SOURCE: "Contract, the Individual and Slavery," in The Sexual Contract, Stanford University Press, 1988, pp. 39-76.

A feminist theorist, Pateman challenged the traditional assessment of the social contract with her book The Sexual Contract. In the excerpt that follows, she analyzes works of the primary contract theorists—includ ing Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes—in order to argue that the freedoms and privileges of the social contract did not apply to women.

Classic social contract theory and the broader argument that, ideally, all social relations should take a contractual form, derive from a revolutionary claim. The claim is that individuals are naturally free and equal to each other, or that individuals are born free and born equal. That such a notion can seem commonplace rather than revolutionary today is a tribute to the successful manner in which contract theorists have turned a subversive proposition into a defence of civil subjection...