I trace key arguments of Jean–Jacques Rousseau's political philosophy to Louise Dupin's Ouvrage sur les femmes to reveal that early modern feminist thought contributed directly to social contract theory. Rousseau applied Dupin's mockery of the marriage contract to dismiss as fraudulent the political contract that previous natural law philosophers had imagined between subjects and sovereign. He then made mutually exclusive property the foundation of the republican social contract, just as Dupin had stipulated separately owned property as the condition of equality in marriage. Yet Rousseau rejected the feminist content of Dupin's arguments, despite incorporating her strategies. Paradoxically, while Dupin, a monarchist, construed marriage along the egalitarian lines of a friendship based on ‘la douceur du commerce', the republican Rousseau invested men with the douceur of the absolute sovereign, masking the contractual character of marriage by positing women’s subordination to men as a matter of passionate attachment.

我将让-雅克·卢梭的政治哲学的关键论点追溯到路易丝·杜邦的《女性权利》，以揭示早期现代女权主义思想对社会契约理论的直接贡献。卢梭运用杜邦对婚姻契约的嘲弄来驳斥先前自然法哲学家所想象的臣民与主权者之间的政治契约是欺诈性的。然后，他将相互排斥的财产作为共和社会契约的基础，正如杜宾将财产分开规定为婚姻平等的条件一样。然而，卢梭拒绝了杜平论点中的女权主义内容，尽管她采用了她的策略。矛盾的是，虽然君主主义者杜邦按照基于“la douceur du commerce”的友谊的平等主义路线来解释婚姻，但共和派卢梭却将男人投资于douceur 绝对主权，通过将女性从属于男性作为一种激情依恋的问题来掩盖婚姻的契约特征。