The Sexual Contract by Pateman Carole

Author:Pateman, Carole [Pateman, Carole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

If this were true of (some? many?) workers in their places of work, it was true of virtually none of them at home. Few husbands were willing to relinquish their patriarchal right to a servant.

The labour of a (house)wife is aptly termed domestic servitude, or, more politely, domestic service. Housework is not ‘work’. Work takes place in the men’s world of capitalism and workplaces. The meaning of ‘work’ depends on the (repressed) connection between the private and civil spheres. A ‘worker’ is a husband, a man who supports/protects his wife, an economic dependent (subordinate). That is to say, a worker is a ‘breadwinner’. The difference between ‘work’ and what a wife does is established in popular language and in official statistics; the labours of housewives are not included in official measurements of national productivity. The construction of the male worker as ‘breadwinner’ and his wife as his ‘dependent’ can be charted in the classifications of the Census in Britain and Australia. In the Census of 1851 in Britain, women employed in unpaid domestic work were ‘placed … in one of the productive classes along with paid work of a similar kind’. This classification changed after 1871, and by 1911 unpaid housewives had been separated from the economically active population. In Australia, an initial conflict over the categories of classification was resolved in 1890 when the scheme devised in New South Wales was adopted. The Australians divided up the population more decisively than the British, and the 1891 Census was based on the two categories of ‘breadwinner’ and ‘dependent’. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, women’s occupation was classed as domestic, and domestic workers were put in the dependent category.69

A worker supports/protects his (house)wife by earning a wage. Receipt of a wage in return for contracting out labour power distinguishes the (free) worker from the slave; the worker is a wage labourer. There is no free exchange between master and slave; the slave receives only the subsistence (protection) that enables him to continue to labour. The conventional view of the wage is that the crucial token of exchange has no taint of protection and servitude clinging to it. But the ‘wage’, like the ‘worker’, is a category that depends on the connection between the civil world of contract and the private realm of protection. A large element of protection remains embodied in the wage. The worker contracts out his labour power, so that he appears to receive a wage as an individual in exchange for the employer’s use of his services. Only since equal-pay legislation has been introduced over the past decade or so, is the wage becoming an individual wage. When husbands became ‘breadwinners’ and their wives became economic ‘dependents’, the wage became a family wage. Wages are paid to the male worker as a husband/breadwinner to maintain himself and his dependents, not merely in exchange for the sale of his own labour power. A ‘living wage’ for a man is a wage that can support himself and his wife and family at a decent level.

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