Democracy in America — Volume 2Tocqueville, Alexis de
Philosophy
Democracy in America — Volume 2
Tocqueville, Alexis de
Democracy -- United States; United States -- Politics and government; United States -- Social conditions
I Have shown how democracy destroys or modifies the different
inequalities which originate in society; but is this all? or does it
not ultimately affect that great inequality of man and woman which has
seemed, up to the present day, to be eternally based in human nature? I
believe that the social changes which bring nearer to the same level
the father and son, the master and servant, and superiors and inferiors
generally speaking, will raise woman and make her more and more the
equal of man. But here, more than ever, I feel the necessity of making
myself clearly understood; for there is no subject on which the coarse
and lawless fancies of our age have taken a freer range.
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 readily be 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 does not consist in making
beings so dissimilar do pretty nearly the same things, but in getting
each of them to fulfil their respective tasks in the best possible
manner. The Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle
of political economy which governs the manufactures of our age, by
carefully dividing the duties of man from those of woman, in order that
the great work of society may be the better carried on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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