The Lippincott Award was established by the Association to recognize a work of exceptional quality by a living political theorist that is still considered significant after a time span of at least 15 years since the original date of publication.

Award Committee:  Philip Pettit, Princeton University, Chair;  Mary L. (Molly) Shanley, Vassar College; S. Sara Monoson, Northwestern University.

Recipient: Carole Pateman,  Professor of Political Science, University of California at Los Angeles.

Book: The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988)

Citation: The Sexual Contract  is a striking and highly original account of the problems of freedom and subordination in modern and contemporary political thought.  This richly textured study offers a powerful critique of social contract theory, raising questions about its philosophical integrity and its political import. It is widely hailed as an outstanding work in contemporary feminism and democratic political theory: one that has made a deep and unsettling impact in both areas.

Starting from analyses of the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and others, Pateman argues that the social contract they envisage constitutes,  not an agreement among equal individual actors that submits all to the authority of the state, but  a device for ensuring male rule over women. Contract theorists generally assume that women lack the capacities required for consent to the social contract, she observes, and assume in particular that each woman has consented to be ruled by an individual man, her husband.  Their theories project a brotherhood of equals that subordinates women through the marriage contract and through exclusion from full membership in political society.  

The effect of these theories is to posit a "sexual contract" that  precedes the formation of political society by the social contract.  Social contract theorists do not leave women behind in the "state of nature", according to Pateman; instead, they incorporate women into civil society in an explicitly subordinate position. Women are denied any place in the public sphere that is created by the social contract, and they are given an inferior status in the private sphere, yet they are depicted as agreeing in effect to each. Social contract theory establishes and legitimizes the subordination of women in the public and the private world. 

The Sexual Contract also offers a striking re-evaluation of an array of contemporary contractual relations that, like the marriage contract, rest on the peculiar myth of property in the person (employment contracts, prostitution contracts, surrogate mother contracts). Pateman argues that feminists and others cannot hope to be able to repair or rescue contract theory, looking for a "proper" contract that might be, for example, uncoerced, undertaken in an "original position," or entered into by genuinely equal partners. On her account, contracts that assume property in the person will not provide a satisfactory grounding for a theory of liberation.

Arguing that the story of universal freedom underlying social contract theory masks the subordination of half of humanity, The Sexual Contract challenges the premises of liberal political theory. In so doing, it has reshaped scholarship in the fields of democratic theory, political participation, and feminist theory.