Delba Winthrop, "Tocqueville's American Woman and "The True Conception of Democratic Progress" in Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009)

Excerpt:

Women, although the moral and intellectual equals of men, should remain barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen? To us, the thought is repugnant, not to say wrongheaded.

At first glance there seems no better place to turn to—or run from— than Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the classic rationalization of male porcine prejudices against women. Tocqueville admires American women for their self-restraint and submissiveness to men, for their recognition of the necessity of this behavior, and for their opinion of its nobility.  These women seem to put society’s (or men’s?) good before their own.  Although Tocqueville applauds them for seeing that their only hope of happiness lies in domesticity, he never says that American women are happy.  Rather, they tend to be sad and resolute, albeit proud.  Yet their pride has limited justification according to Tocqueville’s own logic, for he remarks repeatedly on the pusillanimity of the Americans in their preoccupation with mundane familiar matters.  In sum, Tocqueville seems hostile to the just demands of women for social, political, and economic equality, and unconcerned with their quest for self-fulfillment.  No wonder he erred in believing that American women could remain content with the situation he described.

I shall argue that this impression of Tocqueville’s position is not simply incorrect but, rather, incomplete and, therefore, misleading.  The problematic recommendation of moral and intellectual equality for women, accompanied by social (and political and economic) inferiority, must be appreciated in context.  In context, it implies a devastating critique of American, or modern democratic, life as a whole.

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