Life

Carole Pateman was born and raised in a working-class family in Sussex, England, one of the only members of her family to attain any higher education. Although she left school at 16, Pateman decided to go back to Ruskin College at Oxford, designed for working-class adult-education students, and while there she was offered a place in Oxford’s postgraduate diploma in political science and economics, where she finally earned her bachelor’s degree and DPhil. She was a leader for women at that institution, where, during her final exams, she was the only woman writing. Since 1990, Pateman has been teaching, affiliated with the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lecturing internationally. Previously, she has taught in Europe and Australia. 

 

Works

Pateman’s germinal work is The Sexual Contract (1988). She interrupted traditional social contract theory by pointing out that the Hobbesian or Lockean contract focused on the public, “civil” sphere of citizenship, dominated by men, and thereby excluded women in the private sphere—and that the contract that women typically are afforded is the marital or sexual contract wherein they are not equals to their men partners (see page 33, Chapter 1).

In traditional contract theory, citizens consent to impositions made by the government, such as law, because they have made a “social contract” which affords them certain protections under the government. Although in this conception, all individuals attain freedom and equality based on their contract with the state, the truth is in fact that it is the owning class alone who procure and benefit from the covenant. Many of the rights given to “citizens” in the conception of traditional contract writers are not afforded to women: “Women are not party to the original contract” (6).

According to Pateman, political rights originate in paternal or patriarchal power—the government views men as the only citizens capable of holding political rights and a patriarchal society germinates out of the contract. The public sphere of work and politics exclusively permit male participation, which makes even the inclusion of women in public space in traditional patriarchy problematic, let alone the woman’s equal participation (see page 114, Chapter 6). At the same time, this practice trains women into “consenting” to the choice of domestic roles in the home or within relationships. Pateman questioned that this consent was really given freely, since systemic sexism was pervasive in the contract, privileging men and limiting the options of women: Can a person be said to “consent” to a choice when they only have one? Pateman follows this thread through into modern political systems, and continues it in other works about political obligation in general.

Another of her earlier well-known works is Participation and Democratic Theory, in which she used social science findings of the 1970s and case studies in an iconoclastic argument against several widely held theoretical ideas of the time, to both acclaim and protest. More than 40 years later, Participation is still used in political science. In both this work and The Sexual Contract, she criticized “stories” told by prevailing political science thinkers while looking for truth in the real world. Today, her scholarship focuses on welfare and citizenship and examines how race and domination play into contract theory.

Pateman’s work on contract theory has been particularly useful for examining human rights issues in communities around the world. However, her writings also deal with a wide range of other topics, artfully connecting contract theory, systemic sexism, and welfare to democratic rights and freedom. Pateman’s scholarship examines democracy, feminist re-reading of political theory, citizenship, welfare, and teases apart the ways in which patriarchy influences women’s lives.

 

Further Reading

Hirschmann, Nancy J. and Christine Di Stefano, eds. Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory. Westview Press, 1996.

Pateman, Carole and Elizabeth Gross. Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (2nd ed.). Routledge, 2014.

Pateman, Carole and Charles Mills. Contract & Domination. Polity, 2007.

King, Gary, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Norman H. Nie. The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives. Routledge, NY, 2009

Pateman, Carole. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1970.