THE BASIC NOTION OR IDEA of a democracy is that it is a government by the peo-ple. Its value and justification have to do with the idea that it provides theopportunity for people to participate in the process of decision-making ingovernment. The British-born contemporary political theorist and feministCarole Pateman critically examines the idea of a government by the peopleand the theory of political participation to question the extent to which theidea of the people and participation have included women. She arguesthat one of the major flaws in democratic theory and practice is that it hasexcluded women and has not considered how women have been oppressedand prevented from participating in the deliberative processes of govern-ment. She argues that the ideal of equal participation in democracy has notmaterialized as far as feminists are concerned because women have neverbeen considered full and equal participants in the process of government.She argues that theories of democracy have always taken for granted the rel-evance of the structure of the relationship between the sexes to the demo-cratic process. She indicates how some democratic theorists have hadreservations about the participation of women in body politics and somehave expressed a lack of concern for the exclusion of women. She arguesthat the feminist critique of the practice of democracy centers on the fact thatthe subjection of women is ignored. This issue has been easy to ignorebecause of the introduction of various legal reforms that have provided uni-versal suffrage and civil rights for women. People assume that these reformsindicate that women are of equal status with men when it comes to the issueof participation in government.

This point, she argues, ignores what it takes to have a truly liberal soci-ety. In the absence of social equality, political equality may be vitiated.There are also widespread and deeply held convictions or social practiceswhich make sure that the formal provision of legal equality does not materi-alize in reality. Liberal democratic theories seem to ignore the patriarchalsystem and the division between the private and public (political) realms andtheir relevance to a democracy. She argues that the aims and ideals of femi-

FEMINISM AND DEMOCRACYCarole Pateman

Introduction, Polycarp Ikuenobe

nism, liberalism, and democracy appear to be coextensive in that they areconcerned with creating a political order or social structures in which thereare universal rights to equal citizenship of a political community. Thisimplies that there should be no sexual domination or subordination; it givescredence to equal and individual rights and freedom. By focusing on the his-tory of democratic and social contract theories, Pateman argues that peoplehave always sought to justify the subjection of women by relying on the nat-ural difference between men and women. This natural difference specifiesthe role of women as wives under contractual subjection to their husbands.This argument creates a paradox central to democratic theory: if women arenaturally subordinate, then their right to consent seems to be an irrelevantissue. This idea or conviction regarding the nature of marriage is sowidespread and rooted in custom and traditional practices that any demo-cratic arrangement that does not address this issue and tradition will surelybe undemocratic. Pateman draws on Mills ideas that feminists will haveproblems drawing the attention of democratic systems and theories to theseissues and practices, because people find it difficult to give up practical prin-ciples which have a long tradition.

In Mills view, there is no independent argument to justify the subjec-tion of women and that empirical appeal to nature is unwarranted becausepeople have experienced only unequal relationships between men andwomen. The difference between men and woman can be empirically provenonly if there is an equal relationship between them. Pateman critically evalu-ates Mills argument as one which has addressed the issue of womens par-ticipation in a democratic system but ignored the patriarchal system. Sheshows that Mill was right in arguing that men should not have legal andpolitical rights to oppress women and that women should have the opportu-nity to get education and choose a career either in the professions or as tradi-tional housewives. She argues that Mills argument for the choice of eithermarriage or career ignores the fact that being a wife or choosing it as a plau-sible career in a patriarchal system implies that women are confined to theprivate realm of family, which prevents them from adequately using theirvotes in the public realm to protect their rights. Women in such a system can-not develop to be participatory democratic citizens. Therefore, democratictheories have to take seriously the criticism of marriage and the patriarchalsystem. This criticism raises the issue of the connection (or lack thereof)between the private and the public realms and the fact that what happens (orfails to happen) to women in the private realm may affect their abilities to be

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good participatory democratic citizens in the public realm. In order toachieve a truly democratic society where people can participate equally,Pateman suggests that there must be a radical change in the way people seeand theorize about the private and the public realms, and there must beequality in all its forms in the workplace.

As you read Pateman, consider and reflect on the following questions:How does feminism provide a substantial challenge to the traditional notionof democratic participation? In what respects must men and women be equalin order to be equal participants in a democratic system? Why is the naturaldifference between men and women not an adequate justification for theinequality between men and women? What are the social and historical fac-tors that have prevented the equality between men and women?

Afeminist might dispose briskly of the subject of this essay. For femi-nists, democracy has never existed; women have never been and stillare not admitted as full and equal members and citizens in any countryknown as a democracy. A telling image that recurs throughout the historyof feminism is of liberal society as a series of male clubsusually, as Vir-ginia Woolf points out in Three Guineas, distinguished by their own cos-tumes and uniformsthat embrace parliament, the courts, political parties,the military and police, universities, workplaces, trade unions, public (pri-vate) schools, exclusive Clubs and popular leisure clubs, from all of whichwomen are excluded or to which they are mere auxiliaries. Feminists willfind confirmation of their view in academic discussions of democracy whichusually take it for granted that feminism or the structure of the relationshipbetween the sexes are irrelevant matters. . . . I shall indicate why feminismprovides democracywhether in its existing liberal guise or in the form of apossible future participatory or self-managing democracywith its mostimportant challenge and most comprehensive critique.

The objection that will be brought against the feminists is that after acentury or more of legal reforms and the introduction of universal suffragewomen are now the civil and political equals of men, so that feminism todayhas little or nothing to contribute to democratic theory and practice. Thisobjection ignores much that is crucial to an understanding of the real charac-

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Feminism and Democracy, by Carole Pateman, reprinted from Democratic Theory and Prac-tice, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 204217.

ter of liberal democratic societies. It ignores the existence of widespread anddeeply held convictions, and of social practices that give them expression,that contradict the (more or less) formally equal civic status of women. Theobjection is based on the liberal argument that social inequalities are irrele-vant to political equality. Thus, it has to ignore the problems that have arisenfrom the attempt to universalize liberal principles by extending them towomen while at the same time maintaining the division between private andpolitical life which is central to liberal democracy, and is also a divisionbetween women and men. If liberal theorists of democracy are content toavoid these questions, their radical critics, along with advocates of participa-tory democracy, might have been expected to confront them enthusiastically.However, although they have paid a good deal of attention to the class struc-ture of liberal democracies and the way in which class inequality undercutsformal political equality, they have rarely examined the significance of sexualinequality and the patriarchal order of the liberal state for a democratic trans-formation of liberalism. Writers on democracy, whether defenders or criticsof the status quo, invariably fail to consider, for example, whether their dis-cussions of freedom or consent have any relevance to women. They implic-itly argue as if individuals and citizens are men. It is frequently overlookedhow recently democratic or universal suffrage was established. . . .

Womens position as voters also appears to cause some difficulty forwriters on democracy. Little comment is excited, for example, by Schum-peters explicit statement, in his extremely influential revisionist text, thatthe exclusion of women from the franchise does not invalidate a politysclaim to be a democracy. In Barbers fascinating account of direct democ-racy in a Swiss canton, womanhood suffrage (gained only in 1971) is treatedvery equivocally. Barber emphasizes that womens enfranchisement wasjust and equitablebut the cost was participation and community.Assemblies grew unwieldy and participation diminished, atomistic individu-alism gained official recognition and the ideal of the citizen-soldier could nolonger be justified.1 The reader is left wondering whether women should nothave sacrificed their just demand for the sake of mens citizenship. Again, inVerba, Nie and Kims recent cross-national study of political participation itis noted, in a discussion of the change in Holland from compulsory to volun-tary voting, that voting rights were universal. The footnote, on the samepage, says that in both electoral systems there was a one man one vote sys-tem.2 Did women vote? Unrecognized historical ironies abound in discus-sions of democracy. Feminists are frequently told today that we must not be

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offended by masculine language because man really means human being,although when, in 1867 in support of the first womens suffrage bill inBritain, it was argued that man (referring to the householder) was a genericterm that included women the argument was firmly rejected. . . .

Such examples might be amusing if they were not symptomatic of thepast and present social standing of women. Feminism, liberalism anddemocracy (that is, a political order in which citizenship is universal, theright of each adult individual member of the community) share a commonorigin. Feminism, a general critique of social relationships of sexual domina-tion and subordination and a vision of a sexually egalitarian future, like lib-eralism and democracy, emerges only when individualism, or the idea thatindividuals are by nature free and equal to each other, has developed as auniversal theory of social organization.

Differential rights and status have been and are defended by appeal tothe natural differences between the sexes, from which it is held to followthat women are subordinate to their fathers or husbands and that their properplace is in domestic life. The argument from nature stretches back intomythology and ancient times (and today often comes dressed up in the scien-tific garb of sociobiology) and its longevity appears to confirm that itinforms us of an eternal and essential part of the human condition. But, farfrom being timeless, the argument has specific formulations in different his-torical epochs and, in the context of the development of liberal-capitalistsociety, it appears in a form which obscures the patriarchal structure of liber-alism beneath the ideology of individual freedom and equality.

It is usually assumed that the social contract theorists, and Locke in par-ticular, provided the definitive counter to the patriarchal thesis that paternaland political power are one and the same, grounded in the natural subjectionof sons to fathers. Locke certainly drew a sharp distinction between naturalor familial ties and the conventional relations of political life, but althoughhe argued that sons, when adult, were as free as their fathers and equal tothem, and hence could only justifiably be governed with their own consent,it is usually forgotten that he excluded women (wives) from this argument.His criticism of the patriarchalists depends upon the assumption of naturalindividual freedom and equality, but only men count as individuals.Women are held to be born to subjection. Locke takes it for granted that awoman will, through the marriage contract, always agree to place herself in

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. . .

subordination to her husband. He agrees with the patriarchalists that wifelysubjection has a Foundation in Nature and argues that in the family the hus-bands will, as that of the abler and the stronger, must always prevail overthat of his wife in all things of their common Concernment.3 The contra-diction between the premise of individual freedom and equality, with itscorollary of the conventional basis of authority, and the assumption thatwomen (wives) are naturally subject has since gone unnoticed. Similarly,there has been no acknowledgment of the problem that if women are natu-rally subordinate, or born into subjection, then talk of their consent or agree-ment to this status is redundant. Yet this contradiction and paradox lie at theheart of democratic theory and practice. The continuing silence about thestatus of wives is testament to the strength of the union of a transformedpatriarchalism with liberalism. For the first time in history, liberal individu-alism promised women an equal social standing with men as naturally freeindividuals, but at the same time socioeconomic developments ensured thatthe subordination of wives to husbands continued to be seen as natural, andso outside the domain of democratic theorists or the political struggle todemocratize liberalism.

The conviction that a married womans proper place is in the conjugalhome as a servant to her husband and mother to her children is now sowidespread and well established that this arrangement appears as a naturalfeature of human existence rather than historically and culturally specific.The history of the development of the capitalist organization of production isalso the history of the development of a particular form of the sexual divi-sion of labor (although this is not the history to be found in most books). . . .As production moved out of the household, women were forced out of thetrades they controlled and wives became dependent on their husbands forsubsistence or competed for individual wages in certain areas of production.4Many working-class wives and mothers have had to continue to try to findpaid employment to ensure the survival of their families, but by the mid-nineteenth century the ideal, the natural and respectable, mode of life hadcome to be seen as that of the middle-class, breadwinning paterfamilias andhis totally dependent wife. By then the subjection of wives was complete;with no independent legal or civil standing they had been reduced to the sta-tus of property, as the nineteenth-century feminists emphasized in their com-parisons of wives to the slaves of the West Indies and American South.Today, women have won an independent civil status and the vote; they are,

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apparently, individuals as well as citizensand thus require no specialattention in discussions of democracy. . . .

The present revival of the organized feminist movement has begun torescue The Subjection of Women from the obscurity into which Mills com-mentators have pushed it, although it provides a logical extension of thearguments of his academically acceptable On Liberty. The Subjection isimportant for its substantive argument, but also because the ultimately con-tradictory position that Mill takes in the essay illustrates just how radicalfeminist criticism is, and how the attempt to universalize liberal principlesto both sexes pushes beyond the confines of liberal democratic theory andpractice.

In The Subjection Mill argues that the relation between women andmen, or, more specifically, between wives and husbands, forms an unjusti-fied exception to the liberal principles of individual rights, freedom andchoice, to the principles of equality of opportunity and the allocation ofoccupational positions by merit that, he believes, now govern other socialand political institutions. In the modern world, consent has supplanted forceand the principle of achievement has replaced that of ascriptionexceptwhere women are concerned. Mill writes that the conjugal relation is anexample of the primitive state of slavery lasting on, . . . It has not lost thetaint of its brutal origin (p. 130).5 More generally, the social subordinationof women is a single relic of an old world of thought and practice, explodedin everything else (p. 146). Mill opens The Subjection with some pertinentcomments on the difficulty feminists face in presenting an intellectually con-vincing case. Domination by men is rooted in long-standing customs, andthe idea that male supremacy is the proper order of things derives from deepfeelings and sentiments rather than rationally tested beliefs (and, it might beadded, men have a lot to lose by being convinced). Thus feminists must notexpect their opponents, to give up practical principles in which they havebeen born and bred and which are the basis of much of the existing order ofthe world, at the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of log-ically resisting (p. 128). Mill is very conscious of the importance of theappeal to nature. He notes that it provides no criterion to differentiate thesubordination of women from other forms of domination because all rulershave attempted to claim a grounding in nature for their position. He alsoargues that nothing at all can be said about the respective natures of womenand men because we have only seen the sexes in an unequal relationship.

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Any differences in their moral and other capacities will become known whenmen and women can interact as independent and equal rational beings.

However, despite Mills vigorous attack on the appeal to custom andnature he ultimately falls back on the very argument that he has carefullycriticized. His failure consistently to apply his principles to domestic life hasbeen noted by recent feminist critics, but it is less often pointed out that hisinconsistency undermines his defense of womanhood suffrage and equaldemocratic citizenship. The central argument of The Subjection is that hus-bands must be stripped of their legally-sanctioned despotic powers over theirwives. Most of the legal reforms of the marriage law that Mill advocatedhave now been enacted (with the significant exception of marital rape, towhich I shall return), and the implications of his unwillingness to extend hiscriticism to the sexual division of labor within the home are now fullyrevealed. Mill argues that because of their upbringing, lack of education andlegal and social pressures, women do not have a free choice whether or notto marry: wife is the only occupation open to them. But although he alsoargues that women must have equal opportunity with men to obtain a propereducation that will enable them to support themselves, he assumes that, ifmarriage were reformed, most women would not choose independence.

Mill states that it is generally understood that when a woman marriesshe has chosen her career, like a man when he chooses a profession. When awoman becomes a wife, she makes choice of the management of a house-hold, and the bringing up of a family, as the first call on her exertions, . . .she renounces, . . . all (occupations] not consistent with the requirement ofthis (p. 179). Mill is reverting here to ascriptive arguments and the belief inwomens natural place and occupation. He is falling back on the ancient tra-dition of patriarchal political theory that, as Susan Okin has shown in Womenin Western Political Thought (Princeton, 1979), asserts that whereas menare, or can be, many things, women are placed on earth to fulfill one functiononly; to bear and rear children. Mill neatly evades the question of how, ifwomens task is prescribed by their sex, they can be said to have a realchoice of occupation, or why equal opportunity is relevant to women if mar-riage itself is a career. Mill compares an egalitarian marriage to a businesspartnership in which the partners are free to negotiate their own terms ofassociation, but he relies on some very weak arguments, which run counterto liberal principles, to support his view that equality will not disturb theconventional domestic division of labour. He suggests that the naturalarrangement would be for wife and husband each to be absolute in the

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executive branch of their own department . . . any change of system andprinciple requiring the consent of both (p. 169). He also suggests that thedivision of labour between the spouses could be agreed in the marriage con-tractbut he assumes that wives will be willing to accept the naturalarrangement. Mill notes that duties are already divided by consent . . . andgeneral custom (p. 170) modified in individual cases; but it is exactly gen-eral custom, as the bulwark of male domination, that he is arguing against inthe body of the essay. . . .

Anti-feminist movements and propagandists in the 1980s also claim thatthe domestic division of labor supported by Mill is the only natural one. Theywould not be disturbed by the implications of this arrangement for the citizen-ship of women but advocates of democracy should be. Mill championedwomanhood suffrage for the same reasons that he supported votes for men;because it was necessary for self-protection or the protection of individualinterests and because political participation would enlarge the capacities ofindividual women. The obvious problem with his argument is that women aswives will largely be confined to the small circle of the family and its dailyroutines and so will find it difficult to use their vote effectively as a protectivemeasure. Women will not be able to learn what their interests are withoutexperience outside domestic life. This point is even more crucial for Millsarguments about political development and education through participation.He writes (p. 237) in general terms of the elevation of the individual as amoral, spiritual and social being that occurs under free government, but thisis a large claim to make for the periodic casting of a vote (although the moraltransformation of political life through enfranchisement was a central themeof the womanhood suffrage movement). Nor did Mill himself entirely believethat this elevation would result from the suffrage alone. He writes that citi-zenship, and here I take him to be referring to universal suffrage, fills only asmall place in modern life, and does not come near the daily habits or inmostsentiments (p. 174). He goes on to argue that the family, justly constituted,would be the real school of the virtues of freedom. However, this is asimplausible as the claim about the consequences of liberal democratic voting.A patriarchal family with the despotic husband at its head is no basis fordemocratic citizenship; but nor, on its own, is an egalitarian family. Millargues in his social and political writings that only participation in a widevariety of institutions, especially the workplace, can provide the political edu-cation necessity for active, democratic citizenship. Yet how can wives andmothers, who have chosen domestic life, have the opportunity to develop

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their capacities or learn what it means to be a democratic citizen? Women willtherefore exemplify the selfish, private beings, lacking a sense of justice orpublic spirit, that result when an individual is confined to the narrow sphereof everyday family life.6 Mills failure to question the apparently natural divi-sion of labor within the home means that his arguments for democratic citi-zenship apply only to men.

It might be objected that it is unreasonable and anachronistic to ask ofMill, writing in the 1860s, that he criticize the accepted division of laborbetween husband and wife when only very exceptional feminists in the nine-teenth century were willing to question the doctrine of the separate spheresof the sexes. But if that objection is granted,7 it does not excuse the samecritical failure by contemporary democratic theorists and empirical investi-gators. Until the feminist movement began, very recently, to have an impacton academic studies not only has the relation between the structure of theinstitution of marriage and the formal equality of citizenship been ignored,but women citizens have often been excluded from empirical investigationsof political behavior and attitudes or merely referred to briefly in patriarchalnot scientific terms. . . .8

The problems surrounding womens citizenship in the liberal democra-cies may have been sadly neglected, but the failure of democratic theorists toconfront the woman and wife question runs much deeper still. Democraticcitizenship, even if interpreted in the minimal sense of universal suffrage inthe context of liberal civil rights, presupposes the solid foundation of a prac-tical, universal recognition that all members of the polity are social equalsand independent individuals, having all the capacities implied by this sta-tus. The most serious failure of contemporary democratic theory and its lan-guage of freedom, equality, consent, and of the individual, is that women areso easily and inconspicuously excluded from references to the individual.Thus the question never arises whether the exclusion reflects social andpolitical realities. One reason why there is no consciousness of the need toask this question is that democratic theorists conventionally see their sub-ject-matter as encompassing the political or public sphere, which for radicaltheorists includes the economy and the workplace. . . .

Among Mills criticism of the despotic powers of nineteenth-centuryhusbands is a harsh reminder that a husband had the legal right to rape hiswife. Over a century later a husband still has that right in most legal jurisdic-tions. Locke excludes women from the status of free and equal individualby his agreement with the patriarchal claim that wives were subject to their

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husbands by nature; the content of the marriage contract confirms that,today, this assumption still lies at the heart of the institution of marriage. Thepresumed consent of a woman, in a free marriage contract, to her subordi-nate status gives a voluntarist gloss to an essentially ascribed status ofwife. If the assumption of natural subjection did not still hold, liberaldemocratic theorists would long ago have begun to ask why it is that anostensibly free and equal individual should always agree to enter a contractwhich subordinates her to another such individual. They would long agohave begun to question the character of an institution in which the initialagreement a wife deprives her of the right to retract her consent to providesexual services to her husband, and which gives him the legal right to forceher to submit. If contemporary democratic theorists are to distance them-selves from the patriarchal assumptions of their predecessors they mustbegin to ask whether a person can be, at one and the same time, a free demo-cratic citizen and a wife who gives up a vital aspect of her freedom and indi-viduality, the freedom to refuse consent and say no to the violation of theintegrity of her person. . . .

This contradictory perception of women is a major reason why it is sodifficult for a woman who has been raped to secure the conviction of herattacker(s). Public opinion, the police and the courts are willing to identifyenforced submission with consent, and the reason why this identification ispossible is that it is widely believed that if a woman says no her words haveno meaning, since she really means yes. It is widely regarded as perfectlyreasonable for a man to reinterpret explicit rejection of his advances as con-sent.9 Thus women find that their speech is persistently and systematicallyinvalidated. Such invalidation would be incomprehensible if the two sexesactually shared the same status as individuals. No person with a secure,recognized standing as an individual could be seen as someone who consis-tently said the opposite of what they meant and who, therefore, could justifi-ably have their words reinterpreted by others. . . .

Political theorists who take seriously the question of the conceptualfoundations and social conditions of democracy can no longer avoid thefeminist critique of marriage and personal life. The critique raises some awk-ward and often embarrassing questions, but questions that have to be faced ifdemocracy is to be more than a mens club writ large and the patriarchalstructure of the liberal democratic state is to be challenged. The assumptionsand practices which govern the everyday, personal lives of women and men,including their sexual lives, can no longer be treated as matters remote from

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political life and the concerns of democratic theorists. Womens status asindividuals pervades the whole of their social life, personal and political.

Liberal theorists continue to claim that the structure of social relationsand social inequality is irrelevant to political equality and democratic citi-zenship, so they are no more likely to be impressed by feminists than by anyother radical critics. Advocates of participatory democracy have been reluc-tant to take feminist arguments into account even though these argumentsare, seen in one light, an extension of the participatory democratic claim thatdemocracy extends beyond the state to the organization of society. Theresistance to feminism is particularly ironical because the contemporaryfeminist movement has, under a variety of labels, attempted to put participa-tory democratic organization into practice.10

Feminists deny the liberal claim that private and public life can be under-stood in isolation from each other. One reason for the neglect of J. S. Millsfeminist essay is that his extension of liberal principles to the institution ofmarriage breaches the central liberal separation, established by Locke,between paternal and political rule; or between the impersonal, conventionalpublic sphere and the family, the sphere of natural affection and natural rela-tions. Proponents of participatory democracy have, of course, been willing tochallenge commonplace conceptions of the public and the private in their dis-cussions of the workplace, but this challenge ignores the insights of femi-nism. It is rarely appreciated that the feminists and participatory democratssee the division between public and private very differently. From the femi-nist perspective participatory democratic arguments remain within the patri-archal-liberal separation of civil society and state; domestic life has anexceedingly ambiguous relation to this separation, which is a division withinpublic life itself. In contrast, feminists see domestic life, the natural sphereof women, as private, and thus as divided from a public realm encompassingboth economic and political life, the natural arenas of men.11

By failing to take into account the feminist conception of private life,by ignoring the family, participatory democratic arguments for the democra-tization of economic life have neglected a crucial dimension of democraticsocial transformation (and I include my Participation and Democratic The-ory here).

I have drawn attention to the problem posed by the assumption thatwomens natural place is a private one, as wife and mother in the home, for

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. . .

arguments about the educative and developmental consequences of politicalparticipation. It might be argued that this problem is much less pressingtoday than in Mills time because many married women have now enteredthe public world of paid employment and so they, if not housewives, alreadyhave their horizons widened and will gain a political education if enterprisesare democratized. In Australia, for example, in 1977 women formed 35% ofthe labor force and 63% of these women were married.12 The reality behindthe statistics, however, is that womens status as workers is as uncertain andambiguous as our status as citizens and both reflect the more fundamentalproblem of our status as individuals. The conventional but implicitassumption is that work is undertaken in a workplace, not within the pri-vate home, and that a worker is male someone who has his need for aclean place of relaxation, clean clothes, food and care of his children pro-vided for him by his wife. When a wife enters paid employment it is signifi-cant for her position as worker that no one asks who performs theseservices for her. In fact, married women workers do two shifts, one in theoffice or factory, the other at home. A large question arises here why mem-bers of enterprises who are already burdened with two jobs should be eagerto take on the new responsibilities, as well as exercise the opportunities, thatdemocratization would bring.

The relative importance of the two components of the wifes double day,and so the evaluation of womens status as workers, is reflected, as Eisen-stein notes, in the popular use of the term working mother which simulta-neously asserts womens first responsibility to motherhood and hersecondary status as worker.13 Again, the question has to be asked howworkers of secondary status could, without some very large changes beingmade, take their place as equal participants in a democratized workplace. . ..Secondly, women still have to win the struggle against discrimination byemployers and unions before they can participate as equals. Finally, it has tobe recognized that the workplace is structured by a sexual division of laborwhich poses still further complex problems for equality and participation.Women are segregated into certain occupational categories (womenswork) and they are concentrated in non-supervisory and low-skilled andlow-status jobs. It is precisely workers in such jobs that empirical researchhas shown to be the least likely to participate. . . .

The struggles of the organized feminist movement of the last 150 yearshave achieved a great deal. An exceptional woman can now become PrimeMinisterbut that particular achievement leaves untouched the structure of

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social life of unexceptional women, of women as a social category. Theyremain in an uncertain position as individuals, workers and citizens, andpopular opinion echoes Rousseaus pronouncement that nature herself hasdecreed that women, . . . should be at the mercy of mans judgement.14 Thecreation of a free and egalitarian sexual and personal life is the most difficultto achieve of all the changes necessary to build a true democratic societyprecisely because it is not something remote from everyday life that can beapplauded in abstract slogans while life, and the subjection of women, goeson as usual. Democratic ideals and politics have to be put into practice in thekitchen, the nursery and the bedroom; they come home, as J. S. Mill wrote(p. 136) to the person and hearth of every male head of a family, and ofeveryone who looks forward to being so. It is a natural biological fact ofhuman existence that only women can bear children, but that fact gives nowarrant whatsoever for the separation of social life into two sexually definedspheres of private (female) existence and (male) public activity. This separa-tion is ultimately grounded in the mistaken extension of the argument fromnatural necessity to child-rearing. There is nothing in nature that preventsfathers from sharing equally in bringing up their children, although there is agreat deal in the organization of social and economic life that works againstit. Women cannot win an equal place in democratic productive life and citi-zenship if they are deemed destined for a one ascribed task, but nor canfathers take an equal share in reproductive activities without a transforma-tion in our conception of work and of the structure of economic life. . . .

Recent feminist theoretical work offers new perspectives and insightsinto the problem of democratic theory and practice, including the question ofindividualism and participatory democracy, and an appropriate conception ofpolitical life.15It has been hard to imagine what a democratic form of sociallife might look like for much of the past century. Male-dominated politicalparties, sects and their theoreticians have attempted to bury the old utopianpolitical movements which are part of the history of the struggle for democ-racy and womens emancipation, and which argued for prefigurative formsof political organization and activity. The lesson to be learnt from the past isthat a democratic theory and practice that is not at the same time feministmerely serves to maintain a fundamental form of domination and so makes amockery of the ideals and values that democracy is held to embody.

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ENDNOTES1 B. R. Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty (Princeton, Princeton University

Press, 1974), p. 273. The comment on citizen-soldiers is very revealing. Thereis no reason why women should not be armed citizens and help defend thepatrie (as guerrilla fighters and armies have shown). However, one of themajor arguments of the anti-suffragists in Britain and the U.S.A. was that theenfranchisement of women would fatally weaken the state because women bynature were incapable of bearing arms. I have commented on these issues in C.Pateman, Women, Nature and the Suffrage, Ethics, 90: 4 (1980), pp. 56475.Some other aspects of the patriarchal argument from nature are discussedbelow.

2 S. Verba, N. Nie and J.-O. Kim, Participation and Political Equality (Cambridge,Cambridge University Press. 1978), p. 8.

3 J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2nd edn, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, Cam-bridge University Press, 1967), I. 47, 48; II. 82.

4 For amplification of these necessarily brief comments see T. Brennan and C. Pate-man, Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth: Women and the Origins ofLiberalism, Political Studies, 27 (1979). pp. 183200: R. Hamilton, The Lib-eration of Women: A Study of Patriarchy and Capitalism (London, Allen andUnwin, 1978); H. Hartmann. Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job Segregation bySex, Signs, 1: 3. Pt 2 (1976), pp. 13770: A. Oakley, Housewife (Har-mondsworth, Penguin, 1976), Chs. 2 and 3.

5 Page references in the text are to J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, in J. S. Milland H. Taylor, Essays on Sex Equality, ed. A. Rossi (Chicago, Chicago Uni-versity Press, 1970).

6 Mill, and many other feminists, see the lack of a sense of justice (a consequence ofconfinement to domestic life) as the major defect in womens characters. Theassertion that the defect is natural to women is central to the beliefignoredby writers on democracythat women are inherently subversive of politicalorder and a threat to the state; on this question see C. Pateman, The Disorderof Women: Women, Love and the Sense of Justice, Ethics, 91: 1 (1980), pp.2034.

7 It need not be granted. The Subjection owes a good deal to William Thompsons(much neglected) Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against thePretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political, and Hence inCivil and Domestic, Slavery (New York, Source Book Press, 1970), originallypublished in 1825. Thompson was very willing to question these matters in hisvision of a cooperative-socialist and sexually egalitarian future.

8 For an early critique see, for example, M. Goot and E. Reid, Women and VotingStudies: Mindless Matrons or Sexist Scientism, Sage Professional Papers inContemporary Sociology, I (1975); more recently, for example, J. Evans,Attitudes to Women in American Political Science, Government and Opposi-tion, 15: I, (1980), pp. 10114.

FEMINISM AND DEMOCRACY

9 A detailed discussion of the paradoxical manner in which political theorists havetreated womens consent, and references to the empirical evidence on whichthese comments are based can be found in C. Pateman, Women and Consent,Political Theory, 8: 2, (1980), pp. 14968. In some legal jurisdictions, forexample the States of New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria in Aus-tralia, rape within marriage is now a criminal offense. Legal reform isextremely welcome, but the wider social problem remains; one of the saddestconclusions I reached during my research was that rather than rape being aunique act that stands in complete opposition to the consensual relations thatordinarily obtain between the sexes . . . rape is revealed as the extreme expres-sion of, or an extension of, the accepted and natural relation between menand women (p. 161).

10 On the other hand, the experience of women in the participatory democratic NewLeft was a major impetus to the revival of the feminist movement. The NewLeft provided an arena for political action, the development of skills, and wasideologically egalitarianbut it remained male supremacist in its organizationand, especially, its personal relations: see S. Evans, Personal Politics (NewYork, Knopf, 1979).

11 For some comments on the ambiguous place of the family, see my The Disorderof Women: on the wider question of public and private, see C. Pateman,Feminist Critiques of the Public-Private Dichotomy, in Conceptions of thePublic and Private in Social Life, ed. S. Benn and G. Gaus (London, CroomHelm, forthcoming).

12 A steady increase in the employment of married women has been one of the moststriking features of the post-war development of capitalism. However, it isworth re-emphasizing that (working-class) wives have always been in the paidworkforce. In Britain in 1851 about a quarter of married women wereemployed (Oakley, op. cit., p. 44). Moreover, domestic service, until the late1930s, was a major occupation for (usually single) women. One reason thatMill is able to overlook the fundamental importance of wives (private) chil-drearing duties for their public status is that middle-class mothers had otherwomen to look after their children; similarly, upper- and middle-class suf-fragettes could go to prison secure in the knowledge that domestic servantswere caring for their homes and children (on this point see J. Liddington and J.Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Womens Suffrage Move-ment (London, Virago, 1978)).

13 Z. R. Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York, Longman,1980), pp. 2078.

14 J.-J. Rousseau, Emile, trans. B. Foxley (London, Dent, 1911), p. 328.15 See, for example, the discussion by R. P. Petchesky, Reproductive Freedom:

Beyond A Womans Right to Choose, Signs, 5: 4 (1980), pp. 66185.

FEMINISM AND DEMOCRACY

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