Quotes from Carole Pateman

The original pact is a sexual as well as a social contract: it is sexual in the sense of patriarchal – that is, the contract establishes men's political right over women – and also sexual in the sense of establishing orderly access by men to women's bodies.

The most dramatic example of the public aspect of patriarchal right is that men demand that women's bodies are for sale as commodities in the capitalist market; prostitution is a major capitalist industry.

Under coverture, a wife was required to live where her husband demanded, her earnings belonged to her husband and her children were the property of her husband, just as the children of the female slave belonged to her master. But perhaps the most graphic illustration of the continuity between slavery and marriage was that in England – as Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge reminds us – wives could be sold at public auctions.

The 'family', in the sense in which the term is used today, emerged only after a long process of historical development. The many figures that populated the family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually disappeared until the couple of husband and wife took the centre of the stage, and the marriage contract became constitutive of domestic relations.