sphere. The sexual contract that women are included in exists in the state of nature and has nothing to do with civil society. Men are allowed to pass back and forth through the sphere and this is due to the law of the sex-right through the patriarchal civil society.
Pateman further discusses how in the book ”History of Sexuality” by Michel Foucault in the seventeen century men had taken charge of women’s lives and bodies through a new discipline and mechanism of subordination. The difference between sexual and political difference is a key component to civil society. Men governing women’s lives and bodies seems to be the proper order of nature. She argues that since men are the natural overseers of women, patriarchy is seen as a private matter that can only be conquered if the public policies and laws treated women as equals to men.
