Friday, January 11, 2008

From 1830... to 2008

In 1831, a young Alexis de Tocqueville left France to commence a thorough investigation on America's society, economy, and political system. When he returned, he published his findings in the classic Democracy in America, chronicling both the weaknesses and strengths of our nation. When I read his observations on the women in America, I was surprised— in less than two hundred years, a lot has changed.

"There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make of man and woman beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things— their occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may be readily conceived, that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded; and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women. It is not thus that the Americans understand that species of democratic equality which may be established between the sexes. They admit, that as nature has appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral constitution of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a distinct employment to their various faculties; and they hold that improvement [consists] in getting [men and women] to fulfill their respective tasks in the best possible manner.

Nor have the Americans ever supposed that one consequence of democratic principles is the subversion of marital power, of the confusion of the natural authorities in families. They hold that every association must have a head in order to accomplish its object, and that the natural head of the conjugal association is man. They do not therefore deny him the right of directing his partner. I never observed that the women of America consider conjugal authority as a fortunate usurpation of their rights, nor that they thought themselves degraded by submitting to it. It appeared to me, on the contrary, that they attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will, and make it their boast to bend themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off. Such is the feeling expressed by the most virtuous of their sex.

I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply— to the superiority of their women."

Excerpted from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Chapter XII: "How Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes".

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