Alyssa Mazer
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

As capitalism and its specific form of sexual as well as class division of labour developed…wives were pushed into a few, low-status areas of employment or kept out of economic life altogether, relegated to their ‘natural’, dependent, place in the private, familial sphere. Today, despite a large measure of civil equality, it appears natural that wives are subordinate just because they are dependent on their husbands for subsistence, and it is taken for granted that liberal social life can be understood without reference to the sphere of subordination, natural relations and women. The old patriarchal argument from nature and women’s nature was thus transformed as it was modernized and incorporated into liberal-capitalism. (Carole Pateman 1989c, 123)

While not a traditional political economic term, wife is a title that denotes a very specific role. A wife is best described in negative form, in opposition to a citizen and a worker; by definition, a wife can be neither a public individual nor a free laborer. Although individual women may not end up becoming wives, women at large are coerced into the role and therefore contractually subordinated through the institution of marriage.

For the purposes of this definition, a wife is understood as a political, social, and economic subordinate to the rational individual of liberal economic theory, expected to provide unpaid labor to enable his success; this is a position maintained by legal, cultural, and financial circumstances. This entry introduces the various processes and expectations associated with the idea of a wife through a brief description of liberal theory, via Carole Pateman’s feminist critique.

Pateman’s groundbreaking work The Sexual Contract, originally published in 1988, explains that the initial social contract of liberal theory delineates sex-specific realms and roles. By their (either implicitly or explicitly) sexed articulation of a consenting, free individual and his place in the public sphere, liberal theorists have continuously emphasized that the rational individual—capable of contracting the use of his labor power for a wage, capable of participating in civil society and exercising his public capacities—can only ever be a man. This is an understanding of liberal society that questions key pieces of the contemporary political structure, troubling the foundations of a theory that proclaims individual freedom yet legally enforces arbitrary hierarchies.

One of Pateman’s most thorough critiques, which appears again in her 1989 collection The Disorder of Women, lies in her examination of how “marriage” is described by liberal theorists. Before more specifically considering her description of the wife’s role, it is important to begin with how the wife comes to be subordinated in theory.

Many liberal theorists root the wife’s subordination in nature; John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, argue that marriage occurs in the state of nature—the abstract time before our recognizable, organized society (Pateman 2018a, 54). They argue that families are already well-established by the time husbands consent to be governed and leave the state of nature (Pateman 1989a, 19). According to these thinkers, wives are natural subjects, not rational individuals, and are therefore justly controlled by their husbands for their many reproductive capacities (Pateman 2018a, 53).

Likewise, and more explicit about the purpose of marriage, Hegel argues that women are naturally incapable of participating in civil life. His articulation of women’s political disruptiveness is not dissimilar from Rousseau’s, and they both hold that the social contract necessarily delineates a distinct private sphere to which women are incorporated “as members of the family” (Pateman 1989d, 182). To these theorists, “The family is seemingly the most natural of all human associations and thus specially suited to women, who cannot transcend their natures in the manner demanded by civil forms of life” (Pateman 1989a, 19).

This sexed division helps reveal how the role of a wife is socially assigned, and for a particular reason. Although he doesn’t recognize it, Thomas Hobbes’ description of marriage reveals two of liberal theorists’ core assumptions about the formation of a civil public: first, men have brought it into existence and only men have the proper capacities to govern it; second, their own rules dictate that the proper way to exclude women from it is to legally secure their subordination through marriage (Pateman 2018a, 48-9). Controlling women in this way is vital for the success of the state and the economy. In order to maintain their civil relationship, rational individuals need to organize access to wives that will enable their success in the public sphere. The same way that the individuals entering the social contract agree to their legal equality, they acknowledge their collective interest in accessing women’s bodies and labor (1989b, 43).

Because civil (public) society is a crucial aspect of how the wife comes to be, citizenship—while a word worth unpacking on its own terms—is a useful concept for articulating the wife’s public position. If a citizen is a free and equal individual who trades independence for state protection, the role of a wife is diametrically opposed. This wife vs. citizen tension is most obviously identified in two examples contemporary to the 1980s, and arguably still apparent today.

Pateman writes that legal conditions in Britain, the US, and Australia deny a wife’s right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband, thereby demonstrating her lack of personhood (1989d, 186). In addition, wives are economically subordinated by husbands, not only because he relies on her labor in the home to reproduce his labor power, but also because the expectation that a woman will become a wife limits the wage she can earn in the marketplace and the support she can receive from the state (1989d, 190); she is therefore forced to enter the marriage contract for her own survival.

Importantly, this is a historical condition. While Pateman does not agree that women’s subordination is natural, their position as such has been continuously maintained for centuries, solidifying itself as a kind of common sense. This inequality especially appears in their economic conditions. Despite multiple generations of “equal rights” enjoyed by women, they are more likely than men to live in poverty (1989d, 180); it is not a coincidence that, meanwhile, “the legislation, policy-making and higher-level administration of the welfare state…remain[s] predominantly in men’s hands” (181).

Finally, on the economic role of the wife, it is important to note that her labor is not equivalent to that of a worker. However, the liberal theorists’ reliance on this family structure helps to reveal the fundamental importance of a wife’s labor in the home. The nature of this relation appears most poignantly in Hobbes’ assertion that all people are servants of a particular kind, and wives embody the specific domestic servitude reserved for women (Pateman 2018a, 50).

There are empirical parts of a liberal state, society, and economy that make the idea of wife as servant obvious. According to Pateman’s telling, the legally recognizable position of a wife was nonexistent in the liberal societies of Britain, the US, and Australia until the late 1800s: a wife could not claim an independent identity, and instead was completely subsumed under the master-husband. Wives were regularly sold and treated as property; for example, a man could sue someone for damages inflicted on his wife. Wives had no bodily autonomy, no right to refuse a husband anything he asked, and they worked full time, their entire lives, without pay (2018b).

In the hundred-odd years between then and when Pateman is writing, the legal subordination of wives has changed faces, but its practical effects have not become less coercive. From Pateman’s perspective in the late twentieth century, the wife is a domestic servant, and marriage subordinates the wife to the husband as a kind of laborer. Most married women work outside the home and yet must also be readily available to provide for their husbands and arrange their lives exactly how he asks (2018b, 128). While men have at least some choice in where and to whom they contract the use of their labor power, “women collectively are coerced into marriage” socially and economically (2018b, 132). Both in the theoretical social contract and in practical life, women are made into wives.

The fact that a wife and a worker are definitional opposites further explicates this relation. The distinction is definitional in that the very idea of the worker is constructed as “the other side” of the wife; indeed, the role of a worker “presupposes that he is a man who has a woman, a (house)wife, to take care of his daily needs” (Pateman 2018b, 131). As a practical matter, this sexed division of labor is the norm in political, social, and economic hierarchies; for example, “the labours of housewives are not included in official measurements of national productivity” (Pateman 2018b, 137). The relative invisibility of the wife’s labor is further enforced—or perhaps mandated—by lack of reference to women’s labor in classical economic literature overall.

By now it should be clear that the role of wife is directly linked to women’s subordination in liberal societies. Succinctly, the claim is not that men have political, social, and economic dominance over women and, by unrelated incident, have also institutionalized marriage. This feminist critique demonstrates that the act of making—the many processes coercing—women into wives is what establishes, justifies, and reproduces those many forms of dominance.

(See Social Reproduction, Feminist Economics, Primitive Accumulation, Power)

Bibliography

Pateman, Carole. “‘The Disorder of Women’: Women, Love, and the Sense of Justice.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 17-32. Stanford University Press, 1989a.

_____________. “The Fraternal Social Contract.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 33-57. Stanford University Press, 1989b.

_____________.“The Public/Private Dichotomy.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 118-140. Stanford University Press, 1989c.

_____________. “The Patriarchal Welfare State.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 179-209. Stanford University Press, 1989d.

_____________. “Contract, The Individual, and Slavery.” In The Sexual Contract, 30th Anniversary Edition, 39-76. Stanford University Press, 2018a.

_____________. “Wives, Slaves and Wage Slaves.” In The Sexual Contract, 30th Anniversary Edition, 116-153. Stanford University Press, 2018b.