About the author
British political theorist (b. 1940), a Fellow of the British Academy and a foundational figure in feminist political philosophy. Her work on participation, consent, and contract — above all The Sexual Contract — reshaped how political theory treats gender, and made her one of the most influential feminist critics of the liberal tradition.
Synopsis
Pateman re-reads Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the contract tradition to show that the story of free individuals consenting to government concealed a prior subordination of women. The marriage contract, the employment contract, and the prostitution contract, she argues, all reveal how 'contract' can institutionalize domination rather than freedom — so that the brotherhood of free men was founded on the subjection of women.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted workPateman argues that the classic social contract was always twinned with a 'sexual contract' — an unspoken agreement securing men's authority over women — so that the freedom of the fraternity rested on women's subordination.
By recovering the 'sexual contract' hidden inside social-contract theory, Pateman shows that the founding story of liberal freedom encoded male dominance. Her critique forces a reckoning with how deeply patriarchy is woven into liberalism's own conceptual foundations.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with liberal feminists who believe contract and consent can be reformed to include women as equals rather than abandoned, and with critics who argue Pateman reads a single patriarchal logic into a more varied and contested tradition.
Reading note
Theoretically demanding; read it alongside the contract theorists (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) it reinterprets. A central text bridging feminist theory and the liberal canon.
Best paired with
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract; Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.