ABSTRACT
I will now turn from tort law to the area of contract law in order to further explore the anomalous position of women with regard to selfhood, personhood and individualism. Contract law focuses attention upon the question of consent and, historically, upon an image of persons with an autonomous will.302 The basis of contract law is that it regulates obligations that are entered into by ‘agreement’, in contrast with tort law in which the obligations, for example, the duty to behave with reasonable care so as not to harm anyone foreseeably affected by our actions, are imposed by the courts. There has been much feminist analysis of the way in which women’s consent has been treated in the operation of law, for example, in the areas of rape303 and consent to medical consent.304 Just as Marx305 points out that workers were not really free to choose whether or not to work, so women could be viewed as historically pressured into the traditional marriage contract. The relationship between the employment contract and the marriage contract and their relationship to personhood is the focus of this chapter. I will then use this analysis to look at ‘possessive individualism’ in more detail in the next chapter.
