We are all too familiar with the decline of the American family and its associated phenomena: divorce, deadbeat dads, female-headed households, promiscuity, abortion, out-of-wedlock births, domestic violence, juvenile delinquency, and addiction. The list of pathologies is long, and the statistics are grim. It was not always thus. The most famous visitor to the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, praised the well-ordered home life of its citizens. Further, in his great work Democracy in America, he argued that the nation’s republican political order rested upon this firm domestic foundation.

Tocqueville follows in a long tradition of political thinkers—from Plato to Rousseau, from Aristotle to Montesquieu—who have been attentive to the links between the domestic and political realms. Understanding these connections involves an inquiry into mœurs (or “mores”), an elusive term that Tocqueville initially defines as “habits of the heart.”REF Although he goes on to indicate that he will give the term a more capacious meaning encompassing “habits of the mind” as well as the heart, the core of his inquiry remains with sentiments and “mores properly so-called.”REF Their importance cannot be overestimated: Based on what he had seen of the depravity of Europe, Tocqueville ventured to pronounce that “almost all the disorders of society are born around the domestic hearth, not far from the nuptial bed.”REF

In view of the degree to which our own dysfunction, public and private, has increased, perhaps we need to remind ourselves of the way we once were. In practice, of course, a simple return to the past is neither possible nor entirely desirable. Nonetheless, if Tocqueville’s insight—that healthy politics depends on healthy homes—is true, then sound policy in the 21st century will require a sophisticated awareness of the state of American sexual mores as the beginning point for serious thought about whether and how the family might be rescued and reinvigorated and the nation thereby righted.

We can start by following Tocqueville’s comparative method: He reveals the essential features of the new, democratic American household by juxtaposing it to the old, aristocratic European model. In tracing his presentation, the differences between the American scene then and now will be clear even to observers less perspicacious than America’s favorite Frenchman.

Puritan Origins: Faith and the Family

Democracy in America is composed of two volumes, published five years apart in 1835 and 1840. Although Tocqueville is emphatic that the “two parts complete one another and form a single work,” each volume has a distinct character: The first sketches “the visage of the political world”; the second, “the aspect of civil society.”REF

Tocqueville’s account of the United States begins not with the Revolution of 1776 or the Founding of 1789, but rather with the emigrant embarkations on the New World in the early 17th century.REF He studies the nation in the “swaddling clothes” of its “cradle.” Tocqueville is intent on understanding the fundamental features of this commencement, which put a genetic stamp on the future. As he says: “Peoples always feel their origins.”REF

Although there were various early arrivals by various peoples and nations to various parts of the continent, Tocqueville is most struck by the Puritan settlements in New England. “Everything there,” says Tocqueville, “was singular and original.”REF Other colonies “had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of New England brought with them admirable elements of order and morality; they went to the wilderness accompanied by their wives and children.”REF This original domesticity had profound ramifications. Well-educated and well-off in England, the Pilgrims did not emigrate because of dire poverty or to improve their fortunes, but rather “to obey a purely intellectual need…. [T]hey wanted to make an idea triumph.”REF Like all colonists, the Puritans were adventurers, but of a unique sort: Tocqueville calls them “pious adventurers” who wanted to “pray to God in freedom.”REF

Tocqueville is critical of the narrow sectarianism of the Puritans, pronouncing some of their laws “bizarre or tyrannical” on account of their interference with “the domain of conscience.” Nonetheless, in general, he greatly admires the way in which family, faith, and democratic liberty were harmonized in the New England towns.REF He claims that this special cooperation constitutes “the point of departure”—the point or “first cause” that establishes the national character and marks out the trajectory of the nation:

[T]he character of Anglo-American civilization…is the product (and this point of departure ought constantly to be present in one’s thinking) of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other, but which, in America, they have succeeded in incorporating somehow into one another and combining marvelously. I mean to speak of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.REF

Although family is not mentioned in this passage, it turns out that the key to this marvelous combination is in fact the family, since it is within the domestic circle that mœurs are shaped. Family is the mediating institution between religion and politics. Despite the official separation of church and state, there is an “indirect action” of religion on politics through mœurs. “It is in regulating the family,” says Tocqueville, that religion “works to regulate the state.”REF Religious governance of the private sphere—in other words, the superintendence of sexual purity in particular—is direct, whereas the beneficial political consequences of that moral control are indirect. Religion serves as the “safeguard of mores,” and mores then become the “guarantee of laws.”

'It is in regulating the family,' says Tocqueville, that religion 'works to regulate the state.'

So powerful is this influence among Americans that Tocqueville declares that religion—although it “never mixes directly in the government of society” in America—should be regarded as “the first of their political institutions.”REF Religion underwrites freedom not by preaching freedom, but by doing the opposite: guiding the proper use of freedom by making men, and especially women, moral. This accounts for Tocqueville’s paradoxical claim that “it is when [religion] does not speak of freedom that it best teaches Americans the art of being free.”REF

According to Tocqueville, religion’s message of restraint and obedience is internalized most thoroughly by women. Religion, he says, “reigns as a sovereign over the soul of woman, and it is woman who makes mœurs.”REF Interestingly, Tocqueville admits that religion is often insufficient to control male behavior; only women can keep men in line. By embodying the religious principle of self-control, women enable men to arrive “at happiness through regularity of life.”REF Women’s religiously fortified moral power greatly enhances the status of marriage: “Of the world’s countries, America is surely the one where the bond of marriage is most respected and where they have conceived the highest and most just idea of conjugal happiness.”REF The virtues engendered around the hearth are then diffused into the wider world: “[T]he American draws from his home the love of order, which he afterwards brings into affairs of state.”REF In this way, women and the sanctity of the home are presented as the foundation of the democratic republic.

Even though, in the 1830s, the United States already presented a vast landscape with distinct regions and regional identities, Tocqueville finds that the ethos of New England—with its unique amalgam of family, faith, and freedom—predominates.REF The principles and spirit of Plymouth Rock have “penetrated the entire confederation. They now exert their influence…over the whole American world.”REF

Family Redefined: Property

In addition to its structuring of sexual passion through the religiously sanctified marital vow of fidelity, the democratic household is also an economic entity. Tocqueville argues that the shift from an aristocratic to an egalitarian society fundamentally altered the very shape and meaning of “family.” Americans still use the same word, but its property basis and moral content have changed.

It is important to remember that Tocqueville’s investigation of the New World is always informed by his acute awareness of this departure from the modes and orders of the ancien régime. Aristocracy and democracy are like Old and New Testaments. So profound a reorientation has, in effect, generated “two distinct humanities.”REF Accordingly, Tocqueville can make striking pronouncements like this one: “In America, the family, taking this word in its Roman and aristocratic sense, does not exist.”REF What he means is that patriarchal power has been uprooted, not through feminist consciousness-raising, but instead quite literally by changes in estate law that have pulled their domains out from under fathers. Property and hence power have been dispersed.

In the past, the right of primogeniture and the law of entail brought great landed estates into being and preserved them through the generations. “The result,” according to Tocqueville, “is that family spirit is in a way materialized in the land. The family represents the land, the land represents the family; it perpetuates its name, its origin, its glory, its power, its virtues.”REF

The aristocratic family reached far back into the past (all those oil portraits of the ancestors) and far forward into the future.REF By contrast, the democratic family lives under a much-compressed time-horizon, barely seeing beyond the moment: “[E]ach concentrates on the comfort of the present; he dreams of the establishment of the generation that is going to follow, and nothing more.”REF Tocqueville is describing the advent of what we now call “the nuclear family”: just parents and children (and increasingly few of those).

The revolution in estate law that establishes “equal partition of the father’s goods among all the children” works both an economic and a moral transformation.REF Without primogeniture, the family as a multigenerational enterprise fades away. The aristocratic family had aimed for a kind of earthly eternity. Think what it means for a first-born son to be known as the 36th Earl of Arundel, dating back to 1138—that is “the spirit of family.” Democracy shatters that spirit; as Tocqueville ominously says, “whenever the spirit of family ends, individual selfishness reenters.”REF Equal siblings are free to pursue their individual choices, no longer subordinated to the honor and destiny of the family name. The family has become “immediate.” Although one is still born into a family in the sense that one has biological or adoptive relations, that immediate family comes to be viewed as a sort of launching pad for individual success (or a landing pad in case of failure to launch).

The economic consequence of this liberation of the individual is the leveling of ranks. There are no longer castes or hereditary distinctions.REF There is still wealth—plenty of it—but wealth is diffused and the number of wealth-seekers infinitely increased: Tocqueville says he knows of no country “where the love of money holds a larger place in the heart of man.”REF The rich, and especially the sons of the rich, focus on “transferable assets.” They pursue commerce and the professions. Social mobility increases. There is a tremendous churn of fortunes, with many rising while others fall. Soon enough, the rungs on the ladder are reversed and then reversed again. However, the range within which this rapid oscillation occurs is fairly narrow; those in the middle predominate to such an extent that Tocqueville can declare that “almost all Americans are comfortable.”REF

In sum, the democratic household, as presented by Tocqueville, is compounded of two elements: a suprapolitical religious dimension and a subpolitical economic dimension. The family is the locus of both faith and property, shaping citizens who are devotedly otherworldly and intensely this-worldly.

Tocqueville is fascinated by the way Americans, from the Puritans forward, combine a tranquil belief in the soul’s transcendence with a restless quest for material well-being. He explains how in the moral realm, all is fixed and the human mind “bows with respect before truths it accepts without discussion.”REF Meanwhile, in the economic and political realms, all is innovating motion and agitated striving. Tocqueville remarks that “these two tendencies [obedience and independence], apparently so opposed, advance in accord and seem to lend each other a mutual support.”REF Even 200 years after the Puritan “point of departure,” Tocqueville observes this surprising partnership as Jacksonian-era Americans proceed at a hectic pace through the workweek and then strictly observe the Sabbath.REF

Within the Bosom of the Family

In Volume One, Tocqueville views the family from the outside, taking note of prominent features like the fact that the Puritans arrived en famille and were, as we still say, “puritanical” or the fact that inheritance law, in equalizing siblings, altered both family and economy. In Volume Two, when he revisits the domestic hearth, Tocqueville tells us that his aim is “to penetrate more deeply and enter into the bosom of the family.”REF This interior exploration produces a memorable set of five chapters that contain his best-known observations, including the following remarkable declaration that closes the inquiry:

As for me, I shall not hesitate to say it: although in the United States the woman scarcely leaves the domestic circle and is in certain respects very dependent within it, nowhere does her position seem higher to me; and now that I approach the end of this book where I have shown so many considerable things done by Americans, if one asked me to what do I think one must principally attribute the singular prosperity and growing force of this people, I would answer that it is to the superiority of its women.REF

This statement is something other than the gallantry of a Frenchman, since Tocqueville is in fact critical of the falsity of European seducers whose flattery of women hides intellectual disdain for them.REF To fully understand what Tocqueville means by the superiority of American women and how it could be responsible for national greatness, we need to follow his unfolding argument about equality.

Tocqueville shows himself to be an astute disciple of an earlier French philosopher, the great Baron de Montesquieu. It was Montesquieu who asserted in The Spirit of the Laws that each type of regime has a specific passion that serves as its motive force or “spring.” In the case of democracy, that spring is equality.

By equality, Tocqueville means much more than an abstract principle like “equality before the law”; he also means more than the actual equality of conditions that existed in America.REF What Tocqueville instead stresses is the primary passion for equality (an “ardent” and “insatiable” passion) that generates and energizes the democratic way of life. After first sketching how this passion forms the souls of democratic individuals, Tocqueville examines how these equality-loving individuals will comport themselves in various social settings and roles. He is especially interested in seeing what happens to those relationships in which we might expect inequality to be present and perhaps even integral.

By equality, Tocqueville means much more than an abstract principle like 'equality before the law.' What Tocqueville instead stresses is the primary passion for equality that generates and energizes the democratic way of life.

In other words, Tocqueville examines how the advent of equality will transform that bastion of inequality: the family. Traditionally, the relations that formed the family were all relations of inequality: Fathers ruled children, husbands ruled wives, and masters ruled servants or slaves (slavery has almost always been a domestic institution). It is worth remembering that the word “despot” (which is now a term of opprobrium) was originally simply the Greek term for the head of the household.

Fathers and Sons

Given all this, it is not a surprise that when Tocqueville makes good on his plan to “enter into the bosom of the family,” he does so initially from the spear side. Remember that the aristocratic family had been defined by “paternal authority.”REF The father had been “the organ of tradition, the interpreter of custom, the arbiter of mores.”REF The weakening of that authority and its correlate, filial obedience, was already common knowledge in the early 19th century. Tocqueville presses his observations further, noting that the democratic sloughing off of the cold and formal elements of the father–son relationship actually opens up space for a new tenderness: “[T]he relations of father and son become more intimate and sweeter; rule and authority are met with less; confidence and affection are often greater; and it seems that the natural bond tightens while the social bond is loosened.”REF

During childhood, when the inequality of age is pronounced, fathers retain some “domestic dictatorship,” but it is quickly replaced by the shared standing of adulthood.REF Just as sons attain equality with their fathers, brothers become equals as the prerogatives of the eldest disappear. The stuffiness of the aristocratic family gives way to the familiar warmth of the democratic family. Think of the terms of endearment like “dad,” “daddy,” “poppa,” and “pops” that have replaced the old-fashioned “Father.” Tocqueville frankly regards this liberalization as a gain for individuals who benefit from the new intimacy. Sketching a lovely picture of the “sweetness of these democratic mores,” he observes that even the “fiery enemies of democracy” are susceptible to its charms as they have quickly “gotten used to being addressed familiarly by their children.”REF

On the basis of our longer experience with the democratized family, however, we might wonder whether “natural bonds” alone are sufficiently reliable to hold together a societal institution. Interestingly, Tocqueville’s own verdict on this transformation contained a significant reservation. While he stated his belief that “the individual gains by it,” he also said that he did “not know if, all in all, society loses by this change.”REF Yes, many modern fathers are wonderfully close to their children, but there may also be more risk of male abandonment when the buttresses of “social bonds” are weakened.

Further, it seems that Tocqueville simply assumed the uncontested continuance of parental authority during childhood. However, that too seems to have waned over time, as evidence the tiny tots who peremptorily declare that “you’re not the boss of me.” A whole genre of reality-television shows has sprung up to instruct clueless and overly tender American parents in how to discipline their children, with the lessons usually doled out by a proper British nanny.REF

The American Girl

After documenting the scaled-back authority of democratic dads, Tocqueville dramatically shifts to the distaff side with a chapter entitled “Education of Girls in the United States.” At first glance, his treatment of the family is strikingly sex-segregated, perhaps mirroring the sharpness of the gender delineations in that pre-feminist era (before coeducation, androgyny, and gender fluidity). However, that cannot be the full story because, although Tocqueville discusses fathers and sons first, he does so only to trace the erosion of patriarchy.

In effect, the new democratic tenderness between fathers and sons lessens the traditional divide between the treatment of boys and girls and could be said also to assimilate men to women, at least insofar as fathers come to rely more on love than on fear. In the chapter on girls, we learn of a new dimension of this democratic transformation—one that now assimilates girls to boys (and potentially women to men). If the new order of equality brings boys affection, it brings girls freedom. Tocqueville is in fact astonished at the extraordinary freedom they enjoy. The American girl—“full of confidence in her strength”—is a truly new phenomenon in the history of the world.REF

Explaining her precocious independence brings Tocqueville back to some specifically Anglo–American factors. As we have seen, his analysis often toggles between general lessons about democratization (as they come to sight in America) and acknowledgment of American specifics, whether they be antidemocratic elements like slavery or uniquely prodemocracy elements like the country’s Puritan origins.

To account for the startling self-reliance of the American girl, Tocqueville once again refers to the interaction of Protestantism, long-standing political liberty, and democratic equality. Just as American boys quickly escape paternal authority, the girls escape “maternal tutelage”—and they do so with the approval of their mothers, who quite deliberately release young women to a different kind of tutelage, the school of experience: “The great picture of the world is constantly exposed before her; far from seeking to conceal the view of it from her, they uncover more and more of it to her regard every day and teach her to consider it with a firm and tranquil eye.”REF

Instead of the highly protected, “almost cloistered education” still given to young women in Europe, American girls are worldly-wise from a young age.REF By fitting them for the intelligent use of their unexampled freedom, their education approximates that given to their brothers. At the same time, Tocqueville makes clear that there are sex-specific elements to this education. Yes, the reason of women is cultivated, but the main purpose of that reason is to fortify their virtue, which is to say their sexual virtue. Young women need “to arm” their reason to “defend” their chastity from the importunities of men and, maybe more fundamentally, to “combat” the tyranny of their own desires.REF As Tocqueville notes, the self-controlled or self-ruling American girl “has pure mores rather than a chaste mind.”REF

This sexual discipline on the part of young women is presented as a paradigmatic example of self-government. The right kind of democratic education can counteract the perils of democracy—in particular, the tendency for liberty to become license—and thereby actually preserve democracy. Tocqueville’s description is reminiscent of those famous lines from Federalist No. 10 where Publius speaks of finding “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”REF For Tocqueville, female education is such a remedy. Although reason is the prime ingredient, religion serves as a kind of moral supplement. Tocqueville explains that Americans (despite being “a very religious people”) “have first made incredible efforts to get individual independence to rule itself, and it is only when they have reached the last limits of human force that they have finally called religion to aid them.”REF

The right kind of democratic education can counteract the perils of democracy—in particular, the tendency for liberty to become license—and thereby actually preserve democracy.

Tocqueville admits that there is a downside to this proto-feminist solution. Making women responsible for themselves means they will have more sense than sensibility; prudence will keep emotional spontaneity in check. As a result, Tocqueville foresees less charm, amiability, and imagination, and he does not hesitate to call this new breed “honest and cold.”REF Although he grants that American women remain delicately feminine in manners and dress—gender-bending “bloomers” did not hit the fashion scene until the 1850s, and pant-wearing did not gain full acceptability until the next century—they “sometimes show themselves to be men in mind and heart.”REF

A word cloud of these chapters would reveal just how manly Tocqueville’s portrait of the American woman is. Among the descriptors are “audacity,” “confidence,” “courage,” “firmness,” “independence,” “indomitable energy,” “internal force,” “manly reason,” “strength of will,” and both “virile energy” and “virile habits.”

The American Matron

Yet a funny thing happens when the girl marries. The “freedom and pleasure” of her childhood home are exchanged overnight for the strict confinement of the marital dwelling.REF This restriction to “the small circle of interests and domestic duties” is enforced, Tocqueville says, by “an inexorable public opinion.”REF

Aware of the social expectations of domesticity that attach to republican marriage, a young woman “finds the energy to submit to them in the firmness of her reason and in the virile habits her education has given her.”REF It helps that these marriages are not arranged, but instead based on a woman’s own consent. Moreover, her enlightenment has taught her to be circumspect about granting that consent. Nonetheless, once committed, the American matron steadfastly abides by the austere requirements of “domestic felicity.”REF

Tocqueville insists that “beneath the features of the wife”—despite her very different role and habits—the spirit of the strong-willed girl is still present and unchanged.REF He illustrates what he means by sketching a picture of the hardiness of young women who might have been raised in refined homes in the East but who withstand the extreme rigors of Western settlement as they accompany their restless husbands in their unpredictable quest for material success. Tocqueville even appends a long footnote in which he shares his impressions of a visit to the one-room log cabin of such a pioneer couple.

Overall, one would have to say that Tocqueville’s portrait of American marriage is rather grim. While he admires good mores, he certainly does not sugarcoat this domestic felicity. Repeatedly, he stresses the woman’s “self-abnegation” and “sacrifice” in freely placing herself into this “yoke.”REF But we are also given a beautiful statement of its results—a statement that may simply convey a truth about motherhood—in Tocqueville’s vision of the pioneer woman at her hearth:

Her children press around her; they are full of health, turbulence, and energy; they are true sons of the wilderness; from time to time, their mother casts glances full of melancholy and joy at them; to see their strength and her weakness one would say that she has exhausted herself in giving them life and that she does not regret what they have cost her.REF

Tocqueville calls the dwelling within which she presides “the ark of civilization.”REF It is from such isolated outposts that the continent was peopled and the vast forests vanquished. The contents of the cabin (a rifle, a map of the United States, a Bible, a few volumes of Milton and Shakespeare, and a teapot of English porcelain) reflect the virtues of its inhabitants. Tocqueville highlights the “religious resignation” and “tranquil firmness” with which this pioneer woman “confronts all the evils of life without fearing them or braving them.”REF She is resolute.

Comparative Sexual Morality

As he does so often, Tocqueville returns to his comparative method in order to ascertain the source of North America’s strict moral code. He rejects the climatological view “that women are more or less severe in their mores according to whether they live more or less far from the equator.”REF While admitting that hot climates might indeed produce hotter passions, he attaches more weight to social and political factors, especially the degree to which equality of conditions exists.

According to Tocqueville, aristocratic inequality leads to “passing and clandestine unions”—or, to speak more frankly, it encourages both fornication and adultery. How so? Since the scullery maid could never marry the lord of the manor, her only option (other than abstinence, of course) was a licentious one. In the United States, by contrast, “there is no girl who does not believe she can become the wife of the man who prefers her, which makes disorder in mores before marriage very difficult.”REF

Tocqueville gives a straightforward statement of how equality of conditions (that is, the absence of fixed ranks in society) empowers women and thereby facilitates good morals: '[T]here is scarcely a means by which a woman may be persuaded that you love her when you are perfectly free to marry her and do not do it.'

Tocqueville gives a straightforward statement of how equality of conditions (that is, the absence of fixed ranks in society) empowers women and thereby facilitates good morals: “[T]here is scarcely a means by which a woman may be persuaded that you love her when you are perfectly free to marry her and do not do it.”REF This “regularity of mores” extends into marriage as well. As we have already seen, wives in Tocqueville’s America are permanently bound by the choice they freely make. As a result, “public opinion is inexorable toward her faults.”REF By contrast, arranged marriages are practically an invitation to cheat. While not officially countenanced, adultery is often tolerated wherever non-companionate marriage prevails—and, Tocqueville suggests, justifiably so.

This is a world of compensations, and every social order has its costs. Tocqueville points out that the “regularity of mores” in the United States does not do away with all forms of disorderly behavior. In fact, the world’s oldest profession thrives in the New World even though (or maybe because) most women are chaste before marriage and faithful within marriage. The greater prevalence of prostitution in the United States is also linked to the commercial character of American men, who are too busy and too unimaginative for romantic reveries and love affairs. Truth to tell, they are rarely erotic enough to engage in elaborate schemes of seduction and intrigue.

This foray into comparative sexual mores closes with reflections on how France’s revolutionary tumult (which keeps sexual mores unsettled despite increasing democratization) will eventually subside, at which point even the land of dangerous liaisons will become “more regular and more chaste.”REF

Equality of the Sexes

As he nears the end of his inquiry, Tocqueville expresses concern about the radical direction that equality might take in the future. Although the democratic impulse initially targets social or conventional inequalities, “natural” inequalities can be challenged as well, as the transformation of the family demonstrates.

Thus, Tocqueville wonders about the ultimate fate of “the great inequality of man and woman, which until our day has seemed to have its eternal foundation in nature.”REF Must men and women become altogether “alike”—indistinguishable in their talents and temperaments, their roles and responsibilities? In the strongest terms, Tocqueville warns against this most extreme version of egalitarian individualism. He seems to fear that the androgynous, nature-denying interpretation of equality will be pursued in Europe where such notions were already being formulated. As he has throughout Democracy in America, Tocqueville recommends the better understanding and balanced practices of American equality.

Americans (at least those of Tocqueville’s day) believe the sexes are equal in value but that they are not the same. Among them, equality is grounded in differences—and the complementarity of those differences. The phrase “separate but equal” has acquired a deservedly bad reputation because of its dishonest and illegitimate application to race relations, where it served to justify white supremacy, but in essence, Tocqueville defends the concept with respect to the sexual division of labor. Beginning from a conviction that there are genuine natural differences, both physical and moral, Americans have drawn “cleanly separated lines of action for the two sexes,” with men assigned the economic and political spheres and women the domestic sphere.REF Because these separate spheres are equally valued, women in America are “esteemed.”REF

Tocqueville offers evidence for his claim that women are equally valued both as individuals and as women. Although American men are a little tongue-tied and not given to flattery (unlike the continental Lotharios), they do manifest their appreciation in more substantive ways: They “constantly display a full confidence in the reason of their mate and a profound respect for her freedom. They judge that her mind is as capable as a man’s of discovering the naked truth, and her heart firm enough to follow it.”REF Tocqueville also cites the law’s harsh treatment of rape as an indicator of regard for women’s honor (which is to say their womanly virtue) and independence. Despite the general mildness of punishments in the United States, rape is a capital crime. Moreover, in “he said, she said” situations, Americans believe the woman, whereas in France, Tocqueville says, “it is often difficult to find a jury that convicts,” despite the lesser penalty for the outrage.REF

Tocqueville welcomes this American conception of sexual equality. Indeed, he goes so far as to assert that it embodies “the true notion of democratic progress.”REF The situation as described by Tocqueville is one in which women are the intellectual and moral equals of men while remaining socially distinct, largely excluded from economic and political life. Tocqueville frankly acknowledges that men and women in America do not have “the right to do the same things.”REF How can he say that this is an admirable scenario? Or that it is sustainable? Will not future progress require the dismantling of that remaining inferiority?

Earlier in Democracy, Tocqueville had noted that American women, despite their disfranchisement, were well-informed about politics; they “often go to political assemblies and, by listening to political discourses, take a rest from household tedium.”REF Everything he subsequently says about women’s intelligence and reason argues for their capacity to succeed in those wider realms, suggesting that he would not have been surprised by women’s professional success in the century that has passed since they gained the vote. Yet he counsels against the homogenizing extension of equality. The most politically incorrect line in Democracy in America is his prediction that the attempt to “mix” men and women “in all things—labors, pleasures, affairs” and to make them indistinguishable in their roles and rights will produce “only weak men and disreputable women.”REF

Superior Women

Yet America’s women are not “disreputable”; they are superior in Tocqueville’s estimation. Moreover, their superiority is said to be the main cause of the nation’s superiority. Look again at that closing encomium:

As for me, I shall not hesitate to say it: although in the United States the woman scarcely leaves the domestic circle and is in certain respects very dependent within it, nowhere does her position seem higher to me; and now that I approach the end of this book where I have shown so many considerable things done by Americans, if one asked me to what do I think one must principally attribute the singular prosperity and growing force of this people, I would answer that it is to the superiority of its women.REF

Superior to whom, one might ask? Well, superior certainly to Europe’s pampered dolls. American women are serious partners in serious tasks like settling the frontier; they are accorded respect rather than bouquets by their men. More intriguingly, though, Tocqueville may also mean that American women are superior to American men—superior in that they are less democratized. They still have a noble (or aristocratic) streak in them.

Perhaps it is not a matter of figuring out to whom they are superior but to what they are superior. As presented by Tocqueville, American women are superior to the siren call of individualism. Despite being the intellectual and moral equals of men, American women accept (or, better, knowingly choose) economic and political inequality. They are willing to insist on their difference, their separate status, even at the cost of “equal rights.” For the sake of the domestic happiness of all concerned—their children, their husbands, the nation, and themselves—women remain in the domestic realm.

Tocqueville does not hide the fact that this feminine denial of the thoroughgoing application of equality involves a significant measure of self-sacrifice; indeed, he highlights the sacrifice as part of the American woman’s pride.

Tocqueville does not hide the fact that this feminine denial of the thoroughgoing application of equality involves a significant measure of self-sacrifice; indeed, he highlights the sacrifice as part of the American woman’s pride. Yet there are certain advantages to what seems a relinquishment. From their privileged position within their domestic confinement, women govern the mores of the nation, and Tocqueville is emphatic that mores maintain the constitution and laws.REF

Although the democratic principle of equality renders wives equal to husbands, Americans nonetheless avoid the disintegrative effects of radical equality by a special understanding of sexual equality that enshrines sexual differences. Instead of a fully individualistic ideal (which yields “weak men and disreputable women”), they opt for complementary roles and complementary virtues in a common enterprise, thereby acknowledging human limits to self-sufficiency. Heterogeneity is the foundation for strong families and, in turn, strong communities.

Obviously, over time, many American women decided they preferred democratic justice—in the form of the vote, economic independence, and sexual liberation—more than the consolations of nobility. The suffragist movement was already in its earliest phases when Tocqueville visited. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792; the Seneca Falls convention would take place in 1848. It almost seems as if Tocqueville’s high (maybe inordinately high) praise of American women was an attempt to forestall such rumblings.

Like Rousseau before him, Tocqueville was in quest of a domestic model that could resist the atomizing pressures of individualism—pressures that threaten to erode the bonds of human affection, splitting apart even the nucleus of the family, leaving individuals as free-floating, unencumbered selves. Whereas Rousseau tried to romanticize and idealize marriage, by contrast, Tocqueville appeals less to the tender sentiments and more to spiritedness. His reliance on an internalized thumos rather than other-directed eros can be felt in his claim that women in America not only do not contest male hegemony, but also “made a sort of glory for themselves out of the voluntary abandonment of their will” and “found their greatness in submitting on their own to the [domestic] yoke.”REF Yet he also qualifies that statement. Not all women are so self-abnegating: This brave attitude is what “the most virtuous women express: the others are silent.”REF

Tocqueville Today

That silent portion—initially a minority but eventually a majority—would soon enough find its own voice and a different kind of courage, culminating in the chant “I am woman, hear me roar.”REF More than a century of successive waves of feminist protest would force public opinion into a new mold supportive of new practices and laws. Remember, according to Tocqueville, that public opinion is always what governs in a democracy: “[F]aith in common opinion will become a sort of religion whose prophet will be the majority.”REF Even religion is subordinated to the power of public opinion: “[R]eligion itself reigns there much less as revealed doctrine than as common opinion.”REF Perhaps it is not so surprising that many religious denominations in America have adjusted to the new definitions of marriage and family.

Contemporary readers of Democracy in America usually find much of what Tocqueville describes to be still recognizable. With respect to women, however, that is emphatically not the case. Is there any reason, other than historical curiosity, to take seriously Tocqueville’s account of domestic life in 19th century America?

Having taught this material for the past quarter-century, I can report that college students, men and women alike, still take these chapters seriously. Some are angered, some captivated; all are intrigued. This suggests that despite the dramatic social changes since Tocqueville’s visit, Americans have not entirely abandoned the model of marital bliss that he recommends. Nor have they stopped wondering whether all of the changes have been for the better. In their loneliness and uncertainties about who they are and how they are supposed to connect with others, young people are quite ready to acknowledge the detrimental effects of the sexual revolution. Many also express a preference for elements of the traditional arrangement (now called being a stay-at-home mom).

Regrettably, the law no longer supports this choice. A woman would be unwise not to prepare herself to be economically independent now that the protection of lifetime alimony has been stripped away by the operation of no-fault divorce. 1970s-era feminists were quite explicit about the need to revoke alimony in order to force all women into paid labor, thus making it impossible for women to choose homemaking as a career. Changes in tax law and divorce law could do much to restore this Tocquevillean option for those eager to follow it.REF But even if return (at least on a large scale) is impossible, Tocqueville’s reflections on the family are important. It is in exploring “the female drama” that Tocqueville raises the most difficult questions about the future, such as whether the modern dynamic of equality can coexist with nature and its essentialism. How significant is the bifurcation of nature into male and female? Do those distinctions, rooted in the biology of the body, extend to the soul as well? What construction of society could answer the demands for both justice and happiness? Or for equal rights and community?

Like many political philosophers before him, Tocqueville hints that a woman’s nature is, by nature, more conflicted, ambiguous, and burdened than a man’s. Her very body is both hers and not fully hers, since through the womb she can experience the strongest natural tie: that of mother and child.

For thoroughgoing individualism to be established, that voice of nature, that whispering of self-sacrifice, must be silenced. Women must become nothing other or more than equal individuals; hence, the feminist reconception of pregnancy as exclusively about a woman’s control of her body with no say-so given to the father or the larger society or the prenatal life at stake. The continuing unease over abortion-on-demand is evidence that the most murderous form of the assault on nature has not triumphed decisively over the common-sense view that a mother is bearing a child and that she thus bears moral obligations as a result.

Tocqueville’s insight into the insatiable character of the demand for equality can also help us understand other ongoing campaigns on the gender front. We saw how quickly greater social tolerance of homosexuality turned into the demand for “marriage equality.”REF Meanwhile, the transgender movement offers several new twists on individuality with accompanying demands for equality. For some, such as the gender dysphoric, gender remains highly significant, whereas other individuals, also sheltering under the rapidly expanding acronym LGBTQIA, seek to deconstruct gender altogether.REF One suspects that the only available next frontier in the quest for autonomy would be transhumanism: breaking the boundaries of human being itself.

As we contemplate our proliferating choices (and the choices we have lost), we would do well to keep Tocqueville’s admonitions and recommendations in mind. Democracy in America helps us to think about the proper meaning and scope of both equality and freedom and how those goods might be preserved and combined with others such as family and community.

Diana Schaub, PhD, is Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland and a Visiting Scholar in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies research division at the American Enterprise Institute.