Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville (Re-Reading the Canon)

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Locke.cover

12/5/08

10:00 AM

Page 1

locke & botting

PHILOSOPHY / POLITICAL SCIENCE / WOMEN’S STUDIES

The volume highlights the expressly normative nature of Tocqueville’s project, thus providing an overdue counterweight to the conventional understanding of Tocquevillean America as an actual place in time and history. By reading Tocqueville alongside the writings of early women’s rights activists, ethnologists, critical race theorists, contemporary feminists, neoconservatives, and his French contemporaries, among others, this book produces a variety of Tocquevilles that unsettles the hegemonic view of his work. Seen as a philosophical source and a political authority for modern democracies since the publication of the twin volumes of Democracy in America (1835/1840), Tocqueville emerges from this collection as a vital interlocutor for democratic theorists confronting the power relations generated by intersections of gender, sexual, racial, class, ethnic, national, and colonial identities. Jill Locke is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department at Gustavus Adolphus College. Eileen Hunt Botting is Rolfs Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame.

FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF alexis de tocqueville

This book moves beyond traditional readings of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and his relevance to contemporary democracy by emphasizing the relationship of his life and work to modern feminist thought. Within the resurgence of political interest in Tocqueville during the past two decades, especially in the United States, there has been significant scholarly attention to the place of gender, race, and colonialism in his work. This is the first edited volume to gather together a range of this creative scholarship. It reveals a tidal shift in the reception history of Tocqueville as a result of his serious engagement by feminist, gender, postcolonial, and critical race theorists.

RE-READING THE CANON

ISBN 978-0-271-03403-4

T H E P E N N S Y LVA N I A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S U N I V E R S I T Y PA R K , P E N N S Y LVA N I A W W W. P S U P R E S S . O R G

9 780271 034034

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PENN STATE PRESS

R E - R E A D I N G

T H E

C A N O N

FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF alexis de tocqueville EDITED BY jill locke and eileen hunt botting


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re-reading the canon

NANCY TUANA, GENERAL EDITOR This series consists of edited collections of essays, some original and some previously published, offering feminist re-interpretations of the writings of major figures in the Western philosophical tradition. Devoted to the work of a single philosopher, each volume contains essays covering the full range of the philosopher’s thought and representing the diversity of approaches now being used by feminist critics. Already published: Nancy Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato (1994) Margaret Simons, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir (1995) Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995) Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, ed., Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel (1996) Maria J. Falco, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (1996) Susan J. Hekman, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault (1996) Nancy J. Holland, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida (1997) Robin May Schott, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (1997) Celeine Leon and Sylvia Walsh, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard (1997) Cynthia Freeland, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (1998) Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche (1998) Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (1999) Susan Bordo, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Rene´ Descartes (1999) Julien S. Murphy, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) Anne Jaap Jacobson, ed., Feminist Interpretations of David Hume (2000) Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly (2000) Tina Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (2001) Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger (2001) Charlene Haddock Seigfried, ed., Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey (2001) Naomi Scheman and Peg O’Connor, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2002) Lynda Lange, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2002) Lorraine Code, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer (2002) Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson, eds., Feminist Interpretations of W.V. Quine (2003) Maria J. Falco, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo` Machiavelli (2004) Reneé J. Heberle, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno (2006) Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2006) Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensigner, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman (2007) Judith Chelius Stark, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Augustine (2007) Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure, eds., Feminist Interpretations of John Locke (2007)

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FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS Of alexis de tocqueville EDITED BY Jill Locke

AND

Eileen Hunt Botting

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feminist interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville / edited by Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting. p. cm.—(Re-reading the canon) Summary: ‘‘Explores the relationship of the life and work of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) to modern feminisms, especially as they pertain to the analysis of gender, sex, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and colonialism’’—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-271-03402-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-271-03403-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805–1859. 2. Feminism. I. Locke, Jill, 1969– . II. Botting, Eileen Hunt, 1971– . JC229.T8F46 2008 321.8092—dc22 2008024583

Copyright 䉷 2009 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. This book is printed on Natures Natural, containing 50% post-consumer waste, and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48-1992.

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Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: To Tocqueville and Beyond Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting

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1 Beyond the Bon Meńage: Tocqueville and the Paradox of Liberal Citoyennes Cheryl B. Welch

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2 Democracy’s Family Values Laura Janara

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3 Tocqueville and the Feminization of the Bourgeoisie Dana Villa

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4 A Family Resemblance: Tocqueville and Wollstonecraftian Protofeminism Eileen Hunt Botting

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5 Aristocratic Mourning: Tocqueville, John Quincy Adams, and the Affairs of Andrew Jackson Jill Locke

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6 Sympathy, Equality, and Consent: Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau on Women and Democracy in America Lisa Pace Vetter

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7 Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress’’ Delba Winthrop

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Contents

8 Toward a Generative Theory of Equality Kathleen S. Sullivan

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9 Imperial Fathers and Favorite Sons: J. S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Nineteenth-Century Visions of Empire Richard Boyd

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10 Tocqueville, Black Writers, and American Ethnology: Rethinking the Foundations of Whiteness Studies Alvin B. Tillery Jr.

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11 The Separate Spheres Paradox: Habitual Inattention and Democratic Citizenship Jocelyn M. Boryczka

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12 Tocqueville’s Authority: Feminism and Reform ‘‘Between Government and Civil Society’’ Barbara Cruikshank

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Annotated Bibliography on Alexis de Tocqueville and Gender, Feminism, and Race 337 Christine Carey Contributors

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Index

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Preface Nancy Tuana

Take into your hands any history of philosophy text. You will find compiled therein the ‘‘classics’’ of modern philosophy. Since these texts are often designed for use in undergraduate classes, the editor is likely to offer an introduction in which the reader is informed that these selections represent the perennial questions of philosophy. The student is to assume that she or he is about to explore the timeless wisdom of the greatest minds of Western philosophy. No one calls attention to the fact that the philosophers are all men. Though women are omitted from the canons of philosophy, these texts inscribe the nature of woman. Sometimes the philosopher speaks directly about woman, delineating her proper role, her abilities and inabilities, her desires. Other times the message is indirect—a passing remark hinting at women’s emotionality, irrationality, unreliability. This process of definition occurs in far more subtle ways when the central concepts of philosophy—reason and justice, those characteristics that are taken to define us as human—are associated with traits historically identified with masculinity. If the ‘‘man’’ of reason must learn to control or overcome traits identified as feminine—the body, the emotions, the passions—then the realm of rationality will be one reserved primarily for men,1 with grudging entrance to those few women who are capable of transcending their femininity. Feminist philosophers have begun to look critically at the canonized texts of philosophy and have concluded that the discourses of philosophy are not gender-neutral. Philosophical narratives do not offer a universal

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Preface

perspective, but rather privilege some experiences and beliefs over others. These experiences and beliefs permeate all philosophical theories whether they be aesthetic or epistemological, moral or metaphysical. Yet this fact has often been neglected by those studying the traditions of philosophy. Given the history of canon formation in Western philosophy, the perspective most likely to be privileged is that of upper-class white males. Thus, to be fully aware of the impact of gender biases, it is imperative that we re-read the canon with attention to the ways in which philosophers’ assumptions concerning gender are embedded within their theories. This series, Re-Reading the Canon, is designed to foster this process of reevaluation. Each volume will offer feminist analyses of the theories of a selected philosopher. Since feminist philosophy is not monolithic in method or content, the essays are also selected to illustrate the variety of perspectives within feminist criticism and highlight some of the controversies within feminist scholarship. In this series, feminist lenses focus on the canonical texts of Western philosophy, both those authors who have been part of the traditional canon, and those philosophers whose writings have more recently gained attention within the philosophical community. A glance at the list of volumes in the series reveals an immediate gender bias of the canon: Arendt, Aristotle, Beauvoir, Derrida, Descartes, Foucault, Hegel, Hume, Kant, Locke, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, Rousseau, Wittgenstein, Wollstonecraft. There are all too few women included, and those few who do appear have been added only recently. In creating this series, it is not my intention to rectify the current canon of philosophical thought. What is and is not included within the canon during a particular historical period is a result of many factors. Although no canonization of texts will include all philosophers, no canonization of texts that excludes all but a few women can offer an accurate representation of the history of the discipline, as women have been philosophers since the ancient period.2 I share with many feminist philosophers and other philosophers writing from the margins of philosophy the concern that the current canonization of philosophy be transformed. Although I do not accept the position that the current canon has been formed exclusively by power relations, I do believe that this canon represents only a selective history of the tradition. I share the view of Michael Be´rube´ that ‘‘canons are at once the location, the index, and the record of the struggle for cultural

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representation; like any other hegemonic formation, they must be continually reproduced anew and are continually contested.’’3 The process of canon transformation will require the recovery of ‘‘lost’’ texts and a careful examination of the reasons such voices have been silenced. Along with the process of uncovering women’s philosophical history, we must also begin to analyze the impact of gender ideologies upon the process of canonization. This process of recovery and examination must occur in conjunction with careful attention to the concept of a canon of authorized texts. Are we to dispense with the notion of a tradition of excellence embodied in a canon of authorized texts? Or, rather than abandon the whole idea of a canon, do we instead encourage a reconstruction of a canon of those texts that inform a common culture? This series is designed to contribute to this process of canon transformation by offering a re-reading of the current philosophical canon. Such a re-reading shifts our attention to the ways in which woman and the role of the feminine are constructed within the texts of philosophy. A question we must keep in front of us during this process of re-reading is whether a philosopher’s socially inherited prejudices concerning woman’s nature and role are independent of her or his larger philosophical framework. In asking this question attention must be paid to the ways in which the definitions of central philosophical concepts implicitly include or exclude gendered traits. This type of reading strategy is not limited to the canon, but can be applied to all texts. It is my desire that this series reveal the importance of this type of critical reading. Paying attention to the workings of gender within the texts of philosophy will make visible the complexities of the inscription of gender ideologies.

Notes 1. More properly, it is a realm reserved for a group of privileged males, since the texts also inscribe race and class biases that thereby omit certain males from participation. 2. Mary Ellen Waithe’s multivolume series, A History of Women Philosophers (Boston: M. Nijoff, 1987), attests to this presence of women. 3. Michael Be´rube´, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 4–5.

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Acknowledgments

We are honored and delighted to contribute Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville to the Re-Reading the Canon series—a series that has been so important to our own work in political theory. Special thanks are due to Nancy Tuana for shepherding this series and assisting us with this volume. We could not have asked for a better editor than Sandy Thatcher, who has provided crucial guidance and support throughout the submission and publication process. Thanks are due, as well, to the external reviewer that Penn State Press arranged for us. The book benefited from the reviewer’s careful reading and criticism. We are also lucky to have had such fantastic contributors, from whom we have learned so much about re-reading Tocqueville. All the authors—ourselves included—benefited from blind reviews of their individual chapters, and we are extremely grateful to our reviewers for their willingness to lend their expertise and time. Matt Holbreich provided assistance with manuscript preparation and fact checking. Romaine Perin was an excellent copyeditor. Financial support in the form of a presidential student-faculty research grant and sabbatical leave from Gustavus Adolphus College, a faculty fellowship at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane University, and a grant from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame made it possible to complete this volume in a timely manner. The Canadian Journal of Political Science and the State University of New York Press generously granted permission to reprint a version of Laura Janara’s essay. Mary Dietz and the journal Political Theory kindly permitted the reprinting of Delba Winthrop’s article. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the late W. Carey McWilliams and Delba Winthrop, who did so much to cultivate the study of Tocqueville. We would have loved to share this volume with them.

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Introduction To Tocqueville and Beyond

Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting

Re-reading Tocqueville This book moves beyond traditional readings of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) and his relevance to contemporary democracy by emphasizing the relationship of his life and work to modern feminisms, especially as they pertain to the analysis of gender, sex, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, We would like to thank our editorial assistant, Matthew Holbreich, for his invaluable help with the editing of the notes of this Introduction and of those of the rest of this volume.

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Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville

nationality, and colonialism. Within the resurgence of political interest in Tocqueville during the past two decades, especially in the United States, there has been significant scholarly attention to his relationship to the aforementioned themes.1 This is the first edited volume to gather together a range of this creative scholarship and, thus, reveal a tidal shift in Tocqueville’s reception history as a result of his serious engagement by feminist, gender, postcolonial, and critical race theorists. Seen as a philosophical source and a political authority for modern democracies since the publication of the twin volumes of Democracy in America (1835, 1840), Tocqueville emerges from this collection as a vital resource for democratic theorizing that confronts the power relations generated by the intersection of gender, sex, racial, class, ethnic, national, and colonial identities.2 The recent stirrings of interest in Tocqueville’s relevance to modern feminisms, and related political and intellectual issues, emerged in France and the United States around 1980. In Paris in 1979, Francine Verge published her dissertation, ‘‘Le the`me de la famille et de la femme chez Tocqueville’’ (The theme of the family and woman in Tocqueville).3 In 1986 in Chicago, Allan Bloom published an article on Jean-Jacques Rousseau that argued in passing that Tocqueville’s views on women and the family were probably influenced by his reading of Rousseau’s Emile, or, On Education (1762).4 Verge and Bloom independently yet similarly concluded that Tocqueville emphasized the social and political benefits of the gendered division of labor within the American democratic family, despite its restrictions on female freedom.5 In a similar vein to Bloom, in 1986 Delba Winthrop published a landmark article on Tocqueville’s portrait of the American woman, calling attention to its dissonance with late twentieth-century feminist constructions of female identity and freedom.6 Around 1990, there were a series of feminist critiques of the 1980s consensus that valorized or at least vindicated Tocqueville as a defender of separate spheres for men and women in modern democracy. In 1988 Linda Kerber chastised Tocqueville’s chauvinistic stereotyping of women in the 1830s United States and lambasted those historians who accepted his biased generalizations about the sexual division of labor as sociological facts about the Jacksonian era.7 In 1989, in Justice, Gender, and the Family, Susan Okin employed liberal feminist political theory to expose Tocqueville as an antifeminist defender of a patriarchal division of labor.8 Rogers Smith in 1993 likewise called for political scientists to move

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beyond Tocqueville’s theoretical schema for understanding the development of American democracy and citizenship, because it was fundamentally racist, classist, and sexist.9 Tocqueville was claimed by many conservatives during the 1990s debates over the meaning and future of civil society in the United States and Europe as a founder of the school of thought that stressed the crucial role of nonstate institutions—such as families, churches, and civil associations—in the fostering of the moral and civic virtue necessary to sustain a democracy.10 In particular, conservative scholars and politicians appealed to the influential work, published in 1995 and 2000, of political scientist Robert Putnam, who upheld Tocqueville as the major philosophical source for his theory of the dependence of civic participation on social capital, or homogenous social networks defined by common moral codes.11 Republican politicians from Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to President George W. Bush invoked Tocqueville as an authority for their conservative public policies, ranging from ‘‘welfare to workfare’’ reforms to federally funded faith-based charitable initiatives.12 An astute account of Tocqueville’s view of gender and its place in French history appeared in Mona Ozouf’s influential Les mots des femmes (Women’s Words), originally published in 1995 and translated into English in 1998.13 Ozouf further sharpened the tension between AngloAmerican and French feminisms, as she emphasized how French social class history made it difficult for French feminists to embrace Americanstyle pronouncements about the lifelong oppression of women by men (for example, ‘‘Can a species survive, Marilyn French asks gravely, when half its members systematically assault the other?’’).14 Ozouf recuperates a distinctively French appreciation for the diversity within women’s life stories and experiences, an appreciation she believes to be compatible with Tocqueville’s fears about cultural homogeneity and gender egalitarianism.15 At the turn of the twenty-first century, yet another stage of the reception history of Tocqueville for contemporary democratic theory and practice has unfolded in the spirit of Ozouf’s reading of his work.16 With the publication of Cheryl Welch’s De Tocqueville (2001) and Laura Janara’s Democracy Growing Up (2002), feminist political theorists have reclaimed Tocqueville’s writings from the conservative monopoly on them in the late 1990s. Like Ozouf before them, feminists such as Welch and Janara have paved the way for using Tocqueville as a productive resource for critically theorizing the roles of sex and gender in modern politics, espe-

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cially in democratizing nations. Instead of emphasizing Tocqueville’s obvious inconsistencies and tensions with many strands of feminist theory, recent scholarship has creatively underscored his historical and philosophical compatibilities and intersections with modern feminisms and their related issues. Complementing feminist re-readings of Rousseau, this more recent work on Tocqueville and gender underscores the ways in which Tocqueville’s texts reveal an assiduous effort to impose order on the chaos of gender, suggesting the instability of gender and sex roles in postrevolutionary France and America.17 This recent turn in the feminist scholarship is in some sense a return to its own roots. For example, the American protofeminist Catharine Beecher showed serious philosophical interest in Tocqueville’s views on gender roles and the family as early as the year after volume 2 of Democracy in America was published.18 In her Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), Beecher used Tocqueville’s theory of the democratic family to frame her vision of how female autonomy could develop and grow within the constraints of conventional feminine roles, if women were given a rigorous yet pragmatic education that empowered them to be strong governors of self, household, and civil society.19 Beecher’s many books on this theme were so influential in popular culture that she probably had more impact on American women than any protofeminist of her time. Although she did not support women’s suffrage, her influential account of how education could empower women to expand their individual and collective experiences of freedom and power within their feminine roles contributed to the cultural groundwork for the political mobilization of women in the suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century.20 Through Beecher’s counterintuitive use of Tocqueville as a resource for theorizing self-governance for women as individuals and in groups, Tocqueville became a thinker of interest to feminists even before the term feminist was used to describe arguments and activism that seek to promote the rights, needs, and goods of women. The positive reception of Tocqueville’s views on women and the family by Beecher stands in striking contrast to his own negative reception of their contemporary George Sand. After meeting Sand in Paris just prior to the 1848 Revolution, he snidely remarked: ‘‘I detest literary women [les femmes ećrivantes].’’21 Given this ugly comment and others like it in his corpus, it is certainly understandable that early feminist engagements with his texts sought to expose and condemn his apparent misogyny. The focus on Tocqueville’s conceptions of the proper role of women is, of

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course, an important one, especially in light of undertheorized efforts to ‘‘revitalize’’ his vision of democracy in America and export it to nascent democracies around the world. The contributors to this volume affirm and build on this earlier work on Tocqueville’s views on women and the doctrine of separate spheres while taking a slightly different tack. In keeping with the general trend within feminist theory to turn away from uncovering a particular author’s view of ‘‘women,’’ the writers explore the symbolic work that the figure of ‘‘woman,’’ the feminine, the masculine, and relations of difference, broadly speaking, perform in Tocqueville’s texts.22 Thus the contributors do not seek to document and explain every reference to women in Tocqueville’s vast oeuvre; nor do they seek to explain every relationship he had with women such as his wife, his lovers, female interlocutors, and so on. The point of this volume is not to render a final verdict on Tocqueville’s view of ‘‘woman’’ (in the specific or general case). Rather, the contributors subject Tocqueville’s metaphors, paradoxes, contradictions, and politics to critical-feminist analyses. These analyses of Tocqueville, his life, his times, and his legacies also yield powerful insights into racial, ethnic, class, national, and colonial forms of difference and how they factor into democratic thought and practice. Affirming the slipperiness of Tocqueville’s texts, this volume also suggests that it is both impossible and unfruitful to render a final, static interpretation of Tocqueville’s personal or philosophical relationship to modern feminisms. Let us consider Tocqueville’s account of George Sand more fully. Having reported how he detests les femmes ećrivantes, Tocqueville explains that this prejudice is rooted in a general distaste for women who ‘‘systematically disguise the weakness of their sex, instead of interesting us by displaying them in their true colours.’’ Yet he concludes, ‘‘In spite of that, she charmed me. I found her features rather massive, but her expression wonderful; all her intelligence seemed to have retreated into her eyes, abandoning the rest of her face to raw matter. I was most struck at finding her with something of that naturalness of manner characteristic of great spirits. . . . We spoke for a whole hour about public affairs, for at that time one could not talk about anything else.’’23 And Tocqueville’s friendships with women such as the salonnie`re Madame Swetchine, his trusted confidante, complicate any reading of Tocqueville as mere chauvinist.24 Similar difficulties emerge in judging the apparently less ambiguous account of women in Democracy in America, where Tocqueville applauds the moral work that women perform in the young re-

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public, even if that work requires the surrender of the spunky American girl’s liberty at marriage. As several contributors to this volume note, the case can be made that Tocqueville sees tragedy in the American girl’s surrender, which is enforced by public opinion—a force for which Tocqueville has deep distrust, if not disdain. With this insight in mind, the writers here suggest that Tocqueville’s political paradoxes in fact invite, rather than negate, feminist engagement with his work. Furthermore, the investment in Tocqueville as antifeminist par excellence misses the ways in which his own methodologies have several potential affinities with feminist approaches to the study of politics. First, for decades, feminists have emphasized the ways in which political participation has excluded the work that women do, the function of mores and values on formal political institutions, and the impact of religious doctrine on women’s public participation (or lack thereof).25 The feminist mantra ‘‘The personal is political’’ has been persuasively interrogated of late, but feminist theorists and activists have historically rejected any essential distinction between ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ life.26 And though Tocqueville often invokes this distinction as essential and foundational, his own work puts pressure on this divide as it foregrounds the ways in which political regimes—and democracies, in particular—depend upon a set of social relationships, all of which he describes in explicitly gendered terms. If the first point of affinity can be found in the value Tocqueville places on ‘‘background’’ relationships, habits, and customs, the second exists in the approach he takes to learning more about the subjects he deems worthy of study. In keeping with the work of many feminist theorists and activists, Tocqueville turns a critical eye toward heroic visions of governmental reform or abstract principles of liberty and equality detached from the lives of the citizens they are invoked to serve.27 To learn more about his stated passion, Europe’s democratic future, he does not retreat into his study to dream up a grand plan; living in postrevolutionary France, he knew the dangers of this approach all too well. Instead, to take two well-known texts as examples, in his comprehensive account of the ancien re´gime (1856) he turns an eye to the pages of French history, copiously documenting and deciphering everything from taxation to charitable relief to the poor in local parishes. To ‘‘discover lessons from which [Europe] may profit,’’ he goes to the United States, where he travels throughout the North, South, and western territories and interviews both Americans and foreigners living abroad. Upon his return, he supple-

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ments his findings with research into early American political documents and the writings of the nation’s founders.28 Suspicious of any ‘‘official’’ or universal account, Tocqueville prides himself on setting out to see the ‘‘facts’’ for himself. And yet, as the chapters in this volume show, in spite of Tocqueville’s gestures toward a more comprehensive sociological and historical methodology, his efforts to capture an ‘‘accurate’’ picture of the past in service of a ‘‘new political science’’ for the future enact new exclusions and reveal new blind spots. Although he does, as Cheryl Welch emphasizes in her chapter and as the latter part of his George Sand reference reveals, speak with and respect the views of many European women, there were limitations to the gender, class, and racial boundaries that Tocqueville traversed in his nine-month visit to the United States and Canada.29 Tocqueville’s self-consciously French agenda and frame of reference meant that he sometimes missed much of the richness of North American life, and though he addressed the inequality of the races, he often glossed over other social inequalities.30 To take American marriage as an example, Tocqueville’s familiarity with the French aristocratic tradition of arranged marriage leaves him to conclude that American marriages are chosen and therefore free. This statement only makes sense relative to France; as feminist historians have long documented, young girls in fact struggled with these putatively free choices and their parents’ class and professional interests—to say nothing of long-standing bans against ‘‘race mixing.’’31 This speaks to a third connection between Tocquevillean and feminist methodologies: the recognition of the opportunities and perils inhabiting a normative political project. On this point both Tocqueville and feminist scholarship have been subjected to well-deserved criticism. As feminists we live with our own sets of blinders that emerge from the normative commitments shaping the ways in which we ask and answer our political questions. Many of the controversies within second-wave feminism have emerged from our own (quasi-Tocquevillean) tendency to divine certain general truths from observations about ‘‘women’s’’ lives. A long-overdue wave of epistemic humility has emerged within feminist scholarship that has productively questioned this tendency toward unwarranted inferences and generalizations. This spirit of humility therefore runs throughout this volume. It humbles those who speak authoritatively about what Tocqueville really meant or thought. In good Tocquevillean fashion, in chapter upon chapter au-

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thors investigate broader historical developments in the nations that caught Tocqueville’s attention. Particularly attentive to Tocqueville’s context, the contributors provide careful analyses of his philosophical connections to liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft and his political interest in leaders such as Andrew Jackson and King Louis-Philippe. The writers are similarly attentive to the ways in which Tocqueville fits into contemporary debates that range from race relations to colonialism and welfare reform. To this end, they investigate not only the classics Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution, but also less-well-known texts such as his correspondence, travel writings, and treatises on colonialism and social welfare policy. In this volume we therefore strive to present a complex—though never complete—picture of ‘‘Tocqueville’’ and all of his entailments. The Tocqueville emerging on these pages is unapologetically cacophonous. If feminists have learned anything from the fallout of the second wave, it is that the effort to construct an authoritative account of ‘‘women’’ will only founder—introducing new exclusions as it seeks to dispense with the old. The same wisdom applies for studies of Tocqueville and his legacies for modern democracies.32 A final interpretive point: a cacophonous Tocqueville is not a meaningless Tocqueville. It may be impossible to render, once and for all, a hermetically sealed judgment on Tocqueville’s views of gender (or much else, for that matter). Nevertheless, the statements that so enraged early feminists and comforted social conservatives cannot simply be bracketed so that we can busily salvage and apply his theory to feminist practice.33 Indeed, part of the point of this re-reading is that one cannot make sense of Tocqueville’s texts without paying attention to their gendered dimensions, in the descriptions of the nation as a ‘‘child’’ in its ‘‘mother’s arms,’’ accounts of a virile aristocracy and ‘‘manly freedom,’’ indictments of the effeminacy of the bourgeoisie, attention to the gendered norms that shape ‘‘choice’’ and ‘‘consent,’’ the problem of shameless women’s reproduction, observation of haughty white girls with their black and Native American female caregivers, and reflection on how American white women forge their chastity not only through religion but also through their desire to differentiate themselves from supposedly unchaste black and Native American women. Each of these gendered political stories calls out for the critical analysis of its significance. The authors in this volume answer that call by showing how gender and difference inhabit Tocqueville’s texts and the texts that have engaged him.

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Democracy and Difference The first three chapters in this book engage the relationship of Tocqueville’s gendered political thought to the theory and practice of democratization, especially in the wake of the French Revolution. Cheryl Welch studies the intersection of gender and politics in Tocqueville’s writings to highlight how women were, paradoxically, both absent and present in the public life of France after the Revolution. Through the first systematic examination of his complex response to the liberal citoyennes, Welch situates Tocqueville within postrevolutionary liberal thought and its unstable distinction between public and private. Although the Napoleonic Civil Code attempted to erase women from the public sphere, Tocqueville’s analysis of the status of women in postrevolutionary French society tells a more complex story about women’s relationship to politics in this period. Welch indicates how Tocqueville saw women’s rational capacity for good, democratic political judgment as paradoxically growing from the gendered realm of the family, rather than from the formal institutions and procedures of democracy. Although Tocqueville never fully supported women’s formal inclusion in the same citizenship rights as those enjoyed by men, his analysis of women’s positive impact on democratic politics—especially through rational friendships with men—helped challenge the simplistic, Napoleonic, gendered binary between public and private. Laura Janara, by contrast, explores how Tocqueville’s writings are a repository for the anxieties that grow during such a period of postrevolutionary democratization. In particular, cultural anxieties about the overturning of traditional sex and gender roles—including women’s increased movement across the private and the public spheres—shape the desire to sustain some gendered and sexualized forms of hierarchy, inequality, and difference that Tocqueville and others have hoped would protect democracy from the chaos and flux of its revolutionary origins. Dana Villa’s contribution to the volume continues in this vein as Villa examines the gendered aspects of Tocqueville’s reaction to the political aftermath of the French Revolution. Villa concludes that patriarchal gender norms inflect Tocqueville’s worries about the rise of the bourgeois class and the bureaucratic state and the demise of mediating civil associations and public freedom. Villa ultimately vindicates the conceptual power and historical perspicuity of Tocqueville’s analysis of the evolution of postrev-

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olutionary society and government, once it is stripped bare of its traditional gender coding. Eileen Hunt Botting shares Janara’s and Villa’s focus on postrevolutionary democratization, but rather than looking at how it creates gender trouble for Tocqueville, she explores how it generates a feminist tradition against which Tocqueville defines his views on women’s rights. In her chapter she outlines the emergence of modern feminisms within this process of postrevolutionary democratization and how Tocqueville’s views on women’s rights are best understood when read against this historical background. Through the use of Wittgenstein’s conception of ‘‘family resemblance’’ as a tool for comparative textual analysis, she reveals Tocqueville’s surprising and unwitting affinities with Mary Wollstonecraft and her influential protofeminist school of thought that began with the publication of her internationally renowned book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). This counterintuitive study of Tocqueville’s ‘‘family resemblance’’ with Wollstonecraftian protofeminism productively complicates both the story of Tocqueville’s relationship to feminisms and the story of the development of modern feminisms in the postrevolutionary era. The two chapters that follow continue this examination of the gendered and feminist dimensions of democratization, but turn scholarly attention more closely to American democracy. Jill Locke and Lisa Pace Vetter both look at Tocqueville’s commentaries on America and look at America as a historical background for better understanding his gendered contributions to democratic theorizing. Locke reads Tocqueville’s account of gender roles and marriage in the 1830s United States against the Robards and Eaton affairs, two plagues on Andrew Jackson’s political career that revealed Jackson’s penchant for ‘‘unchaste’’ women. Locke explores the sexual politics of the Jacksonian era vis-a`-vis the decline of the ‘‘aristocratic-republican’’ regime of John Quincy Adams. She concludes that Democracy in America suggests a deep affinity between Tocqueville and Adams, and that the democracy Tocqueville seeks to ‘‘awaken’’ is akin to Adams’s quasi-aristocratic politics, which explicitly checks the excesses and sexual disorder that worried Tocqueville. Vetter uses a similar methodological approach to explore Tocqueville’s views on the practice of sympathy in democratic marriage and in democratic society. She reads Tocqueville against the background of the work of his contemporary, the philosopher and fellow traveler to America Harriet Martineau. By comparing and contrasting the views of Martineau and

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Tocqueville on marriage and female citizenship in American democracy, Vetter reveals the deficiencies in Tocqueville’s moral and political theory that arise from his traditionally gendered understanding of sex roles. Martineau emerges from this study as the more astute moral and political philosopher on questions of gender equality, as a thinker whose travels in America generated sociological observations that served as a basis of an egalitarian theory of how the practice of sympathy between equals is the foundation of genuine democracy. Delba Winthrop and Kathleen Sullivan productively read Tocqueville against early feminist pieties about democratic egalitarianism. Winthrop’s classic piece, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress’ ’’ (1986), is included here as a counterinterpretation of Tocqueville as sexist par excellence that also rejects modern feminists’ critique of the private sphere as a domestic prison.34 Winthrop argues that Tocqueville’s analysis of American women’s misery is not an endorsement of women as ‘‘barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.’’ Winthrop’s Tocqueville understands that democratic life is ultimately unfulfilling and that the American woman is both fortunate and wise to be free from its ignoble tendencies, seeking solace in a domestic sphere relatively free from democratic incursions. Reading Tocqueville in sympathy with historical and contemporary feminist developments, Sullivan amplifies Winthrop’s point about the potential pitfalls of democratic promises for full emancipation and liberation for democratic women. Sullivan draws attention to the flaws inhering in some first- and second-wave dreams of perfect equality and harmony. However, unlike Winthrop, Sullivan refashions democratic equality in keeping with feminist—and Tocquevillean—commitments to egalitarian practices and commitments. She does so by distinguishing between equality as a ‘‘general idea’’ and equality as a ‘‘generative principle.’’ The latter, according to Sullivan, is better attuned to the chaos and particularities of social circumstances and reflects Tocqueville’s insights into the trouble with abstract impositions of egalitarian dogmas. Equally attuned to circumstance, Richard Boyd argues that Tocqueville’s apologies for French imperialism are best understood as compensatory measures for postrevolutionary effeminacy, manifest in the regime of King Louis-Phillippe. Against recent scholarship that links liberalism and imperialism per se, Boyd advances his argument about Tocquevillean imperialism by way of comparison to the liberal thought of J. S. Mill. Boyd argues that unlike Mill, who saw the imperial project as an opportunity

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to reflect a new, less explicitly gendered vision of family authority back to the British, Tocqueville justifies French empire in terms of reviving the lost, manly spirit of the aristocracy in the bourgeois nineteenth century. In so doing, Boyd connects Tocqueville’s preoccupation with manliness in his writings on slavery and empire to the concerns of the Recollections and Democracy in America. In Boyd’s rendering, Tocqueville’s support for empire is less about liberalism’s seamy imperialistic underbelly than a desperate Frenchman’s effort to assert French greatness on the national stage. Boyd shows how Tocqueville’s effort to reinvigorate French masculinity through the imperial project in fact falls prey to the feminine preoccupation with seeing and being seen by others. Boyd’s compelling account invites reflection about the ways in which imperialism and the need to assert the nation as virile and potent serves an educative function for citizens at home that cannot be divorced from questions of gender and difference. Just as the authors of the previous chapters complicate the reading of Tocqueville as merely sexist or imperialist, Alvin B. Tillery Jr. rejects the portrait of Tocqueville as an apologist for U.S. racial slavery.35 Contradicting this dominant view, Tillery argues that Tocqueville’s deep and abiding pessimism about a democratic future forged from racial inequality is not evidence of his racism, but a trenchant critique of U.S. democratic foundations. In fact, as Tillery emphasizes, Tocqueville’s pessimism bears an uncanny resemblance to the arguments made in the critical race theory tradition. To this end, Tillery offers a careful genealogy of ethnology and critical race studies alongside exegesis of Tocqueville to argue that Tocqueville’s insights into whiteness as a social identity deserve a place in the history of whiteness studies alongside the figure of W. E. B. Du Bois. The final two contributors to this volume read Tocqueville against the grain to extract political and theoretical observations that may be of service to contemporary feminist and democratic politics. Jocelyn Boryczka urges feminists and democrats to heed Tocqueville’s warnings against ‘‘habitual inattention,’’ the tendency of citizens to absolve themselves of responsibility for public affairs and unwittingly support increased administrative centralization. Boryczka argues that while Tocqueville gets this diagnosis right, he mistakenly accepts ‘‘for the greater good’’ the loss of women’s liberty in marriage and the doctrine of separate spheres, to protect women’s moral voice and allow it to be channeled to husbands and sons. According to Boryczka, in ultimately endorsing women’s cloistering

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in the domicile, Tocqueville permits the very crime of ‘‘habitual inattention’’ he claims to oppose. Only when both men and women are responsible for the moral direction and education of the nation and full and equal participants in the public sphere will democratic societies be able to ward against the tyrannical tendencies that haunt postrevolutionary Europe. The volume closes with Barbara Cruikshank’s reading of Tocqueville’s Memoir on Pauperism, which she argues has been misread by opponents of the U.S. welfare system, most notably Gertrude Himmelfarb. The neoconservative appropriations of Tocqueville’s writings on pauperism ignore both his trenchant critique of capitalism and his aristocratic insistence that the rich have some responsibility for the poor. His concern about the conditions wrought by public aid, Cruikshank argues, cannot be divorced from his concerns about the ways in which the poor become paupers in industrial society. Cruikshank emphasizes that feminist reformers may find a surprising fellow traveler in Tocqueville, who shares the recent feminist ambivalence about ‘‘solutions’’ to inequality. Cruikshank therefore captures Tocqueville’s insistence upon reform as a simultaneously ‘‘avid’’ and ‘‘ambivalent’’ practice and puts it to feminist use.

Beyond Tocqueville? In her impassioned response to Rogers Smith’s ‘‘multiple traditions’’ thesis, Jacqueline Stevens pleads that scholars of American political history move ‘‘beyond Tocqueville’’ and take seriously the contributions of thinkers and activists whom the canon and its arbiters have long ignored.36 For Stevens, we have heard enough of what Tocqueville thought. It is high time to hear competing, subaltern accounts of democratic life. In taking Tocqueville’s account of democracy in America and abroad seriously, this volume appears to affirm Tocqueville’s authority and resist Stevens’s plea. But in another, equally important sense, this volume does move beyond Tocqueville as he has been conventionally read. Whereas Smith treats Tocqueville as a reporter of American democracy who noted the young republic’s ‘‘pervasively liberal democratic’’ point of departure, the authors of the chapters gathered here highlight the expressly normative nature of Tocqueville’s project.37 This volume thus provides an overdue counterweight to the conventional understanding of Tocquevillean America as an actual place in time and history. By reading Tocqueville alongside

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the writings of early women’s rights activists, ethnologists, critical race theorists, contemporary feminists, neoconservatives, and his French contemporaries, among others, this volume produces a variety of ‘‘Tocquevilles’’ that unsettle the hegemony so troubling Stevens. Unpacking Tocqueville’s normative project and the normative projects of neo-Tocquevilleans who invoke his authority, the authors in this volume divest any hegemonic interpretation of Tocqueville of moral and political weight while acknowledging the powerful impact of his ideas on modern democracy. Similarly, the contributors acknowledge that while the observations of Tocqueville and his contemporary disciples are not without their blind spots, Tocqueville’s ideas have come to matter precisely because they are full of rich insights, ironies, and paradoxes. Although many contemporary feminists and democrats wisely disagree with some of his conclusions, Tocqueville was keenly aware of the ways in which democratic social and political institutions were inflected by gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and colonialism. Accordingly, we hope that Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville might inspire both Tocqueville scholars and democratic theorists, in all their methodological diversity, to return to his texts as resources in their own right as well as to challenge univocal accounts of Tocqueville’s ideas. Thus, just as the story of democracy is not a closed text, neither should we close the book on the intellectual histories that contribute to the story of Tocqueville’s legacies. Modern democracies such as the United States, Britain, France, Japan, Israel, and India continue to struggle with questions of liberty, equality, religion, secularism, racism, colonialism, and domestic and international obligations—the very questions that so preoccupied Tocqueville. The presence of these struggles on the ground in established democratic nations suggests that we should be unsurprised to learn that new and aspiring democratic countries cannot be created by a ready-made blueprint. Although heads of state often look to Tocqueville to justify particular national agendas, his texts provide no such grand design.38 Quite to the contrary, as this volume shows, they can be persuasively conscripted by multiple sides in any given argument.39 Thus this volume encourages continued re-reading of Tocqueville’s texts as touchstones for conversations about democratic challenges, pitfalls, promises, and ironies. In this spirit, we hope to present a Tocqueville who not only inspired efforts to redraw the parameters of the political horizon, but also urges us to move beyond the imagined limits of our own perspectives on

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what it means to be a democratic citizen. We therefore return to Tocqueville to move past him while pushing forward his philosophical and political legacies for contemporary democratic theory and practice.

Notes 1. See, for example, Jean Elshtain, ‘‘Women, Equality, and the Family,’’ Journal of Democracy 11, no. 1 (2000): 157–63; Nathan Glazer, ‘‘Race and Ethnicity in America,’’ Journal of Democracy 11, no. 1 (2000): 95–102; Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); and Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2. In addition, the recent explosion of translations of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America can be seen as evidence of his enduring and diverse significance for contemporary democratic thought and practice. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004); Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald Bevan (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); Democracy in America, trans. Stephan D. Grant (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2000); and Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper Collins, 1966). Since there is currently no single ‘‘authoritative’’ translation of Democracy in America or Tocqueville’s other texts, we did not require our authors to use a single set of translations. Our contributors’ use of a range of translations reflects the fruitful cacophony of voices in the scholarly conversation about his work. 3. Francine Verge, ‘‘Le the`me de la famille et de la femme chez Tocqueville’’ (Paris: Me´moire de dea, Etudes Politiques, Paris II, 1979). We thank Drew Cramer for locating this text. 4. Allan Bloom, ‘‘The Relation of the Sexes: Rousseauian Reflections on the Crisis of Our Times,’’ in Tocqueville’s Political Science: Classic Essays, ed. Peter Lawler (New York: Garland, 1992). 5. Olivier Zunz describes Tocqueville on gender and the family as directly reducible to book 5 of Rousseau’s Emile in his introductory essay to The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics, ed. Oliver Zunz and Alan S. Kahan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 6. Delba Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress,’ ’’ Political Theory 14, no. 2 (1986): 239–61. 7. Linda Kerber, ‘‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,’’ Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 9–39. 8. Susan Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 9. Rogers Smith, ‘‘Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,’’ American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 549–66. 10. Michael Shapiro, ‘‘Bowling Blind: Post Liberal Civil Society and the Worlds of Neo-Tocquevillian Social Theory,’’ Theory and Event 1, no. 1 (1997), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_ and_event/v001/1./shapiro.html. 11. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Robert Putnam, ‘‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,’’ Journal of Democracy 6, no. 1 (1995): 65–78. 12. President George W. Bush plans to capture Tocqueville’s authority for his presidential library, ‘‘to create a policy center focused on the spread of democracy and Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of America as a nation made better by its ‘associations’ or community groups.’’ See Elisabeth Bumiller, ‘‘His Legacy and His Library Occupy Bush’s Thoughts,’’ New York Times, May 8, 2006, A16. In a commencement speech at Calvin College in 2005, Bush declared that ‘‘Tocqueville’s account is not

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just the observations of one man—it is the story of our founding. It is not just a description of America at a point in time—it is an agenda for our time.’’ http://www.whitehouse.gove/news/ releases/2005/05/print/20050521–1.html, 2. 13. Mona Ozouf, Les mots des femmes: Essai sur la singularite´ française (Paris: Fayard, 1995); Mona Ozouf, Women’s Words: Essays on French Singularity, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 14. Marilyn French, The War Against Women, 182, cited in Ozouf, Les mots; Women’s Words, 277. 15. The reception of Tocqueville in France is documented at length in Francoise Melonio’s important study, Tocqueville et les Français (Paris: Aubier, 1993), which was published in English as Tocqueville and the French, trans. Beth G. Raps (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). 16. While not focusing on the analysis of gender and its cognates in Tocqueville’s thought, recent scholarship has brought to light Tocqueville’s relevance for contemporary democratic thought and practice. Among others, see Putnam, Bowling Alone; Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001); Patrick Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics, trans. Marc LePain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). For recent historical studies of Tocqueville’s relevance to the evolution of liberal democratic thought, see Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003; revised and expanded French edition, Paris: Plon, 2006) and Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings, ‘‘The Third Democracy: Tocqueville’s Views of America After 1840,’’ American Political Science Review 98 (August 2004): 391–404. 17. On Rousseau’s effort to impose order on the instability of gender, see especially Elizabeth Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Linda M. G. Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994),16–59. 18. Protofeminist describes the use of terms, arguments, and actions that anticipate certain modern feminist views and strategies yet were employed in a time when the term feminist was unknown. We use the term protofeminist in this historical sense and not in a developmental sense. To identify Beecher or Tocqueville as ‘‘protofeminist’’ on certain issues is not to say that they are ‘‘less’’ feminist than modern feminists but rather that they share certain affinities with modern feminisms yet lived in a time before the term feminist was used to describe such views. The term ‘‘feminisme’’ was first used in France in the 1870s and not regularly used anywhere until the early twentieth century. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 3, 14; Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 19. 19. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar (New York: Schocken Books, 1977). 20. Sarah A. Leavitt, Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 21. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971), 167. 22. This development is captured in the shift from Susan Moller Okin’s classic text, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) to Joan W. Scott’s ‘‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,’’ American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–75, and Zerilli’s Signifying Woman. 23. Tocqueville, Recollections, 167. 24. Tocqueville’s letters to Madame Swetchine reveal the extent to which he trusted her as a sounding board and friend. He writes to her about personal matters such as health, loneliness, and the difficulty of self-examination as well as his belief in the power and importance of human freedom. Representative samples of the Tocqueville-Swetchine correspondence are translated and reprinted in Olivier Zunz and Alan S. Kahan, eds., The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2002), 271–73, 334–37.

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25. Cathy Cohen, Kathleen Jones, and Joan Tronto, eds. Women Transforming Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Nancy Burns, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Sidney Verba, The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Martha A. Ackelsberg, ‘‘Broadening the Study of Women’s Participation,’’ in Women and American Politics: New Questions, New Directions, ed. Susan J. Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 26. On the problems with the ‘‘personal is political’’ approach to feminist politics, see Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Given Zerilli’s debts to Arendt, this point appears to be complicated by feminist engagement with Arendt, who assiduously defended a distinction between ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private.’’ But these re-readings of Arendt do not seek to reinstantiate Arendt’s division tout court. See, in particular, Bonnie Honig, ‘‘Toward an Agonistic Feminism,’’ in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), and Patricia Boling, Privacy and the Politics of Intimate Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 27. There is an uncanny affinity between Tocqueville’s ambivalence about state reform and that of Wendy Brown in her book States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 28. On this point, see Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 17. 29. For the best study of Tocqueville’s journey through North America and the people he met there, see George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), originally published as Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938). For a retracing of Tocqueville’s American journey from the perspective of contemporary French-American cultural and political relations, see also Bernard-Henri Levy’s American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Random House, 2007). 30. Kerber, ‘‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds.’’ 31. Although the term miscegenation was not used until 1864, social and legal bans against interracial romance date back to the colonial period. See Richard Newman’s ‘‘Miscegenation’’ entry in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., 5 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 4:40–41. 32. On debates about women within second-wave feminism, see, among others, Denise Riley, ‘‘Am I That Name?’’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990); Linda Alcoff, ‘‘Cultural Feminism Versus Post-structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,’’ Signs 13, no. 3 (1988): 405–36; and bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). 33. On the problem of the ‘‘add women and stir’’ approach to re-reading the canon, see Susan Carroll and Linda Zerilli, ‘‘Feminist Challenges to Political Science,’’ in Political Science: The State of the Discipline II, ed. Ada W. Finifter (Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 1993), 55–76. 34. Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family. 35. August Nimtz, Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: ‘‘The Absolute Democracy’’ or ‘‘Defiled Republic’’ (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 36. Jacqueline Stevens, ‘‘Beyond Tocqueville, Please!’’ American Political Science Review 89, no. 4 (1995): 987–95. See also Mark Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 37. Smith, ‘‘Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz,’’ 551. 38. On the invocation of Tocquevillean authority by President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, see ‘‘Tocqueville and the Mullah,’’ New Republic 333, no. 4 (1998): 7 and Donald E. Pease, ‘‘After the Tocqueville Revival; or, The Return of the Political,’’ Boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 87–114. 39. Pease, ‘‘After the Tocqueville Revival,’’ 89–90.

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1 Beyond the Bon Meńage Tocqueville and the Paradox of Liberal Citoyennes

Cheryl B. Welch

The theme of claustration—the cloistering of women in religious houses—was a staple of gothic literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. Melodramas of incarceration tapped general fears about women’s divided loyalties and their potential entrapment by agents of a resurgent church.1 At the same time, the authors of the Civil Code, the sacred writ of the new France, deliberately obliterated most traces of the revolutionary citoyenne as they attempted to sequester women safely in the alternate I would like to thank Bob Gannett, Sarah Horowitz, Jennifer Pitts, and Aurelian Craiutu for helpful comments on previous drafts. I am particularly indebted to Arthur Goldhammer, Sarah Leonard, and Jill Locke for insightful critiques of the argument.

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cloister of the patriarchal family. Indeed, the extent to which political theory and practice became explicitly gendered after the French Revolution represents a momentous—and still insufficiently understood—shift in the political and cultural history of Europe, and especially of France. By the mid-nineteenth century, the husband’s pronouncement in Etienne Gosse’s popular stage play Les femmes politiques (1799)— ‘‘Government demands the silence of women’’—had become a grand nostrum of conventional political thought across the ideological spectrum.2 Those who have studied this discursive shift—mostly feminist scholars—have begun to interrogate, on many levels and from different perspectives, the significance of the perceived need to erase women from public life. These works share a common focus on so-called paradoxes or contradictions: although women were banished theoretically to the household, they were both concretely and symbolically present in the public life of France.3 It has been argued that the emergence of gender paradoxes continually betrayed the hidden exclusions of democratic universalism,4 structured political dissent in the sexually charged rhetoric of the popular press,5 bedeviled the apparent clarity of postrevolutionary law,6 and permanently transformed the realms of religion and philanthropy.7 In this chapter, I use the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville on the intersection of gender and politics to illuminate yet another dimension of women’s paradoxical absence and presence in the public life of France after the Revolution. Tocqueville’s discussion of the role of the exemplary liberal citoyenne, I argue, indirectly reveals the fragility of the attempt by postrevolutionary liberals to construct a public/private distinction that denied female political agency. At the same time, this rather unfamiliar entreé into Tocqueville’s thought may clarify the often vexing question of the relative importance accorded to widespread public participation in his conception of ‘‘la vie politique elle-meˆme,’’ that is, genuine political life under a free government.8 My discussion proceeds as follows. After a brief review of the position of women in French law and politics after the Revolution, I turn to the charged nature of any recognition of women’s extrafamilial loyalties. The particular historical associations of women’s direct ties to the nation or to God go some way, I suggest, toward explaining the insistence on women’s political exclusion by the centrist liberal elites who dominated political life in the first half of the nineteenth century. Tocqueville shared in this reflexive rhetorical exclusion. Nevertheless, his various discussions of the role of the ideal democratic woman illustrate the ways in which the repar-

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Beyond the Bon Meńage

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ative functions of the liberal citoyenne escaped the private cloister of the well-ordered household (bon meńage).

The Claustration of Women It was the Jacobins who first transformed women citizens into passive subjects, a process that can be traced at least from Amar’s famous speech in 1793 on behalf of the Committee of General Security, urging the Convention to disband the Socie´te´ des citoyennes re´publicaines re´volutionnaires and end its scandalous political activities.9 Yet it was a general recoil from the Terror’s massive incursions into private life that triggered concerted attempts under the Directory and the Empire to roll back revolutionary reforms surrounding inheritance and marriage. There is a vast literature on the creative recasting of paternal power in the 1804 Napoleonic Civil Code, a reconstruction partially directed to controlling the sexuality and domestic rights of women and children.10 Drafters of the Code removed legal language that might be interpreted as granting to women ‘‘civic’’ status as individual citizens, and instead assigned to them a ‘‘civil’’ status as subordinate but legally protected family members. This status came with certain new protections (for example, recognition of equal inheritance claims by children of both sexes) but also with new restrictions. The Code encased women within the patriarchal household, thus denying them direct access to public space. Marriage was exalted as a bond outside the contractual order, an exaltation intensified by the abolition of divorce in 1816. Ideological agreement that paternal authority and familial discipline needed to be established firmly in the new order made possible a set of legal compromises integrating aspects of Old Regime law with revolutionary innovations, compromises that attempted to balance individual rights, family autonomy, and state control. So relentless was the litany of women’s natural destiny in the family during the postrevolutionary period that some scholars have been preoccupied with how this theme ‘‘seamlessly connects with the pre-Revolutionary discourse concerning [women]’’ and in turn bequeaths rigid structures that confined women to the domestic sphere until the twentieth century.11 Languages of gender difference, however, were never singular. The doctrine that a woman’s social, legal, and political relationships outside the family should be mediated by a male head of household was

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always unstable in theory and confounded in practice. Madame de Stae¨l’s bitterly resigned comment in De la litte´rature (1800) proved prophetic: these new laws placed women in an uneasy legal limbo, fully in the realm neither of nature nor of society.12 Indeed, the implementation of the Civil Code, thrashed out in civil litigation in subsequent political regimes, revealed gaps and fissures in the vision of a society based on families, not individuals. These gaps were particularly evident when court cases raised the question of conflicting loyalties. In practice, obligations to the nation or to God could pull against duties of obedience to husband or father. Jennifer Ngaire Heuer’s work on gender and citizenship law in France has made particularly good use of court cases that tested the parameters of Article 19 of the Civil Code, which proclaimed (in contrast to the legal ambiguity in the Old Regime) that a married woman always shared her husband’s citizenship status. What happened when e´migre´s returned to wives who had remained in France, but had remarried after their husbands had been proclaimed civilly dead? Who had final disposition over the marriage decisions of celebrated orphans of revolutionary violence who had been adopted by the nation? Could foreign citizens claim paternal power over natural children born to French women? Were marriages contracted under the Empire to avoid conscription in wars against the ‘‘legitimate’’ king valid during the Bourbon Restoration? Heuer concludes that ‘‘despite the resurgence of the term re´gnicole [to designate a French national], both citoyen and citoyenne remained potent words, and ones that could sometimes still conflate civic and civil aspects of national belonging.’’13 In the process of responding to the unintended consequences of their own legal concepts and categories, authorities and litigants kept the potential of women’s direct tie to the nation alive: ‘‘even in very different revolutionary and postrevolutionary regimes, [women’s] membership in a national community could suggest a connection to the political basis of that community.’’14 If Heuer’s work suggests the continued potency of allusions to women’s direct ties to the nation, Caroline Ford’s discussion of religion and gender during the period uses intriguing legal microhistories to examine social anxieties, fears, and concerns about women’s unmediated ties to God. Many women and children had been politicized for the first time by counterrevolutionary struggles, engaging in widespread civil disobedience and rioting. The abbe´ Gre´goire charged, for example, that the constitutional church had been strangled by ‘‘lewd and seditious women.’’15 The poten-

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tially destabilizing aspects of women’s religious commitments were increasingly at issue during the Restoration and July Monarchy and were revealed in civil litigation. Because the Civil Code did not cover the rights of women in religious orders, courts were often confused about the disposition of their property. What were the rights of an English Protestant father over a daughter who had converted to Catholicism and fled the paternal home for a French convent?16 Of a nun who claimed to have been sent to a convent against her will? Of a daughter or a sister who wished to bequeath or to take her inheritance and family patrimony to a religious order? Public responses to these controversies highlighted ‘‘the contradictions within individuals driven by competing allegiances and impulses.’’17 Although the Civil Code was the public face of a widespread consensus on the legitimacy of women’s sequestration within the patriarchal family, evidence of women’s capacities for higher loyalties nevertheless continually erupted to disturb this putative unanimity and to suggest the continued popular salience of alternative sources of political legitimacy. Among the liberal elites who dominated representative politics in the first half of the nineteenth century, and who struggled to exorcise the claims both of the revolutionary republic and of royalist legitimism, the myth of women’s necessary sequestration in the family was particularly sacred precisely because discussion of women’s agency, as in the legal controversies discussed above, was associated with political ‘‘extremism.’’ It has sometimes been argued that the firm displacement of women to the private side of the public/private distinction was inherent in liberal theory itself or was a necessary consequence of the imperatives of bourgeois property. Whatever the merits of these claims—and they are far from impregnable—the liberals of postrevolutionary France had another reason to exorcise women from the public sphere. Women’s agency was symbolically linked to fundamental threats to the regime from a revolutionary republicanism (perceived as toxic) or an unruly Catholic sensibility (perceived as irrational and untamable). Among the liberal elites of the Restoration and July Monarchy, then, an increasingly solid rhetorical wall protected the polity from women’s official incursions—however tenuous—into public space. Yet, in the center as on the margins, women were already present, concretely as well as symbolically. Until 1848, the salons of Paris—created and run by women—helped to shape political debate, to maintain alliances, and to facilitate the staffing of the upper levels of the government and important cultural institutions. As Steven Kale has observed, ‘‘Salons inhabited a

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sphere of unofficial politics from which women were never fully excluded, where gender constraints made ‘private’ the political conversations that occurred prior to official political conduct, and where the ambiguities of gender and privacy among the rich belied the efforts of authorities to separate politics from the customary institutions of associational life.’’18 Although not directly political and increasingly less so as political life developed in exclusively male parties and clubs, French salons in the first half of the nineteenth century were guardians of the sociability that was so important to the functioning of the new parliamentary regimes. Unlike her eighteenth-century predecessor, the nineteenth-century salonnie`re, with a few notable exceptions, rarely presided over a group that crossed partisan lines, but her function certainly went beyond merely setting the stage for extraparliamentary discussion by the political figures of her class or party. One way to use gender to understand the early functioning of liberal politics, then, is to study the unacknowledged political work of women in facilitating political conversation and alliances in the Restoration and July Monarchy.19 There is much to be learned along this path, but it is not the avenue I wish to pursue in this chapter. I argue, rather, that Tocqueville’s views on women’s place in democracy, especially as revealed in his private writings, illuminate another intersection of gender and liberal politics: the use of idealized male/female friendships to repair the failings of a ‘‘civil society’’ infected by individualism and deficient in the judgment, balance, and fellowship necessary to support successful liberal politics. Like the trial records used by Heuer and Ford, Tocqueville’s texts expose the difficulty of expunging women’s higher extrafamilial loyalties from public consciousness. His particular appropriation of those loyalties to bolster genuine political life reveals his assumption that constancy and conscience are developed, rehearsed, and honed in private spaces, rather than generated by participation in democratic political institutions. In assigning the role of rational political interlocutor and sympathetic critic to the extraordinary woman, Tocqueville uses gender both to evoke an idealized notion of liberal judgment and to suggest that such judgments are only contingently related to democratic politics.

Tocqueville, Women, and the Bon Meńage Paralleling his method of argument elsewhere in Democracy in America, Tocqueville notes that the goal of his account of marriage, family, and

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the role of women is not ‘‘to seek new truths, but to show how facts already known relate to my subject.’’20 By drawing conventional observations into the unfamiliar explanatory orbit of ‘‘democracy,’’ he hoped to defuse the anxieties of his readers and prepare them to envision reform. In this case, he wished above all to highlight the surprising affinity between regular morals and democratic instincts.21 In Tocqueville’s ideal reconstruction of American democratic gender relations, virtuous women, sequestered in the family, were barred from the public sphere by law, custom, and choice—praiseworthy exclusions that served to regulate what otherwise would have been social and political chaos. Taking for granted the familiar consensus among right-thinking French liberals that women’s destiny was in the family, Tocqueville wished to emphasize that—contrary to the fears of his readers—the logic of democracy itself led to a gendered polity. In America, the democratic woman did not noisily invade the public sphere, but rather lived quietly ‘‘in her husband’s home as in a cloister.’’22 Tocqueville assigns to the married recluse an important empowering and disciplining role in a free democracy. The restlessness and uncertainty inherent in competitive democratic life—both economic and political—impose a psychological burden on male citizens that becomes tolerable only with the support of a helpmate who cushions such shocks by anchoring his life in the bon meńage. Wives, Tocqueville says, bow ‘‘immediately and uncomplainingly to the austere duties of their new estate’’ and bear the wildly varying fortunes of their husbands ‘‘with quiet indomitable energy. Their desires seem to contract with their fortunes as readily as they expand.’’23 The central moment in the life of such a democratic woman is the marriage vow. Imperfectly captured in the notion of a bourgeois contract, this sacred bond—‘‘often onerous’’—carries the heavy weight of irreversible duty.24 Austere sexual mores requiring the domestic cloistering of women play a role in American democracy analogous to the unquestioning acceptance of religious restraints or to a despotic prison system that swiftly represses deviance. Domestic discipline, in this idealized reading of American life, takes its place among the hidden enablers and stabilizers of democracy. The restriction of women’s public roles in the text of Democracy in America seems to reveal deeply gendered assumptions about the preconditions for a free and well-ordered democracy. A cumulative reading of Tocqueville’s letters, notes, and textual variants in one sense confirms and even deepens this impression.25 Advocacy of women’s participation in the public sphere, or even the republic of letters, strikes him as unnatu-

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ral and faintly disreputable, a harbinger of disorder promoted by fringe elements. In a marginal manuscript note, he reminds himself to give a few examples of the bizarre doctrine ‘‘called the emancipation of women,’’ since it is unlikely to be familiar to his readers.26 Tocqueville’s informal advice to friends and family, moreover, is replete with praise of domestic tranquility. Finally, a certain construction of his own marriage might be thought to illustrate the democratic bon meńage sketched in Democracy in America. His wife, Marie Mottley, was a private soul without public ambitions or scholarly pretensions who managed the household, more or less lived in retirement, and loved their dogs. Despite Tocqueville’s obviously conventional views, however, his private writings also reveal ambivalence about his idealized construction of American gender relations, an ambivalence that draws one’s attention to certain contradictions and paradoxes inherent in his published narrative.

Beyond the Bon Meńage: Repairing the Deficits of Liberal Politics In a letter written to his sister-in-law E´milie from America, Tocqueville muses over the American woman’s miraculous withdrawal into the domestic ‘‘teapot’’ as soon as she has uttered ‘‘the famous yes.’’27 The ironic tone of his private correspondence suggests the need to read his published account with attention to multiple layers of meaning and to his rhetorical concerns. Most obviously, even as Tocqueville reassured his readers that democracy was not synonymous with disorder, he was criticizing European institutions. To reap the benefits of democracy’s potential affinities for bonnes moeurs, the French would have to view marriage as a voluntary merger of persons rather than as an arranged merger of blood or property.28 Although Tocqueville supported the sequestering of women in the household, his idealization of the world of American mores implicitly condemned the Civil Code’s attempt to recreate an anachronistic aristocratic power over subordinate family members (such as patriarchal control over marriage) and he clearly approved the greater simplicity and freedom granted to children of both sexes in America.29 Indeed, the most curious aspect of Tocqueville’s discussion of democratic gender relations for contemporary readers is his blindness to the apparent contradiction between recognizing the spiritual and intellectual equality of democratic

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women (and their consequent capacity for independent judgment) while endorsing their complete exclusion from political society. As in other discussions of cases in which human dignity is not degraded by accepting discipline or hierarchy, Tocqueville focuses on the democratic woman’s voluntary assumption of obligation.30 His most discerning readers have seized on this dramatic moment in which an American woman, the product of a free and rational education that thrusts her into the social world at an early age and develops her reason and judgment, willingly renounces life in society for the duties of secluded domesticity.31 There is an obvious tension between his simultaneous recognition that a woman’s desire is ‘‘natural’’ and the development of her democratic passions likely, and his assertion that both desire and democratic passions are willingly repressed in the bon meńage. Tocqueville’s admiring portrait of the democratic woman in Democracy in America, then, is not entirely in focus. On the one hand, he lauds the suppression of her democratic passions as a manly sacrifice in which Americans can take justified pride. America owes its freedom to the superiority of its women.32 On the other hand, he offers no plausible account of the voluntary nature of this renunciation, other than the great sway of religion over female souls.33 Moreover, the resulting bon meńage emerges as a flawed solution. As companions, these idealized democratic women are respectable and cold (disparaging words in Tocqueville’s lexicon) rather than tender and loving (terms of approbation). Public gain is private loss.34 And given the problematical nature of economic self-interest, material ambition, and individualism in democratic society, devotion to husband and family might have its own unexpected pathology. Tocqueville’s private writings allow us to explore these subtextual reservations and narrative inconsistencies; they provide a fuller account of the reparative role of gender difference in the world of liberal politics.

Des Femmes Honneˆtes et Froides I traveld thro’ a Land of Men A Land of Men & Women too, And heard & saw such dreadful things As cold Earth wanderers never knew.

As in William Blake’s cryptic evocation of the mysterious interdependence of male and female in ‘‘The Mental Traveller,’’ Tocqueville’s letters

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from America portray American marriage and family life with dread as well as approbation. The lack of warmth in the tranquil bon meńage, dominated by chaste but cold women, appears more troubling than it does in the considered discussion that Tocqueville fashions in Democracy in America. He writes to his sister-in-law E´milie from New York, for example, that one of these reserved American matrons informed him with great ‘‘sang-froid’’ that women in the United States have only one occupation: to admire their husbands.35 Indeed, America is an El Dorado for husbands, who can find complete happiness if all they want is someone to pour tea and raise the children.36 These anecdotes are obviously meant to amuse (Tocqueville’s tone in these letters is somewhat arch), but they convey disdain as well. He suggests that married women literally become ill (languissantes et faibles) through the suppression of their natural passions, an observation that may be the kernel of his affecting portrait, in Democracy in America, of the sad and wasted pioneer woman whose very life appears to be draining away as her family prospers.37 In a more serious and reflective vein than in these letters to E´milie, Tocqueville confided to his childhood friend Euge`ne Stoffels that domestic happiness in the form of a tranquil and uniform family life might satisfy his ‘‘teˆte tre`s froide’’ but not his ‘‘passions ardentes.’’38 This split between teˆte and coeur haunts his entire correspondence, as does his complaint that the oscillation between reason and passion makes him an ‘‘an insoluble mystery to [him]self.’’39 After the publication of the 1835 Democracy, he responded to a letter from Basil Hall, who had taken issue with Tocqueville’s claim that Americans experience greater domestic felicity than Europeans, by sketching out the kernel of the argument that he would present in the 1840 Democracy. Tocqueville implicitly acknowledged, however, the defect that would deprive this portrait of democratic marriage from expressing perfect happiness or true virtue: pure and orderly households lacked ‘‘tendresse.’’40

Friendship in Marriage: ‘‘Un Bon et Tendre Meńage’’ In contrast to the respectable household, inhabited by a competent but cold ‘‘directrice du meńage,’’ Tocqueville’s letters to his wife Marie express an ideal of true friendship, a marriage of souls: ‘‘[our marriage] is something quite superior to what is called a bon meńage. It is much more

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profound, much more intimate, much more exclusive; it is the true union and complete melding of souls.’’41 No isolated lyric, this letter to Marie is one variation on a common theme: Alexis and Marie form, according to Tocqueville, a couple who complete each other in body and soul.42 Only with Marie can he overcome—if only temporarily—his black moods and restless agitation. He is attached by sentiment to his family, by reason to his political work, but only to Marie by both coeur and teˆte. And only with Marie is this solace infinitely renewable.43 According to a famous maxim of La Rochefoucauld, ‘‘Women are touched very little by friendship because it seems insipid after they have tasted love.’’44 Tocqueville, however, collapses the distinction between friendship and love, constructing an ideal of complete marital friendship that serves both as solace and substitute for the lack of true amitie´ in a competitive and craven public sphere. Jean-Louis Benoıˆt, editor of the Tocqueville’s familial correspondence and author of a recent biography of Tocqueville, notes that historians have generally been excessively severe in their judgments of Marie Mottley.45 Recent accounts, including his own, are considerably more contextual and sympathetic and permit a deeper reading of the significance of this relationship.46 The following facts are uncontested. In 1835, rejecting the urgent advice of his closest friends and incurring the displeasure of his family, Tocqueville chose to marry a woman either six or nine years older than he, an Englishwoman whom he had met at Versailles and who had been his mistress since 1828. She was not French, not noble, not wealthy, not beautiful, and already ‘‘old.’’ This marriage was, in fact, a scandalous misalliance. With the successful publication of the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville appears to have gained the confidence to break with convention and to arrange his life to suit himself. By his own account, he married—as did his hypothetical American girl—with his eyes open. A letter written to a cousin (not so much in advance of the marriage as to invite remonstration over his choice) adroitly finesses the primary objections, but is quite clear-sighted about the advantages. He admires her intellect, soul, and character; and most important, he is convinced that she will give him the interior happiness that he needs to make his way in the world.47 Whatever the difficulties of this union, he never regretted it. Mysterious and perhaps always opaque to outsiders, the alchemy of a marriage is difficult to discern from a temporal and cultural distance and from sketchy historical materials. Although there are 215 extant letters

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written from Alexis to Marie over a thirty-year period, there are few from the seven-year period before their marriage, and none from Marie to Alexis. Moreover, Marie apparently sorted through the correspondence rather thoroughly; she also erased passages (now partially restored) in existing letters referring to their sensual relationship.48 Many letters also exist only as copies in her hand. There were storm waves and turbulent undercurrents. Tocqueville was repeatedly unfaithful; Marie was jealous and aggrieved. During the early 1840s the relationship was especially tense.49 Nevertheless, Tocqueville’s comments to his friends and family (while not wholly uncritical) largely echo the unflagging loyalty and unremitting praise we see in his letters to her.50 Before his marriage, he wrote from America to Ernest de Chabrol, ‘‘I love her more than I can express to you. . . . This is not just a matter of an interest in pleasure or amour-propre, but a real and immense interest, a profound sentiment that fills my whole heart.’’51 The last letter we have from Tocqueville to Marie addresses ‘‘mon amie che´rie et mon unique bien.’’52 Laurence Guellec offers a particularly sensitive discussion of the Tocqueville marriage.53 According to Guellec, the tenor and frequency of his letters to Marie, ‘‘with and despite the infidelities of a husband overtaken by his sensual appetites or by the customs of aristocratic libertinism,’’ reveal a myth, even a religion, of egalitarian Christian marriage.54 The letters invoke reciprocal love and respect in a particularly transparent and frank manner, devoid of romantic or Romanesque flights of fancy. Neither can this ideal of modern companionate marriage be equated with aristocratic or bourgeois alliances or the patriarchal family. Alexis and Marie had no children, a cause for regret but no real angst.55 Removed from the discourse of complementary gender roles or social convention, this idealized union seemed to represent for Tocqueville a confirmation of his own capacity for transcendence: ‘‘I never feel more inclined to think of God, more convinced of the reality of another life, than when I think of you.’’56 Indeed, Tocqueville’s understanding of this relationship with Marie as one both gendered and beyond gender is explicit: ‘‘You are my consolation, my mainstay (appui), my only friend (amie) on earth; when I say my ‘only’ friend, I do not say enough, I would like to find a word that conveyed this tenderness, this devotion, this delicacy that one only finds in an amie, and this courage, this firm reason and this good counsel that, it is said, only an ami can offer.’’57 With Marie Mottley, then, Tocqueville found a union that provided the psychological and spiritual ballast necessary to moor his life and

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work.58 But Tocqueville’s construction of his marriage is of more than idiosyncratic or biographical interest. He saw this fusional relationship not only as a means to equilibrate his own divided psyche, but also as a counterpoint to the splintered sensibility that, in his view, made it difficult to pursue principled politics in the public world he inhabited. Marital friendship—with its unconditional support, transparent conversation, and possibility for corrective criticism—becomes a necessary context for the development of political judgment and the performance of political duty. From his entry into public life until his death, Tocqueville had a wide circle of acquaintances but few intimates.59 Ill at ease in parliamentary life, which seemed to require a kind of superficial camaraderie for which he was not equipped and which he despised, Tocqueville never fused friendship with politics. Among the liberals—his primary political interlocutors—he never became permanently attached to any party or coterie and could never turn his ‘‘honest and moderate’’ friends into an effective opposition.’’60 He is more explicit in the Recollections: friendship cannot cross party lines. ‘‘Political parties never know each other; they come close, jostle and grip one another, but they never see.’’61 Without trust and the possibility of friendship, however, politics became a frustrating business, and the political life both painful and sad.62 Contributing to the faltering of friendship in public life, according to Tocqueville, was the lack of a generally accepted code of honor. In his work on honor in the Restoration and July Monarchy, William Reddy rather awkwardly places Tocqueville in the camp of those thinkers who simplistically distinguished aristocratic honor from the new amoral realm of male self-assertion. Reddy argues that this bifurcation (between the worlds of honor and self-interest, feeling and reason) both disguised new codes of bourgeois (male) honor and facilitated ‘‘the gendered marking of feeling as a female matter.’’63 Tocqueville, however, was quite aware of the social construction of honor and of the importance of these codes in regulating both aristocratic and democratic behavior.64 Moreover, his discussion of ‘‘true honor’’ was more likely to dissolve than to reinforce both the idealization of aristocratic honor and democratic gender binaries that divided masculine reason from feminine sentiment. For example, he compares the ‘‘bastard wisdom’’ allegedly current in French political life (namely that one should be pious and honorable in private, but could ignore the public good and pursue interests faithlessly in politics) with an analogous bastardization of wisdom in aristocracy (‘‘which held that

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it was honorable to break faith with a woman, but infamous to break one’s word to a man’’).65 Here Tocqueville uses a gendered example to suggest that democratic honor should ideally transcend the accident of bodies even as it fused reason and sentiment. If the institutions of parliamentary democracy were filled with petty parties and bastardized wisdom, coteries in which it was impossible to indulge the higher social instincts that nurtured true freedom, what of the sociable world of the salonnie`res? Welcomed in the most prestigious salons both because of his birth and his fame, Tocqueville was more comfortable there than in the assemblies. Between 1815 and 1848 he regularly frequented more than a dozen prominent salons. Nevertheless, with the exception of Madame Swetchine, Tocqueville ‘‘made useful contacts in the salons . . . but very few friends.’’66 He could be harsh in judgment of the fickle and selfish standards of society, and though he was at ease in le monde, he was not at home there.67 In La vie e´le´gante ou la formation de Tout-Paris, 1815–1848, Anne Martin Fugier notes the important linguistic distinction that nineteenth-century writers made between ‘‘avoir de l’esprit’’—to be intelligent, to be capable of elevated or spiritual conversation—and ‘‘faire de l’esprit’’—to be witty, capable of sharp or interesting or lively conversation.68 Tocqueville never ceased praising his wife as a woman who had ‘‘l’esprit’’—a rare quality, he assured Madame Swetchine, ‘‘particularly, I have to say, in the salons where politeness [honneˆtete´] itself has a thousand ruses.’’69 More than a tranquil refuge, the ideal of marital friendship offers an alternate form of sociability: a model debating society for the frank revelation of self that is necessary to motivate honorable public action and to check petty ambition. ‘‘With you,’’ he writes to Marie, ‘‘I can speak, think, and act according to my nature without fear of being misunderstood or judged by faulty standards.’’70 ‘‘It seems that every minute I need to speak to you, to see you, to hear your ideas and show you mine. Your impressions, even on politics, are precious to me.’’71 It is to Marie that he confides his deepest doubt about himself: as a politician: he lacks the essential talents for success. And it is to Marie that he reveals his frankest assessment of the political situation in 1848.72 An idealization of the fusional couple, then, keeps alive the image of equal association where heart and reason pull together in a milieu that seemed to thwart it. Tocqueville attributes to the extraordinary friend/wife the task of stimulating a balance of reason and sentiment through her own exemplary melding of the two. But companionate marriage cannot play this role without

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both partners rising above the concerns of the bon meńage, without wives who are also, in some sense, citoyennes.

Liberal Citoyennes Tangled debates over national membership and ultimate loyalties, I have argued, could still raise troubling questions about the relationships among le citoyen, la citoyenne, and la nation in postrevolutionary France. Although Tocqueville deployed these words with a deliberate lack of revolutionary associations, his use of citoyen always suggested awareness of the claims of the cite´ or of political activity and duty.73 It is significant, then, that Tocqueville uses the term citoyenne to express those qualities by which superior women rise above the confines of the bon meńage, exercising independent political judgment. Consider these three contrasts. In 1841, he wrote to Marie about the shortsighted loyalties of Lamartine’s wife, who was so ambitious for her husband that she urged him to make a dishonorable and foolish political move. ‘‘I told myself that Marie would not have acted like that; and if I had the weakness to let myself be pulled along blindly by my ambition and pride into this kind of mistake, at least I would not lack a warning that would point out the danger, and a tender and loving friend who would have the courage to tell me the truth in time.’’74 In 1842 Tocqueville wrote to Marie about a former general, wounded in battle, who was about to lose his lucrative government post because he would not toe the government line. The general’s wife sent her husband an admirable letter, advising him to follow the honorable course, and not to worry about her or his children, who would share in his good name. Tocqueville was moved by such a ‘‘belle parole’’ and also by his realization that his own wife would write a similar letter in similar circumstances.75 Finally, there is the behavior of his sister-in-law Alexandrine in 1848, related in his Recollections. Characteristically, my sister-in-law had lost her head. . . . There was neither depth of feeling nor breadth of sympathy in her demonstrative sensibility. She was, after all, very kind and even intelligent, but her mind had contracted and her heart frozen as both were restricted within the narrow limits of a pious egotism, so that both mind and heart were solely concerned with the good

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God, her husband, her children and especially her health, with no interest left over for other people. She was the most respectable woman and the worst citoyenne one could find.76 Again the contrast is with Marie, ‘‘of penetrating insight and staunch spirit, whose naturally lofty soul would be ready to face any situation and triumph over any setback.’’77 The insufficiency of Tocqueville’s account of the politically salutary discipline of domesticity in Democracy in America is manifest in these examples. Except for the unusual woman of naturally lofty soul, it seems, dedication to the bon meńage can starve the understanding and shrivel the heart, thus fueling narrow individualism and self-interest. Yet how do such unusual women—not directrices du meńage, but rather directrices de conscience and private coaches of public performance—come to be? Insulated from the salutary influence of civil or political association, women can be influenced to look beyond the foyer only by the other force that Tocqueville recognizes as a counterweight to individualism: religion. It is not accidental, then, that religion, patriotism, and the formation of the citoyenne figure prominently in Tocqueville’s famous correspondence with his spiritual ‘‘advisor,’’ Madame Swetchine. After the failure of the republic in 1851 and the establishment of the Second Empire, Tocqueville’s estrangement from quotidian politics intensified. He had been uncomfortable practicing representative politics in a regime that, in his view, failed to generate leadership with the longterm interests and best political instincts of the nation at heart. Now he feared that the number of those capable of launching even a nominally liberal regime was small and dwindling.78 He steadily withdrew into a ‘‘petite cite´ ideále’’—a phrase that he had used in a letter to RoyerCollard in 1837, but that took on new meaning under imperial despotism.79 In this retreat, contact with kindred souls became all-important, and Tocqueville’s private writings during the Empire are filled with fears of isolation and hopes of compensatory friendship. Perhaps the most powerful portrait of such friendship emerges in his correspondence with Madame Swetchine. An erudite woman of deep spirituality and ‘‘esprit’’ who played a significant role in conservative Catholic circles, Madame Swetchine became an important interlocutor for Tocqueville during the mid1850s.80 She was the delicate confidante of his religious doubts and of an important confession about his loss of faith. The letters, however, are also interesting for their presentation of an ideal association: not the glue or

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grease of existing politics, but a private meeting of minds and hearts that could fan the embers of public liberty. Tocqueville placed Madame Swetchine among ‘‘a very small number of persons’’ who could relieve the cruel isolation imposed by despotism.81 In Tocqueville’s view, successful liberal politics required not only mutual respect but also sympathetic trust, qualities that he found to be rare in political life under France’s postrevolutionary representative regimes, but entirely absent from the Second Empire. It was Madame Swetchine’s ability to inspire both rational respect and sympathetic confidence that most attracted Tocqueville and that he cites as the reason for initiating the correspondence. He notes that she ‘‘inspires at once respect and trust [confiance]: two sentiments that do not always go together, although they are designed for one another.’’82 In the presence of Madame Swetchine, Tocqueville experiences ‘‘the invincible attraction that contact with warmth of heart [coeur] united with sincerity of mind [esprit] has always had for me.’’83 As in his correspondence with Marie, this dual inspiration is a frequent theme, as is the claim that this special friendship draws out his higher self and inspires courageous political action. ‘‘Your last letter both interested and touched me; you were completely present, your esprit and your coeur. You show me a kindness that I would like to deserve, for friendship with a person like you puts one under obligation; it demands not only gratitude but also deeds that can justify it.’’84 Madame Swetchine’s sex is not irrelevant to this friendship. By quoting Genesis to her (‘‘it is not good for man to be alone’’) Tocqueville implicitly evokes the presence of Eve and suggests the special role of women in relieving his permanent existential angst and political isolation.85 As in the depiction of his marriage to Marie, however, this solace does not arise from any special feminine affinity for emotion or love, but rather from an admirable balance of mind and heart that rises above conventional gender roles, a mysterious equipoise achieved by the exceptional woman and capable of inducing a similar balance in Tocqueville himself. The language of fusing ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ principles was increasingly common in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet most such conceptions understood the female principle to be emotion or intuition (as in the Saint-Simonians or Auguste Comte) or a religiously infused notion of maternal love (as in Jules Michelet). Tocqueville’s notion is rather more androgynous and—in its elitist way—egalitarian: two superior beings, each capable of high reason and deep feeling, experience a transcendent fusion of rationality and emotion through their participa-

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tion in a transformative friendship. Since Tocqueville associates a love of liberty with the highest aspirations of l’esprit and the deepest promptings of le coeur, this association of two souls also keeps alive the possibility of a free spirit. Let me return to the question of the origins of such an exceptional amie and citoyenne. In the course of discussing the political role of priests in France, Tocqueville initiates a curious and revealing interchange with Madame Swetchine on the religious affinities of woman’s citizenship. He first identifies two distinct parts of morality in the ‘‘eyes of God.’’ One relates to private life (the duties of father, son, wife or husband). The other refers to public life: obligations to one’s country and to the larger human community of which that country is a particular part. Implicitly recognizing that religion is the only vehicle to enlarge women’s loyalties, he indicts the clergy for their preoccupation with private life and neglect of public duties, particularly in relation to women.86 It is not that he disputes the role of religion in recalling women to their primarily domestic roles—faithful wives and excellent mothers, judicious in household matters and charitable toward the poor—but there is nevertheless a direct moral obligation to one’s country, a consciousness of ‘‘duties that relate to public life.’’87 It is not only that women do not practice these virtues for themselves, ‘‘which is rather natural,’’ but that they do not inculcate them in those over whom they have influence. He then cites the memory of his paternal grandmother, who never failed to inform his father that God had commanded sacrifice to king and country.88 In another letter he returns to this theme, noting explicitly that God enjoins the duties of patriotism (‘‘the great idea of political duty in its most vigorous and elevated sense’’) directly on both men and women. The universal duties of conscience cannot be mediated through father or husband. Without an independently inspired larger vision, a woman cannot exercise ‘‘a bracing influence on the general way in which men ought to consider duty or even ambition.’’89 Tocqueville was gravely disappointed that the Catholic Church did not oppose the Empire, and he could hardly have thought it likely that it would begin to preach the duties of independent political judgment to Catholic women. However, absent any social or political context for the formation of liberal citoyennes—contexts that Tocqueville believed would intensify corruption and competition in the public sphere and impoverish private life—he was left with the language of exceptionality and divine intervention. Through her capacity for the highest form of friendship,

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the exceptional woman could repair the failings of liberal politics, sustain honorable ambitions, inform political judgment, and even keep the seed of freedom alive in despotic times. Yet such a liberal citoyenne was rare, not typical, touched by grace, rather than naturally created by the emerging ‘‘democracy’’ in France. It is perhaps not accidental, then, that the exemplars of the liberal citoyenne—Marie Mottley and Sophie Swetchine—were liminal figures: religious converts of foreign birth who remained in some sense outsiders in French society.90

Conclusion: Tocqueville and the Paradox of the Liberal Citoyenne Deliberately removed from the public sphere and legally sequestered in a reconstituted patriarchal family by the Civil Code, women nevertheless emerged as potent figures in the political theory and practice of postrevolutionary France. I have suggested that for political moderates, Tocqueville among them, denying women a public role appeared to be particularly urgent in order to stabilize the emerging and still fragile liberal regime. Yet, like the specter of female agency that haunted conceptions of republican fraternity or of the community of the faithful, the image of the liberal citoyenne could not be completely occluded. How does this image come into focus in Tocqueville’s texts? Successful liberal politics, in Tocqueville’s view, required attentiveness to long-term common interests, the ability to shape democratic instincts and to compromise creatively, and a certain moral constancy. These qualities of character—so his discussion of the role of women in democracy would suggest—are above all formed in private life, because the competitive theater of democratic politics cannot generate such virtues on its own. What he calls in a letter to his brother Edouard ‘‘the sphere of practical politics’’ is an arena in which the successful political figure must lead a strenuous double life, acting on the public stage according to certain pragmatic rules of the game, yet at the same time shaping the dramatic action in such a way as to transform the system in the direction of greater freedom.91 To play this role was difficult and lonely. Tocqueville offers us two versions of women’s place in the exacting mise-en-sce`ne of liberal democratic politics: the bon meńage and the bon et tendre meńage. Both are supporting roles off the main stage. According to Tocqueville,

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women have the innate capacity—even the duty—to exercise independent rational judgment about political matters. Yet he believed their exclusion from the political action was so obviously necessary as to seem self-evident. The superior American women who direct the regular households depicted in Democracy in America sustain free democracy in a manner that appears more passive than active. The chaste wife and mother creates an oasis of order and regularity that counters the turbulence of democratic life. Like widespread religious belief, the discipline of domesticity calibrates the labile psyche of the democratic male citizen. There is surprisingly little discussion of female intellectual or political agency in this account, other than at the sacrificial moment in which the young woman chooses a husband and renounces society, in full knowledge that her subsequent sequestration serves the greater good of the republic. Indeed, Tocqueville’s tone in discussing the regularity of family life and its functions in stabilizing democracy recalls his judgment on the general operation of self-interest properly understood in America; the bon meńage cannot represent true virtue because it is merely respectable, not truly great. A fuller picture of the ideal citoyenne, and perhaps of the reasons that Tocqueville was blind to the contradiction of her political exclusion, emerges in his portrait of the bon et tendre meńage, directed by a woman who was a true companion rather than merely a functional helpmate. This version of the democratic household, in contrast to his account in Democracy in America, exalts a conception of friendship based on an egalitarian fusion of exceptional souls. Transcending conventional gender binaries—the wife is both amie and ami—the bon et tendre meńage could compensate for the lack of associational friendship in political life. Tocqueville depicts his marriage as at once refuge (from his own spiritual and political anxieties), reparation (for a liberal political sphere that could not reconcile the mind and heart), and preparation (for the arduous political life). His friendship with Madame Swetchine under the Empire provides another example of idealized male/female friendship conceived as both consolation (for the painful isolation that comes with political repression) and political incubation (of a liberty that can arise only from conversation with intelligent and sympathetic soul mates). In both these model associations, the exemplary woman friend emerges as an ideal citoyenne, an independent conscience who upholds duty ‘‘in its most vigorous and elevated sense.’’92 When Tocqueville writes

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to Marie that her ideas and criticisms and impressions are crucial to his political equilibrium, he points to a more active role for women in a gender-divided polity than is apparent in Democracy in America. Still hidden, because her presence on stage would only intensify conflict and make its management less likely, the citoyenne exercises an explicit counterweight to the private forces of individualism and material self-interest that continually threaten to seep into representative politics and poison the well of residual political trust. The classical image of the virtuous republican wife, who provides the warrior/citizen respite between battles, is here curiously desexualized, intellectualized, and invested indirectly with political agency.93 Indeed the woman’s role in this conception is to model and motivate (in private) the elusive fusion of reason and passion necessary to create a public culture of law and freedom rather than of force and fraud. Removed from the public sphere, women are allegedly freed to play an active role in calibrating the exacting judgments necessary to master democratic political life. Tocqueville’s description of the gendered democratic polity, then, was at the same time a construction of the exemplary woman as a morally autonomous subject. If Tocqueville’s idealized construction of the reparative functions of male/female association in part explains the paradoxical ease with which he excluded women from the liberal public sphere, it does not solve the mystery of the sources of the exemplary female civic character. Tocqueville speaks in Democracy in America of liberty’s difficult ‘‘apprenticeship,’’ by which he appears to have meant a combination of political experience and the capacity for independent judgment. Although he notes that women in America were allowed freely to experience society before marriage, an apprenticeship that apparently developed their judgment and that he advocated for European girls as well, this experience did not extend, in his view, to actual participation in civil or political associations. Moreover, it was an education largely aimed at producing a reasoned choice of spouse, rather than enlightened social and political opinions. Their domestic destiny removed women from those bracing effects of civil and political associations that facilitated political judgment, modeled ‘‘self-government,’’ and enlarged the understanding and sympathies. The other influence of paramount importance in shoring up the capacity for autonomous political judgment, according to Tocqueville, was religion. Indeed, Tocqueville looked primarily to Christian religious teaching to reinforce women’s consciousness of public duty. Perhaps because he judged French clerical influence on women to be perni-

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cious—it produced narrow piety rather than expansive patriotism— Tocqueville was forced to conclude that to encounter an exemplary amie and citoyenne was a mysterious benediction, a gift from God. Ironically, she played a role in Tocqueville’s intellectual sensibility akin to that of freedom itself. Like Tocquevillean liberty, the citoyenne kept alive an ideal of an active self-governing politics that fused heart and mind. But like that fugitive freedom, she eluded instantiation in the concrete life of democracy.

Notes 1. A particularly good example of these general fears can be found in Jules Michelet’s pamphlet Du preˆtre, de la femme, de la famille (Paris: Hachette, 1845). 2. Les femmes politiques, Come´die en trois actes et en vers, par le citoyen Gosse, repre´senteé la premie`re fois sur le theáˆtre des victoires, performed le 30 fructidor an 7 (Paris, Year VIII), 4–5, cited in Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 144. 3. There is, however, a noticeable fault line in the literature. Some scholars argue that the exclusion of women illuminates the exclusionary assumptions and limitations inherent in liberalism itself. They argue that liberalism’s construction of the universal subject required the category of ‘‘other’’ and thus facilitated the emergence of a gendered polity. Joan Scott’s discussion in Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) is in part a subtle exploration of this theme. See also Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Pres, 1988). Other scholars emphasize a latent emancipatory tension inherent in the historical exclusion of women from the polity, arguing that the liberal project did not so much inscribe women’s necessary exclusion as assure their ultimate, if long-delayed, recognition as ‘‘universal’’ beings. In this camp one might locate Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Mona Ozouf, Les mots des femmes: Essai sur la singularite´ française (Paris: Fayard, 1995). It is not my intention to engage directly in this debate, but my reading of the tensions in Tocqueville’s discussion of citoyennes quite apparently falls into the latter category. 4. See, for example, Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer, and Landes, Women and the Public Sphere. 5. See, for example, Jo Burr Margadent, ‘‘Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France: Reinterpreting the Failure of the July Monarchy, 1830–1848,’’ American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999): 1461–96. For a useful review of the literature on gendered and pornographic imagery in popular political discourse, see 1461n1. 6. See Heuer, The Family and the Nation, discussed below. See also Hesse’s discussion in The Other Enlightenment of the (short-run) contradiction between the philosophical awakening of women, who emerged as major players in the print culture of the postrevolutionary world and constructed their moral autonomy through authorship, and the denial of full female agency in both constitutional law and laws governing intellectual property. 7. A recent example is Caroline Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), discussed below. For a review of the historical literature on gender and religion in France see 3n5. 8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr, trans. George Lawrence

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(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971), 11 (hereafter this work is cited as Recollections); Lettres choisies, Souvenirs: 1814–1859, ed. Françoise Me´lonio and Laurence Guellec (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 754 (this work hereafter cited as Lettres, S). 9. ‘‘Each sex is called to the type of occupation that is peculiar to it; its activity is circumscribed within this circle that cannot be breached, for nature, which has laid down these limits for mankind, commands imperiously and is not itself commanded.’’ Archives parlementaires de 1787 a` 1799, 1st ser., 63 (Paris, 1903): 562 (my translation), cited in William H. Sewell Jr., ‘‘Le Citoyen/la Citoyenne: Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship,’’ in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 2, The Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 117. 10. For a useful discussion of the Code’s consolidation of a reaction against revolutionary innovations in family law, see Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), chap. 8, ‘‘The Genesis of the Civil Code,’’ 283–310. See also the useful bibliographical discussion, 425–26nn4–7. 11. See, for example, Madelyn Gutwirth, ‘‘Citoyens, Citoyennes: Cultural Regression and the Subversion of Female Citizenship in the French Revolution,’’ in The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship, ed. Reneé Waldinger, Philip Dawson, and Isser Woloch (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 25–26. 12. Madame de Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, ed. Ge´rard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 332. Cf. 335: ‘‘Since the Revolution men have thought that it was politically and morally useful to reduce women to the most absurd insignificance [me´diocrite´].’’ 13. Heuer, The Family and the Nation, 194. 14. Ibid., 197. 15. Quoted in Lynn Hunt, ‘‘The Unstable Boundaries of the French Revolution,’’ in A History of Private Life, ed. Michelle Perrot, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 26. 16. In this famous case, a dispute between Douglas Loveday and his daughter Emily, even the legitimist Comte de Bonald, who had used paternal authority to argue for the abolition of divorce and who considered the social and political influence of women a sign of decadence, supported the right of the daughter. See Ford, Divided Houses, 54–55. 17. Ibid., 10. 18. Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 7. 19. On the role of women in establishing the connections and trust necessary for political decision making and place making among the Doctrinaires in the July Monarchy, see Sarah Horowitz, ‘‘Just Friends: Separate Spheres and the Case of Male/Female Friendships,’’ paper presented at the Society of French Historical Studies, April 2006, Champaign, Ill. On the importance of patterns of elite sociabilite´ to politics in general during this period, see Maurice Agulhon, Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise 1810–1848: E´tude d’une mutation de sociabilite´ (Paris: Armand Colin, 1977), especially 66–72, and Anne Martin-Fugier, La vie e´le´gante ou la formation du Tout-Paris 1815–1848 (Paris: Fayard, 1990), especially chaps. 3 and 5. 20. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 2004), 2:685; (De la de´mocratie en Ame´rique, ed. Andre´ Jardin, Jean-Claude Lamberti, and James T. Schleifer, Œuvres de Tocqueville, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliote`que de la Pleáide, 1992), 705. Subsequent references to Democracy in America are to the Goldhammer translation, cited as da1 or da2, with the Pleíade text cited in parentheses as da1p or da2p. 21. By good, pure, or regular morals, Tocqueville means absolute sexual fidelity for women and men’s avoidance of extramarital affairs with respectable women. In these chapters (8–11 in part 2 of the 1840 Democracy) Tocqueville is quite aware of the deep influence of national origin and religion on moeurs that regulate relations between the sexes, and he plays simultaneously with a number of

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comparative dimensions (French/American, American/English, French/English, Catholic/Protestant). Yet he constructs the published text to stress the importance of ‘‘democracy’’ rather than the more familiar explanations of national origin or religion. 22. da2, 695 (da2p, 715). Tocqueville continually plays with images of sequestration. An alternate text reads, ‘‘She leads a claustral life in the home of her husband.’’ Alexis de Tocqueville, De la de´mocratie en Ame´rique, ed. Eduardo Nolla, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1990), 2, 172. In a letter to his sister-in-law E´milie (9 June 1831), he writes: ‘‘It is as if she entered a convent. . . . It is a nun’s life.’’ Alexis de Tocqueville, Œuvres comple`tes: Œuvres, papiers et correspondances d’Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 14, ed. Jean-Louis Benoıˆt (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 102–3. This work is hereafter cited as oc, 14. 23. da2, 696 (da2p, 717). 24. da2, 700 (da2p, 720). 25. Private writings consulted for this chapter include the notebooks he kept on his journey to America, edited by Françoise Me´lonio and published in the first volume of the Bibliote`que de la Pleíade edition of the Oeuvres de Tocqueville (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 27–413, especially the conversations with Gallatin, Lieber, and Brown (31–34, 68–71, 85–87); important letters published with his Recollections in Lettres, S; his familial correspondence, ed. Jean-Louis Benoıˆt and published in 1998 as vol. 14 of the Œuvres comple`tes: Œuvres, papiers et correspondances d’Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. J. P. Mayer, Andre´ Jardin, and Françoise Me´lonio (Paris: Gallimard, 1951–) (oc, 14); and his correspondence with Madame Swetchine, edited by Pierre Gibert and published in 1983 as vol. 15 of the Œuvres comple`tes, hereafter cited as oc, 15:2. 26. Tocqueville writes the following note to himself: ‘‘Make clearer the doctrine called the ‘emancipation of women.’ Do not suppose that the reader knows about it. Even cite, whether in a note or in the text, the extravagant ideas of the Saint-Simonians and others on this point’’ (da2p, 1145). In the context of discussing his one meeting with Georges Sand, he confides that he normally despises women authors (‘‘Je de´teste les femmes qui ećrivent’’), although Sand proved an exception, charming him with ‘‘the naturalness of manner characteristic of great spirits.’’ Recollections, 167 (Lettres, S, 860). 27. 28 November 1831, oc, 14:148. 28. For a discussion of the prevalence of arranged marriage in France among both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and of the centrality of the contrast between democratic and aristocratic marriages in Tocqueville’s text, see Jean-Louis Benoıˆt, Tocqueville Moraliste (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 2004), 369–475. 29. On his criticism of certain patriarchal aspects of the Civil Code and interest in the ‘‘rights of the child,’’ see Michelle Perrot, ‘‘Tocqueville Mećonnu,’’ oc, 4:1, 36. For his approval of a more simple, spontaneous, and natural girlhood than was usual in France, see his letter to his niece Denise (6 January 1848) oc, 14:252 and his letter to his cousin Eugeńie de Grancey (5 May 1832) on the birth of her second son, humorously congratulating her on this fortuitous avoidance of the difficulty of having to raise a daughter. Lettres, S, 281. 30. Compare his discussion of nobles in seventeenth-century France who are not degraded by their obedience to the king because they accept his power as legitimate. They have ‘‘un gouˆt libre pour l’obeíssance.’’ See ‘‘E´tat social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789,’’ oc, 2:1, 60. 31. Delba Winthrop offered one of the first scholarly analyses of this surprising renunciation in ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress,’ ’’ Political Theory 14, no. 2 (1986): 239–61. Although I do not entirely agree with the thrust of her reading, Winthrop’s argument that democratic women model the rational modulation of desire for democratic men does intuit the role of the exemplary ‘‘true’’ companion suggested in Tocqueville’s private writings. 32. da2, 708 (da2p, 729). 33. For a subtle discussion of the ways in which Tocqueville smuggles earlier Puritan assumptions

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about complementary gender obligations into his construction of nineteenth-century family relations, see Barbara Allen, Tocqueville, Covenant, and the Democratic Revolution: Harmonizing Earth with Heaven (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005), 195–223. In her view, Tocqueville’s conception of democratic marriage is a flawed but illuminating attempt to ‘‘rehabilitate a covenantal view of the family for a modern world’’ (219). 34. da2, 694 (da2p, 714). 35. 9 June 1831, oc, 14:103. 36. 29 November 1831, oc, 14:148. 37. Ibid., 149. He compares such women to men who turn bilious through the suppression of ambition. Cf. da2, 865 (da2p, 858). 38. 18 October 1831, Lettres, S, 238. 39. Ibid. For other confessions of this sense of a split between heart and head, see his letters to Charles Stoffels, 22 October 1831, Lettres, S, 239, and to Louis de Kergolay, 25 October 1842, Lettres, S, 509. Also compare his letter to Marie Mottley, 29 August 1845, oc, 14:491, in which he notes, ‘‘I am a strange man, inexplicable to myself.’’ 40. Letter to Basil Hall, 19 June 1836, Lettres, S, 349. In a letter to Ernest de Chabrol from America, Tocqueville notes that holding women in esteem as ‘‘me`res de famille et directrices du meńage’’ is a kind of regular or well-ordered virtue, but is not virtue in the strict sense of the word (9 June 1831, Lettres, S, 187). 41. Letter to Marie, 3 May 1841, oc, 14:415. Marie was clearly also the directrice of their household. He called her his ‘‘ministre des finances’’ (letter to Marie, 13 June 1841, oc, 14:437). She also negotiated the tenant rents and oversaw the renovation of the Tocqueville chateau inherited on his mother’s death. These matters take up very little of the existing correspondence. The phrase shown in the heading of this section is from a letter to his wife, Marie, 6 December 1841, oc, 14:443. 42. See, in particular, the following letters to Marie: 26 August 1843, oc, 14:479; 24 July 1844, oc, 14:483; 29 August 1845, oc, 14:491; and 24 September 1848, oc, 14:543. 43. See his letters to Louis de Kergorlay of 11 November 1833, Lettres, S, 296 and 10 October 1836, Lettres, S, 369. 44. François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld, The Maxims, trans. Louis Kronenberger (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1936) 174 (No. 440). 45. See ‘‘Pre´face,’’ oc, 14:20. 46. See ibid., 18–23 and Jean-Louis Benoıˆt, Tocqueville: Un destin paradoxale (Paris: Bayard, 2005), 31–39. Hugh Brogan also gives an insightful and generally sympathetic account of Marie Mottley throughout Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 47. Marie is carefully portrayed as ‘‘about my own age,’’ and ‘‘pleasing without being exactly pretty.’’ More forcefully, Tocqueville notes: ‘‘Her mind pleased me, what I perceived of the greatness of her soul and character pleased me more. Finally, I imagined that a woman like that would bring me the interior tranquility that I needed.’’ Letter to Camille d’Orglandes, 14 October 1835, Lettres, S, 343. 48. These passages reveal, in Benoıˆt’s judgment, ‘‘the closeness of a couple profoundly united by reciprocal esteem, love, and a strong sensuality that accords the body a major role.’’ ‘‘Pre´face,’’ oc, 14:18. 49. On Tocqueville’s infidelities, see Benoıˆt, ‘‘Pre´face,’’ 19–20; Benoıˆt, Tocqueville, un destin paradoxal, 33–35; and Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville, 395–403. 50. See, for example, the letters to his brother Edouard of 3 October 1836, oc, 14:192–93 and 2 September 1840, oc, 14:214; the letter to Euge`ne Stoffels, 7 March 1839, Lettres, S, 442; and the letters to Louis de Kergorlay, 10 October 1836, Lettres, S, 369–70 and 27 September 1843, Lettres, S, 522. 51. 26 October 1831, Lettres, S, 248.

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52. 6 October 1858, oc, 14:668. 53. Laurence Guellec, ‘‘Tocqueville a` travers sa correspondence familiale,’’ Tocqueville et l’esprit de la de´mocratie, bicentenary issue, Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville 25, no. 1 (2005): 383–409. 54. Ibid., 403. 55. See letter to Henry Reeve, 24 July 1837 Lettres, S, 382. 56. Letter to Marie from America, 1831–1832, oc, 14:379. Cf. his letter to Marie of 29 August 1845, oc, 14:491: ‘‘In thinking of you I feel that there is something in us superior to life.’’ In a provocative image, Guellec likens this Tocquevillean view of his marriage to Denis de Rougemont’s conception of the ‘‘gracious absurdity’’ of believing in the eternal quality of temporal attachment. See Guellec, ‘‘Tocqueville a` travers sa correspondence familiale,’’ 404. 57. Letter to Marie, 30 March 1848, oc, 14:529. 58. Tocqueville tells Marie that she anchors him to life itself (17 May 1841, oc, 14:415). Guellec describes Marie as Tocqueville’s ‘‘porte d’attache’’ (homeport) (Guellec, ‘‘Tocqueville a` travers sa correspondance familiale,’’ 407). Benoıˆt calls her a ‘‘poˆle d’affection et de stabilite´’’ (oc, 14:412n1). Or, in Tocqueville’s own words, ‘‘you and me, our work, our studies, and a momentary divorce from the world’’ (25 July 1842, oc, 14:457). 59. See Françoise Me´lonio, ‘‘Tocqueville entre re´volution et de´mocratie,’’ in Lettres, S, 15–21. 60. Letter to Marie Mottley, 27 July 1842, oc, 14:459. Perhaps his closest political and intellectual associate, of course, was Gustave de Beaumont. The letters between Beaumont and Tocqueville display openness, trust, and a freedom of expression that Tocqueville attributes to ‘‘complete mutual self confidence,’’ Letter to Beaumont 14 July 1834, Lettres, S, 299. See also his letter to Beaumont of 8 May 1830 Lettres, S, 149. But Andre´ Jardin notes that ‘‘Beaumont did not prove to be the alter ego in the Chamber that Tocqueville had rather naively dreamed of’’ and that they pursued separate political strategies. Andre´ Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography (1805–59), trans. Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway (London: Peter Halban, 1988), 297. Despite their close collaboration, Tocqueville always addressed Beaumont formally (with vous, not tu), reserving the familiar for a few intimate childhood friends and family members, and Marie. 61. Recollections, 168 (Lettres, S, 861). 62. Letter to Marie Mottley, 27 July 1842, oc, 14:459. In a letter to his brother Edouard he complains that political life (life of the ‘‘teˆte’’) is barren and arid; it therefore pushes the soul towards the enjoyments of the heart. Only the local side of politics offers a respite. See letter of 24 August 1842, oc, 14:227–29. 63. William Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France: 1814– 1848 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 237. 64. See the famous chapters in da2, 725–44 (da2p, 745–65). 65. See his letter to Euge`ne Stoffels, 12 January 1833, Lettres, S, 284. 66. Me´lonio, ‘‘Tocqueville entre re´volution et de´mocratie,’’ in Lettres, S, 20. For a discussion of Tocqueville’s participation in the salons, see ibid. and Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, 378–79. Tocqueville was quite aware, of course, that prominent salonnie`res facilitated the game of influence and were mistresses of ‘‘what goes on behind the scenes.’’ Letter to Beaumont 14 July 1834, Lettres, S, 300. (Tocqueville refers here to Mme Ancelot, who was advising him about how to get the 1835 Democracy talked about in the journals before publication.) 67. See his letter to his brother Edouard 3 October 1836, oc, 14:194. 68. Anne Martin Fugier, La vie e´le´gante ou la formation de Tout Paris, 1815–1848 (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 160. 69. Letter to Mme Swetchine, 4 December 1856, oc, 15:2, 300. 70. Letter to Marie, 29 August, 1845, oc, 14:492. 71. Letter to Marie, 27 July 1842, oc, 14:458. 72. Letters to Marie written in March 1848, oc, 14:507–32. 73. See the very useful discussion in Laurence Guellec, Tocqueville et les langages de la de´mocratie

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(Paris: Honore´ Champion, 2004), 279–81. Guellec notes that while Tocqueville retained certain dimensions of public duty associated with revolutionary language, he diluted the explosive connotations of ‘‘la nation’’ by using it indifferently with ‘‘peuple’’ or ‘‘patrie,’’ and that he similarly diffused ‘‘citoyen’’ by equating it indifferently with man or individual to connote a member of a regime, or by using it in the plural. Hence a typical Tocquevillean locution: ‘‘Chez les peuples aristocratiques, les citoyens.’’ da2p, 1143. 74. Letter to Marie, 10 December 1841, oc, 14:444. Note his slightly more charitable judgment of Madame Lamartine in the Recollections, 141 (Lettres, S, 842). 75. Letter to Marie 17 August 1841, oc, 14:469–70. 76. Recollections, 50–51 (Lettres, S, 778). 77. Recollections, 107 (Lettres, S, 817). See also Tocqueville to Marie, 22 August 1846, oc, 14:501: ‘‘You have a great soul. Look around you, as far as you can see, you will not encounter the like.’’ 78. See two letters to Anastasie de Circourt, 18 September 1851 and 2 September 1853, Lettres, S, 1054–55 and 1078–79. ‘‘There are societies (compagnies) that I like better than solitude. But there aren’t many of them and their number diminishes rather than grows daily (1054). 79. 20 August 1837, Lettres, S, 385. 80. Tocqueville frequented her salon, though he had little use for many of the conservative religious figures he met there. She was seventy-three when Tocqueville began their correspondence and she died shortly before his own death. The most famous letter to Madame Swetchine is that of 26 February 1857 (oc, 15:2, 313–16), in which Tocqueville reveals his spiritual doubts. On these themes, see also the letter of 6 October 1855, ibid., 264, in which he offers a Pascalian analysis of pride that echoes an earlier letter to Louis de Kergolay (25 October 1842, Lettres, S, 509) and those of 4 August 1856, oc, 15:2, 284–86 and 11 February 1857, oc, 15:2, 308–11. 81. 7 January 1856, oc, 15:2, 268–69. Tocqueville also draws closer to his friends Corcelle (to whom he writes, ‘‘La patrie is nothing other than the companionship of people who think and feel as I do’’ [21 November 1852, Lettres, S, 1059]) and Gustave de Beaumont. See especially the letter to Beaumont, 23 March 1853, Lettres, S, 1063–65. 82. Letter to Mme Swetchine, 20 July 1855, oc, 15:2, 259. 83. Letter to Mme Swetchine, 4 December 1856, oc, 15:2, 299. 84. Letter to Mme Swetchine, 7 January 1856, oc, 15:2, 267–68. 85. Letter to Mme Swetchine, 7 January 1856, oc, 15:2, 266. 86. 10 September 1856, oc, 15:2, 292. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. Madame Swetchine gently points out that the church needed to be wary of partiality; its duty was not to instill patriotism, but to save souls and to uphold a universal code of morality for ‘‘all times, all races, all degrees of civilization, and all regimes.’’ 26 September, 1856, oc, 15:2, 294. 89. 20 October 1856, oc, 15:2, 297, 298. Note that Tocqueville’s indictment of bad citoyens exactly parallels his condemnation of bad citoyennes. See, for example, his disparaging comments on those aristocrats who rallied to Louis Napoleon (male versions of his sister-in-law Alexandrine): ‘‘Nobles of the most venerable lineage who may well be very scrupulous Christians, highly respectable people, excellent fathers, and sons whose exploits are worthy of epitaphs—I say they are degenerate brutes.’’ Letter to his nephew Hubert, 1854, oc, 14:290. 90. If the epistolary record still existed—it was destroyed either by Tocqueville or his wife—it might support adding Mildred Childe to this list of foreign women who played the role of exemplary female ‘‘amie’’ and ‘‘ami.’’ The sister of Robert E. Lee, she was the wife of Edward Vernon Childe, a Parisian correspondent for several New York newspapers. Tocqueville was friendly with the family and attended the salon over which Mrs. Childe presided. See his references to her in oc, 7:249–51. Hugh Brogan wrote a controversial account of the friendship between Tocqueville and Mrs. Childe, in which he argued that there was most likely an intimate relationship between the two, in ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville and the Coming of the American Civil War,’’ in American Studies: Essays in Honour

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of Marcus Cunliffe, ed. Brian Holden Reid and John White (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 83–104. This account is missing from his recent biography of Tocqueville, underscoring its speculative nature and the skepticism of other Tocqueville scholars. A forthcoming edition of Tocqueville’s American correspondence after 1840, which includes heretofore unpublished letters, confirms only Tocqueville’s obvious affection for Mrs. Childe and deep sadness at her death in 1856. See Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings, eds., Letters and Other Writings: Tocqueville on America After 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2008). 91. 24 August 1842, oc, 14:228. 92. 20 October 1856, oc, 15:2, 297. 93. I owe this formulation to Arthur Goldhammer, who notes that Tocqueville’s modernized trope of the repos du guerrier seems to envision ‘‘Mars lying down in the arms of Athena, as it were, rather than Venus.’’ Personal communication with the author, July 2006.

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2 Democracy’s Family Values Laura Janara

Born amid France’s volatile transition from aristocracy to democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville was acutely aware of the consequences that a change in ‘‘social state’’ means for family as well as for politics, society, and culture. In Democracy in America, he argues that the form that family takes reflects the broader society in which it is situated. In his chapters on family and elsewhere in the text, Tocqueville argues that family is in no way a discrete sphere of life, that ‘‘there are certain great social principles which a people either introduces everywhere or tolerates nowhere,’’ and that ‘‘the changes that have taken place within the family are closely connected with the social and political revolution taking place under our

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eyes.’’1 An aristocracy can last only if built upon a legalized principle of inequality that is ‘‘introduced into the family as well as into the rest of society’’ (d, 399). In Europe’s transition from aristocracy to democracy, ‘‘everyone has noticed that . . . a new relationship has evolved between the different members of a family, that the distance formerly separating father and son has diminished, and that paternal authority, if not abolished, has at least changed form’’ (d, 585). In other words, the ‘‘family habits of democracy hold together’’ with ‘‘its social state and laws’’ and ‘‘one cannot enjoy the one without putting up with the others’’ (d, 589).2 Moreover, ‘‘political society cannot fail to become the expression and mirror of civil society’’ and, simultaneously, ‘‘the Americans almost always carry the habits of public life over into their private lives.’’3 Tocqueville thus identifies a social state’s characteristic ethos as something that transcends any notion of public and private as discrete spheres. But scholars have overlooked this important dimension of his work. John Stuart Mill was the first to dismiss Tocqueville’s analysis of family for lacking ‘‘any considerable value.’’4 In more recent years, commentators have missed or misconstrued his overarching observation that a society’s dominant mentality governs family as well as society and politics.5 However, this theme implicates our understanding of Democracy in America, of family and gender in democracy, and of democratic society and culture. Most recent commentators project onto Tocqueville’s analysis an exaggerated separation of family and public as discrete realms, not only spatially but psychologically. For instance, Delba Winthrop rightly argues that in assessing nineteenth-century U.S. middle-class family life and a world in which females lack suffrage, Tocqueville is no mere sexist. Although his Americans may be convinced that women and men should be treated differently for reasons of nature, he sees this as a matter of convention designed to meet the needs that democracy itself generates. But Winthrop subsequently ignores Tocqueville’s central concern to distinguish between healthy republican and unhealthy excessive or despotic democracy: for him modern democracy is laced with various potentialities both hopeful and dangerous (d, 57; see 12, 13). Winthrop claims that Tocqueville exposes the inevitable shortcomings of democracy as neither ‘‘fulfilling [n]or liberating’’ and lacking an ‘‘end that is both meaningful and attainable,’’ all of which reveals that ‘‘women have little or nothing to gain from coming out into it.’’ Indeed, she suggests, these women ‘‘embody democracy’s finer aspirations’’ only because they remain outside its spheres of commerce and politics, just as men would if only they were

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likewise educated and excluded.6 Likewise ignoring Tocqueville’s effort to direct democracy away from state despotism and toward civic-minded republicanism, William Mathie concurs that the American woman’s household role offsets democracy’s disruptive political and commercial spheres, and there is no reason to think she would be happier in this outside world.7 Effectively inverting Winthrop’s and Mathie’s public-private argument, Susan Moller Okin claims that Tocqueville uncritically accepts undemocratic patriarchalism in gender and family relations. She suggests that Tocqueville, Hegel, and Rousseau ‘‘bifurcated public from private life to such an extent’’ that they had ‘‘no trouble reconciling inegalitarian, sometimes admittedly unjust, relations founded upon sentiment within the family with a more just . . . social structure outside the family.’’8 Like Winthrop and Mathie, then, Okin imagines a sharp public-private divide in Tocqueville’s view of U.S. democracy and misses Tocqueville’s rich complication of ‘‘equality’’ as something that can manifest in different ways, as participatory republicanism, majority tyranny, or state despotism. Such interpretations obscure Tocqueville’s clear insistence that family is embedded in the broader ‘‘social state,’’ exhibiting the pervasive mentality and sensibilities of that society and its politics. As Mark Reinhardt remarks, when Tocqueville discusses women in democracy, he ‘‘makes it clear that he is exploring a topic that is inextricably bound up with— indeed constitutive of—the character of democracy itself.’’9 Jean Bethke Elshtain is similarly right to claim that for Tocqueville, family and ‘‘public’’ life are not radically distinguished from one another, in democracy or aristocracy. She extols Tocqueville’s ‘‘insight that domestic institutions, in some way, mesh with or reflect the higher political order.’’10 On the one hand, she says, families ‘‘labor under a strong compulsion to pattern themselves on the structure of the public power.’’ On the other, the democratic family is an essential site for the production of democratic citizens. But Elshtain immediately loses track of this helpful insight into Tocqueville’s text. Overlooking the deep paradoxes in his presentation of ‘‘democracy’’ and just what it means for family to mirror and reproduce these paradoxical conditions, she lapses into a Rousseauian account of how the nineteenth-century U.S. woman, though excluded from citizenship, serves some sort of straightforward ‘‘essential civic vocation as the chief inculcator of democratic values in her offspring.’’11 But given this woman’s exclusion from political rights, what might these values be? Elshtain certainly complains that Americans’ ‘‘equal regard’’ for men and

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women ‘‘did not lead to social and political equality,’’ a fact that ‘‘Tocqueville glossed over or lost in the midst of his praise for America’s success in raising the moral and intellectual level of women.’’12 But Tocqueville does not praise the role played by American women in any simple way, instead diagnosing layers of paradox that haunt their lives. Moreover, in Democracy in America, we see such paradox beyond the domestic realm as well. Instead of coming to terms with this most telling feature of Tocqueville’s work, Elshtain resurrects a strong public-private distinction.13 While many social historians have viewed the nineteenth-century household as a haven in a heartless world, Tocqueville characterizes the democratic social state as pervasively moderate, tranquil, gentle, and prosperous, with family sharing with other dimensions of society a common ethos (d, 15, 245, 564). Here I show how Tocqueville’s intended claims and the additional resources of his text together suggest that one paradoxical mentality floods democratic society and culture. While equality and liberty are cultivated as a matter of principle, democratic culture and society simultaneously pursue largely unacknowledged desire to reconstitute hierarchy and structured inequality based in notions of difference. I argue that Tocqueville’s democracy produces these paradoxes out of an ambivalent psychological reaction to the social uncertainty and flux of postaristocratic democracy itself. Tocqueville argues that nations, like individuals, are fundamentally shaped by their early years, such that ‘‘peoples always bear some marks of their origin’’ (d, 31). In order to grasp democracy, then, one must consider its ‘‘point of departure,’’ which, for both French and U.S. democracy, is European aristocracy.14 That aristocratic past is, for Tocqueville, a world of hierarchical authority wherein tightly woven relations of fealty and noblesse oblige posit an ethic of mutual obligation. In aristocracy, a serf felt ‘‘obliged to devote himself to the service of the one who happened to be his lord’’; the lord felt ‘‘that duty and honor compelled him to defend those who lived on his land, at the risk of his own life’’ (d, 562). Alongside these interclass bonds, ‘‘the members of each class think of themselves as all children of the same family, feeling a constant sense of sympathy for one another, such as can never be found to the same degree among the citizens of a democracy’’ (d, 561). In aristocracy as Tocqueville sees it, then, one is born into a fixed station that ensures belonging and security at the same time that it permits no escape from the determinacies of class life. The individual is not autonomous but

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rather one small node in a seemingly eternal web of relations structured by class and its definitive identities. In the aftermath of aristocracy, where once Europe’s class, interclass, and guild associations fostered mutuality and security and guaranteed belonging, democracy atomizes the individual, signifying release from a highly organized hierarchy into a world of flux. Tocqueville observes that ‘‘during the last fifty years of transformation,’’ France has been in a state of ‘‘disorder.’’ ‘‘In the universal confusion of thought undermining all established concepts, incoherently jumbling right and wrong, truth and falsehood, law and fact, public virtue has become unreliable and private morality shaken’’ (d, 599). All aspects of society are affected and Tocqueville fears that postaristocratic indeterminacy may portend a social void wherein known social meaning and distinctions are torn asunder. The ‘‘abyss’’ figures repeatedly in his writings as the representation of such swirling disintegration.15 So Tocqueville attempts to grasp democracy to gain some control, repeatedly casting it against aristocracy as the point of origin and departure that still haunts young democracy’s cultural imagination. The French, he fears, are ‘‘carried away’’ by the ‘‘rapid current’’ of democracy, but, nevertheless, ‘‘we obstinately keep our eyes fixed on the ruins still in sight on the bank while the stream whirls us backward— facing toward the abyss’’ (d, 13). The Americans, an ocean away from Europe, react to aristocracy’s ghost differently. Tocqueville chides them for being more ignorant of history than any other people as they seek to erase their past, reimagining themselves as pioneers in a new world or, according to the popular myth of the time, as the American Adam.16 But, says Tocqueville, ‘‘no man can entirely detach himself from the past’’; in his mind, it has left an indelible mark on the democratic present in France and America alike (d, 48). Tocqueville’s democracy reacts to the world transformations it instigates with an ambivalent array of what he calls the ‘‘passions.’’ These include anger and resentment at infantilizing aristocratic hierarchy, a yearning for individual autonomy and freedom that inspire the democratic passion for the idea of equality, and fear of reengulfment by aristocratic authority. But democracy’s passions also include subterranean desire for what has been lost: the certainty once provided by aristocratic interdependency in which every one has a place. Fear of the burden and loneliness imposed by atomistic freedom is triggered by democracy’s central passion for equality. As Reinhardt remarks, ‘‘Democracy’s distinctive and potentially powerful ways of breaking up order can make people—

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whether they are its participants or observers, friends or foes—uneasy.’’17 Democracy in America helps us to see how these competing but only partly acknowledged passions are manifest in all dimensions of the U.S. democratic social state, pressing inhabitants to structure their social and political world in contradictory ways to mollify the ambivalent psychology of the culture. In the throes of these mixed passions, Tocqueville’s U.S. democracy combines equality with hierarchy, freedom with constraint, and individual choice with acts of submission. As part of his effort to grasp the psychic complexities of modern democracy, Tocqueville examines family relations. He insists that shaping these democratic family relations is the same psychology that animates democracy’s broader social state. It is the ‘‘white’’ American middle-class household to which he turns—the social formation that best approximates the governing U.S. and European normative ideal of ‘‘family.’’ Tocqueville has been criticized not only for focusing exclusively on this mode of family life but also for treating it as universal, thereby overlooking family experiences of ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘black’’ workers, farmers, and others.18 But what Tocqueville successfully reveals are the psychopolitical dynamics of the reigning ideal of family. His analysis yields not a social history of modes of family life but, rather, a nuanced portrait of the sensibilities shaping and reflecting the modern democratic imagination. Family, gender, and sex relations emerge in Democracy in America as key venues for democracy to assert for itself, against its flux, a historically new order. In these family relations percolates the unacknowledged ambivalence stimulated by postaristocratic democracy’s freedoms and flux. Rather than choosing exclusively the healthy egalitarian option of seizing the burden of freedom, Tocqueville’s Americans let their fear of flux temper equality with structured relations of inequality, and principles of universalism with practices of hierarchical radical differentiation among humans. Although Tocqueville displays only partial consciousness of this, critical excavation of his text unveils how the democratic passion for the idea of equality stimulates a historically novel consciousness about gender. Equality as a principle promises elimination of sex-based oppression and inequality. However, paradoxically, democracy’s ideology of equality does not straightforwardly yield equality between the sexes, but stimulates anxiety that such leveling signifies loss of order and meaning—the fall into Tocqueville’s swirling abyss. Ironically, then, emergent democracy triggers an ardent appeal to ideas of sex difference to offset fear of disarray.19

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Democracy as Self-Mastery: Fathers, Sons, and Brothers Tocqueville begins his analysis of democratic family life in the United States by observing father-son relations and comparing them with those typical of the ancien re´gime. In describing each type, he employs explicitly political terms, his figurative language pressing the point that political and familial relations share a common sensibility. In aristocracy, family hierarchy reflects and is embedded in the broader societal chain of command: ‘‘men are linked one to the other and confine themselves to controlling those next on the chain. . . . This applies to the family as well as to all associations with a leader.’’ Thus aristocratic society ‘‘controls the sons through the father; it rules him, and he rules them.’’ Like a noble over a serf, the father ‘‘is given a political right to command. He is the author and support of the family; he is also its magistrate’’ (d, 586). In aristocracy, family lineage links past with future, deepening predictability and lasting meaning. Democracy signifies the very destruction of such certainty. Tocqueville reports that in democracy all men are equal before the law and ‘‘adopt the general principle that it is good and right to judge everything for oneself’’ (d, 587).20 In the family, father-son relations reflect this new politics based in equal, individual sovereignty. The principle of individual sovereignty is ‘‘the great maxim on which civil and political society in the United States’’ is built; ‘‘the father of a family applies it to his children, a master to his servants, a township to those under its administration, a province to the townships, a state to the provinces, and the Union to the states’’ (d, 397). Now that aristocracy’s paternal ‘‘master and magistrate have vanished; the father remains’’ (d, 588). This father exercises a ‘‘domestic dictatorship’’ necessitated only by his son’s childhood vulnerability. As the boy grows, ‘‘the reins of filial obedience are daily slackened.’’ He is soon ‘‘master of his thoughts’’ and ‘‘becomes responsible for his own behavior.’’ At ‘‘the close of boyhood,’’ the young American male ‘‘is a man and begins to trace out his own path.’’ For Tocqueville, being ‘‘manly’’ means, as for other republican thinkers, practicing fraternal self-rule as egalitarian associative citizenship (see d, 57).21 In democracy this is ‘‘man’s estate,’’ his birthright (d, 585). The father, anticipating his son’s independence as a given, ‘‘abdicates without fuss’’ to this fellow citizen, acting no longer as intermediary but merely as ‘‘a citizen older and richer than his sons’’ (d, 585, 586). For their part, sons understand that their claim to independence and freedom will not

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be challenged and thus readily receive this legacy as ‘‘men’’—a legacy that fathers consider to be, like citizenship, ‘‘an incontestable right.’’ There is, then, no violence between father and son, since ‘‘the son has known in advance exactly when he will be his own master and wins his liberty without haste or effort, as a possession which is his due and which no one seeks to snatch from him’’ (d, 585).22 Tocqueville also describes relations among brothers in the United States, further to illustrate democracy’s egalitarian impulse for self-rule. In aristocracy, children are ‘‘by no means equal among one another; age and sex irrevocably fix the rank for each and ensure certain prerogatives.’’ The ‘‘eldest son, who will inherit most of the property and almost all the rights, becomes the chief and to a certain extent the master of his brothers.’’ For his siblings, life promises ‘‘mediocrity and dependence.’’ Reliant upon their oldest brother for support, ‘‘the various members of the aristocratic family are closely linked together; their interests are connected and their minds are in accord, but their hearts are seldom in harmony.’’ Democracy levels these fixed ranks, deeming children ‘‘perfectly equal and consequently independent’’ (d, 588). He concludes: ‘‘Not interest, then, but common memories and the unhampered sympathy of thoughts and tastes draw brothers, in a democracy, to one another. Their inheritance is divided, but their hearts are free to unite’’ in bonds of mutual recognition (d, 588–89). Among brothers in democratic family life is precisely the sort of egalitarian, mutually respectful mode of association that promotes healthy civic republicanism.23 But recall that republicanism is just one of democracy’s potentialities. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville is at pains to provide portraits of both healthy and unhealthy democracy and the democratic tendencies that foment each. His central purpose is to warn the French against democracy’s easy inclination toward majority tyranny, materialism, individualism, mediocrity, passivity, and state despotism. If, as Tocqueville says, family embodies the same sensibilities that shape the rest of society, so too must it exhibit democracy’s dangerous as well as healthy tendencies and potentialities. But here Tocqueville loses some of his nerve. In his portrait, U.S. family relations do exhibit manifestations of democracy’s reactionary tendencies. But he only partly admits it, distracted from his guiding distinction between healthy and unhealthy democracy and from his conviction that liberty, including of the individual, is the prime human good. To explore this problem, let us confront the fact that Tocqueville’s

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account of democracy’s fathers, sons, and brothers is exaggerated. In describing the transition from American boyhood to manhood, Tocqueville repeatedly refers to the process of one becoming ‘‘his own master.’’ Yet there is something suspect here, for Tocqueville is silent on the matter of education. In other chapters of Democracy in America, indeed as a central thesis of the book, Tocqueville insists that democratic citizens must be actively educated in the habits and skills of association in order to mature into a genuinely ‘‘manly’’ republic. But in his account of U.S. family life, sons somehow acquire the status of ‘‘manly’’ republican citizen merely as a matter of course. Despite Tocqueville’s fear of individualism and materialism flourishing amid an uneducated citizenry, despite elsewhere insisting on a stage of apprenticeship in republican association, he asserts that the U.S. boy slides directly into manhood, as ‘‘in America there is in truth no adolescence’’ (d, 585). This new claim that U.S. males automatically come to embody mature citizenship evokes that myth of the American Adam, the man of new beginnings who, sui generis, sprang from American soil to exemplify republican independence and goodness.24 But Tocqueville consciously rejects such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century myths of new beginnings in history; they also clash with his account of the complex dynamics constantly thwarting democracy’s health, dynamics that citizens must actively, skillfully allay. In so contradicting himself, Tocqueville betrays the possibility that his U.S. citizens have not fully attained self-mastery—an uncertainty that seems to stimulate hyperbolic claims of how firmly they have won it. Perhaps in the hearts of Tocqueville’s U.S. males this self-mastery, and the desire for it, is compromised by a competing fear of the freedom that republican selfrule signifies and by a shameful but lingering desire for the comforts of hierarchy’s certitudes. Tocqueville himself seems swept up in the republican discourse of manliness. Further, the unhealthy democratic potentialities that Tocqueville fears are partly concealed in his account of U.S. family life because it focuses on European American middle-class family relations. While fathers, sons, and brothers in this class at this time could expect citizenship as their birthright, men beyond this class did not enjoy the same degree of political or socioeconomic power. In his chapter on ‘‘the three races,’’ for example, Tocqueville accounts for how racism flourishes in the democratic U.S. North, conspicuously undercutting equality in the midst of a culture impassioned by the idea of it. He describes how the ‘‘white man in the United States is proud of his race,’’ which, given the putatively biological

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terms of American slavery, provides him with an unassailable property (d, 356, 357). Throwing open the doors to genuine universalism would undo this ascribed privilege that insulates the ‘‘white’’ Northerner from having to endure the ramifications of egalitarian flux.25 Seeing among these same anxious ‘‘whites’’ a desire to eliminate Native Americans, Tocqueville records the chilling words of one Anglo-American: ‘‘This world here belongs to us . . . God . . . has destined them in advance to inevitable destruction. The true owners of this continent are those who know how to take advantage of its riches.’’26 The democratic right of selfrule is reserved only for some. Tocqueville was also partly aware that what political equality was being enjoyed by European American males in the mid-nineteenth century, by way of an expanded suffrage, was offset by a new kind of class hierarchy shaped by capitalism. Sometimes he claims that ‘‘commerce,’’ ‘‘industry’’ and democracy go hand in hand, failing to assess whether capitalism’s companion is healthy or unhealthy democracy. But there is also notable evidence in Democracy in America that democracy’s innate pressures toward materialism and envy encourage economic relations that undercut healthy republicanism. Further, contemplating industrial ownerworker relations, Tocqueville observes that ‘‘when a workman has spent a considerable portion of his life in this fashion, his thought is permanently fixed on the object of his daily toil; his body has contracted certain fixed habits which it can never shake off. In a word, he no longer belongs to himself’’ (d, 555; emphasis added). Owners, for their part, look not like citizens but like administrators of empires (d, 556). Meanwhile, in democracy’s ‘‘master-servant’’ relations, the ideology of voluntary contract to the contrary, not every male is ‘‘master’’ of himself, nor does being a master over others foster republican civic relations (d, 582).27 Right on the heels of Tocqueville’s account of the complex psychology marking the new contract-based economic relations in democracy, he says he wants ‘‘to carry the argument further and consider what happens within the family’’ (d, 584–85). As for the owner-worker and masterservant relations, they, alongside ‘‘race’’ relations in America, reveal democracy to be a social state laced with hidden forms of subjugation and unfreedom that leave men living a ‘‘sort of fancied equality’’ despite the ‘‘actual inequality of their lives’’ (d, 577). Armed with this insight, Tocqueville commences his analysis of ‘‘what happens within the family’’ in democracy, already having foreshadowed that the republican relations among middle-class fathers, sons, and broth-

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ers constitute only a first layer of democratic family life. The men Tocqueville describes may all be citizens who are equal before the law, but the women with whom they constitute their families and the polity are denied this status. Undoubtedly this sexism reassures the men that their political liberty is irretractable because it is based in their irretractable maleness, rather than in the vagaries of wealth, for instance. Tocqueville’s first chapter on family suggests that democracy’s males have conquered aristocratic hierarchy and attained autonomous self-mastery. But this republican fraternalism is not extended to females in the family, just as equality in public is denied to females, non-‘‘whites,’’ workers, and the poor. Tocqueville’s subsequent chapters on democratic family life reveal that radical differentiation of humans mollifies the repressed passions of postaristocratic democracy, feeding democratic pathology rather than health. That is, if family and the rest of the social state share a common ethos, what do sexbased disparities and political exclusions say about this ethos?

Girls: Democracy’s Shadow Figures In Tocqueville’s ensuing chapters on family and gender relations, the girl emerges as a shadow figure that captures the paradox at the heart of the democratic psyche. She finds herself trapped between democracy’s quest for equality, autonomy, and individual freedom that drove the rejection of aristocracy, on the one hand, and democracy’s anxiety over separating from that old world of certainty, on the other. The status of the girl in democracy is central evidence of the messy, compromised psychic transition from aristocracy to democracy, utterly sheltered and infantilized as she is in the former, but whose potential freedom, equality, and independence in the latter threaten deeply uncomfortable postrevolutionary shockwaves. After all, if she were to become a republican brother engaged in collective self-rule, gender differentiation as one of the last frontiers of social structure and felt certainty would be lost. So while she is the most representative figure of democracy, capturing its paradoxes, so too is she an anomalous figure on its borders. In his first chapter on democratic family, Tocqueville leans heavily on the political, public language of ‘‘citizen,’’ ‘‘equality,’’ and ‘‘incontestable right’’ to describe relations among fathers, sons, and brothers. When he turns to the ‘‘Education of Girls in the United States,’’ questions of indi-

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vidual sovereignty and self-mastery take on ominous meanings as he dwells anew upon ‘‘burgeoning desires,’’ ‘‘tyrannical passions,’’ ‘‘disorder,’’ and ‘‘[self-]control.’’ Surely here Tocqueville reveals his own ambivalence about democracy as he projects onto females fear of social mayhem while appreciating in males the courageous quest for liberty. Still, he does not consider democracy’s girl an anomaly found in an otherwise democratic family. Rather, she is for him a constitutive feature of democratic family life, and consistent with the mentality he diagnoses in the democratic social state more broadly. It is the U.S. girl and her destiny as a ‘‘wife’’ that takes us to the heart of the complexities in Tocqueville’s portrait of democracy and its disparate potentialities. Tocqueville opens his chapter ‘‘Girls’’ by reiterating his claim that in a given social state, family, politics, and society are grounded in the same basic ethos. He notes that girls in Protestant democratic nations are ‘‘much more in control of their own behavior’’ than are Catholic girls, as here, ‘‘political habits and religious beliefs infuse a spirit of liberty into the family.’’ Hence, the ‘‘status of women, their habits, and their thoughts is, in my view, of great political importance’’ (d, 590). While appreciating the independence of mind of the American girl, Tocqueville reveals U.S. democracy’s anxieties, as well as his own, as he casts this girl’s life as one of ‘‘passions’’ and ‘‘tyranny’’ that must be ‘‘controlled.’’ Recall that in Democracy in America democratic health is not easily achieved, requiring a citizenry meaningfully educated in association, but one that is constantly troubled by pressures for materialism and individualism. Of course democracy’s inhabitants can tell themselves that they have achieved maturity, engaging in the same pretence exemplified by Tocqueville’s exaggerated and unjustifiably universal account of ‘‘white’’ middle-class male family relations. Such pretence of achieved republican maturity seems to grow out of unexamined yearning for the lost aristocratic order and its structural securities that, nevertheless, rears its head. What can be seen in Tocqueville’s analysis is that democracy manages without solving these repressed desires by projecting them onto girls and women. Females are radically differentiated from males and excluded from political rights. They are exclusively assigned a role of domestic moral teacher and guide, of nurturer and comforter, in order to recapture for democracy that which it fears it has lost: the certitudes of structured social order and a well-entrenched cultural morality. This elaborate differentiation of male from female, grafted respectively onto a differentiation of citizenship and enterprise from household labor and morality, establishes a predictable order in a world that has heralded flux.

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In France, Tocqueville observes, the relics of the ancien re´gime still prescribe a ‘‘timid, withdrawn, almost cloistered education’’ for girls. Although suitable to a rigid regime in which girls’ security is carefully guaranteed, such a protective education leaves girls ‘‘unguided and unaided’’ amid the tumult of democracy (d, 591). Rather than preparing them for genuine independence, it produces ‘‘virgin innocence amid burgeoning desires,’’ a ‘‘chaste’’ mind and ‘‘naı¨ve and artless graces.’’ In democracy, with the firm hand of aristocracy gone, a girl’s ‘‘safeguards’’ are ‘‘shaken or overthrown’’ (d, 590, 591). According to Tocqueville’s observations, U.S. democracy responds by structuring the life of the girl in ways that are fraught with all the tensions that mark democracy’s broader struggle to overcome desire for aristocracy. Like her brothers, the American girl learns an ‘‘independence’’ that Tocqueville describes as ‘‘manly,’’ apparently recognizing in her signs of a republican capacity for self-rule (d, 593). In the United States, Protestantism combines with ‘‘a very free constitution and a very democratic society’’ so that a girl enjoys some of the benefits of democracy, such as more independence at an earlier age than anywhere else he can imagine: ‘‘Before she has completely left childhood behind she already thinks for herself, speaks freely, and acts on her own’’ (d, 590). But at the same time that Tocqueville admires this girl’s autonomy, independence of mind, boldness, and ‘‘skill,’’ he is also ‘‘almost frightened’’ by it (d, 591). Democracy’s girl unsettles him, emerging as she does from the limiting structures of the Old World to seize a dexterous worldliness. He writes rather ominously, ‘‘I know that such an education has its dangers’’ (d, 592). What seems to be at stake is that, against the backdrop of old Europe, the American girl’s freedoms exacerbate democracy’s putative flirtation with social mayhem. While Tocqueville admires the independence of U.S. male youth, he writes that in democracy, female ‘‘youth will be impatient, tastes ill-restrained, customs fleeting, public opinion often unsettled or feeble, paternal authority weak, and a husband’s power contested’’ (d, 591). ‘‘Amid all the disorder inseparable from democratic society,’’ the potential freedoms of the girl must be delimited precisely because her freedom, unlike her brother’s, is taken to signify postaristocratic mayhem. Exhibiting some of the anxiety that this throbbing condition elicits, Tocqueville welcomes the U.S. effort to educate girls in self-control, to make society ‘‘more peaceful and better ordered’’ (d, 592). But Tocqueville notes that Americans nonetheless think about their girls in terms of independence and liberty; since ‘‘there must be a great

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deal of individual freedom in a democracy,’’ Americans ‘‘have calculated that there was little chance of repressing in woman the most tyrannical passions.’’ It seems that the girl triggers fears of social mayhem, but also demands respect as a subject of the healthy democratic interest in selfrule. As such, Americans set aside aristocracy’s authoritarianism and ‘‘count on the strength of her free determination more than on safeguards which have been shaken or overthrown.’’ ‘‘Unable and unwilling’’ to shelter and infantilize this girl, ‘‘they are in a hurry to give her precocious knowledge of everything. Far from hiding the world’s corruption from her, they want her to see it at once and take her own steps to avoid it, and they are more anxious to ensure her good conduct than to guard her innocence too carefully’’ (d, 591). She thus learns to look upon the ‘‘vices and dangers of society’’ with a ‘‘firm and quiet gaze.’’ Rid of the omnipresent hand of overweening old Europe, she ‘‘judges’’ society’s dangers ‘‘without illusion and faces them without fear, for she is full of confidence in her own powers’’ (d, 590). She does so through religion, that disciplining force that combines with her reason to guide her in her freedom, ensuring that, with ‘‘her morals pure,’’ ‘‘even in the freedom of youth’’ she ‘‘never quite loses control of herself.’’ She keeps her ‘‘head’’ amid ‘‘permitted pleasures,’’ ‘‘and her reason never lets the reins go’’ (d, 591). Emblematic of the paradoxes of her social state, the democratic girl is thus taught a modified and strange version of self-rule: not a republican one based in engagement with others, but a private and self-delimiting one that leads her to check in herself the freedoms that democracy fears will plunge it into chaos. Tocqueville is aware that this education develops ‘‘judgment at the cost of imagination,’’ makes ‘‘women chaste and cold rather than tender and loving companions of men,’’ and, as a result, the ‘‘charms of private life are often less.’’ But this loss is a ‘‘secondary evil’’ that ‘‘should be faced for the sake of the greater good.’’ While otherwise judging liberty the greatest good, he makes an exception in relation to females: ‘‘At the point we have now reached, we no longer have a choice to make’’ but to ‘‘protect women’’ from the passions unleashed by the ‘‘institutions and mores of democracy’’ (d, 592).

Desire and Fear: Containing the American Woman Tocqueville was himself ambivalent about the powers of women. He admired his grandmother’s public-mindedness and chastised his sister-in-

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law for attending exclusively to domestic concerns in the midst of serious public upheaval. Yet his wife played a soothing domestic counterpart to his republican activism, an arrangement that suited him, while her power over him frustrated him.28 In his Souvenirs, he writes of meeting George Sand, against whom he was ‘‘strongly prejudiced . . . for I loathe women who write, especially those who systematically disguise the weaknesses of their sex, instead of interesting us by displaying them in their true character. Nevertheless, she pleased me.’’ After describing her physically and recommending more adornment, he remarks that ‘‘what she said on the subject [of public affairs] struck me greatly,’’ her depiction of the disposition of Paris workmen later proving accurate.29 Not unlike U.S. democratic culture, then, Tocqueville, himself caught between aristocracy and democracy, admires the independent and public-minded female, fears the democratic impulse to dissolve sex differentiation, and desires the comforts that a differentiated femaleness can offer him. He characterizes U.S. women as holding a deeply paradoxical status, both ‘‘very dependent within’’ the domestic sphere and nowhere enjoying ‘‘a higher station’’; both dominated and revered. Tocqueville’s text reveals that U.S. democracy employs a second gender strategy to contain the perceived threat of societal chaos. In addition to girls being educated to ‘‘control’’ themselves, women are ‘‘cloistered’’ in their husband’s homes after marriage. While ‘‘all the men in a democracy either enter politics or practice some calling’’ outside the household, ‘‘the wives’’ stay ‘‘at home and watch in person very closely over the details of domestic economy’’ (d, 598). Wives are also to keep the faith of religion to foster a pervasive morality at a time when social flux threatens moral decay. So where ‘‘religion is often powerless to restrain men in the midst of innumerable temptations which fortune offers,’’ it ‘‘reigns supreme in the souls of the women, and it is women who shape mores.’’ Through women, religion is effective, and ‘‘by regulating domestic life it helps to regulate the state’’ (d, 291). In this role, Tocqueville’s democratic woman is both oddly self-ruling and dependent, both powerful and subordinate. At the same time that her culture attenuates her freedoms, its ideological passion for equality and autonomy compels all (including her) to see her as her own ‘‘master,’’ consciously choosing for herself this paradoxical status. Tocqueville recognizes the paradox in stunting the freedom of American girls in restrictive ‘‘bonds of matrimony.’’ As he points out, following her education in independence, the U.S. girl ‘‘loses her independence

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forever.’’ In the U.S., where a girl experiences ‘‘less constraint’’ than anywhere, ‘‘a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father’s house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband’s is almost a cloister’’ (d, 592). Tocqueville makes sense of this by suggesting that ‘‘Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy which now dominates industry. They have carefully separated the functions of man and of woman so that the great work of society may be better performed.’’ This is not a natural arrangement, he says, but one constructed: ‘‘More than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same.’’ Tocqueville is critical of the industrial economy’s new division of labor for its impact on people’s capacity for self-governance. Yet with some disdain he mentions European intellectuals who claim that because women and men are in effect the same, they should bear the same duties and rights in work, pleasure, and public affairs. He is clear that such a genuinely egalitarian arrangement ‘‘is far from being the American view of the sort of democratic equality which can be brought about between man and woman’’ (d, 601). Americans have never believed that ‘‘democratic principles should undermine the husband’s authority and make it doubtful who is in charge of the family.’’ Despite their ‘‘passion for equality,’’ ‘‘they think that in the little society composed of man and wife, just as in the great society of politics, the aim of democracy is to regulate and legitimatize necessary powers and not to destroy all power’’ (d, 592, 601; emphasis added). And so Tocqueville admires and laments American women’s ‘‘cold and austere powers of reasoning’’ and eros-stifling moral disposition that lead them to foster stability in what he and his Americans fear is, otherwise, an order-destroying democratic society (d, 592, 593). In the absence of aristocratic order, public opinion erects and coercively guards this new democratic order that seeks both egalitarian freedom and structured social identities. The U.S. girl quickly learns that she has few options: she finds restrictive opinions about woman’s proper role ‘‘firmly established’’; she is ‘‘soon convinced that she cannot for a moment depart from the usages accepted by her contemporaries without immediately putting in danger her peace of mind, her reputation, and her very social existence.’’ A young wife, informed by her ‘‘free view of the world’’ yet understanding that ‘‘a light and free spirit within the bonds of marriage is an ever-lasting source of trouble, not of pleasure,’’

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consciously ‘‘chooses’’ her sacrifice (d, 593). Subtly aware of the costs of rebellion, these women bend to the dictates of social mores that press them to issue a seeming ‘‘voluntary acceptance’’ of banishment ‘‘to the little sphere of domestic interests and duties’’ (d, 596, 592). These women are themselves participants in the cultural imagination that partly fears the transcendence of gender differentiation—passion that leads them to accept as good their domestic, moral designation. And so Tocqueville’s U.S. women and men collude in the idea of gendered spheres. For men, controlling their wives reassures them that institutionalized, hierarchical order still exists at the same time that they enjoy civic fraternity as evidence of their republican triumph over the humiliations of aristocratic hierarchy. The women, likewise, breathe a sigh of relief that the old authoritarian society is vanquished, replaced by brothers in association. But they all fear what it would mean for females to be brothers, for structured social differentiation to dissolve further. Thus Tocqueville can charge, ‘‘I am far from thinking that only the constraint of public opinion imposes this great change in the ways of women as soon as they are married. Often it is simply their own will which imposes this sacrifice on them’’ (d, 593). He adds: ‘‘I have never found American women regarding conjugal authority as a blessed usurpation of their rights or feeling that they degraded themselves by submitting to it.’’ Surely this is an overstatement: women in this period agitated for political rights and feminist social reform. But what he captures in his assessment of U.S. women is their society’s reactive desire for hierarchical, differentiating social structures, a desire that leads women to ‘‘seem to take pride in the free relinquishment of their will, and it is their boast to bear the yoke themselves rather than to escape from it’’ (d, 602). These gender arrangements exemplify the repressed ambivalence of postaristocratic democracy. In exposing the confused life of the American female, Tocqueville reveals the veritable leitmotif of modern democracy: the paradoxical desires for equality and inequality, freedom and constraint. To claim as he does that ‘‘it is natural’’ for girls to begin their lives as free individuals who subsequently volunteer for subjection is to begin to unravel the confusion permeating the psychology of democracy, a confusion that marks and obscures the inequality found throughout U.S. democracy’s social, political, and economic relations. When Tocqueville observes that Americans ‘‘have allowed the social inferiority of woman to continue’’ while doing ‘‘everything to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man,’’ he rightly concludes with irony that

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they have ‘‘wonderfully understood the true conception of democratic progress’’ (d, 603). As we may suspect, the station assigned to American women does not betoken happiness for them. For Tocqueville, ‘‘one may say that it is the very enjoyment of freedom that has given her the courage to sacrifice it without struggle or complaint when the time has come for that.’’ She ‘‘suffers her new state bravely’’ and is ‘‘both sad and resolute’’ (d, 593, 594). But democracy’s middle-class woman is dogged by the fact that, precisely because she is molded to represent and guarantee the comforts of ordered social differentiation and structured moral regularity, so too does she elicit democracy’s cultural resentment of the aristocratic past. In so doing, she continually stimulates the fear of sliding back into that aristocratic hierarchical world wherein ‘‘white’’ middle-class males lose their claim to individual sovereignty. Even as this adult female soothes democracy’s postaristocratic anxieties, she continually pricks them. In relegating women to the household in order to install a new certainty in society, U.S. democracy staves off some of the tumult. But these women’s deep influence—over mores and morality, bodies and erotic desire— undoubtedly triggers the opposing fear that, through them somehow, authority-from-above will reincarnate to dissolve men’s newfound autonomy.30

Marriage and Sex: More Order For Tocqueville, aristocratic marriage is framed by rules of ‘‘birth and fortune’’; ‘‘social conditions and the thoughts that spring from them’’ as well as ‘‘laws’’ impose great ‘‘restraint’’ that ‘‘does not allow’’ choice, which, if pursued, leads to ‘‘ephemeral and clandestine connections.’’ Generally, any man and woman who ‘‘wish to come together in spite of the inequalities of an aristocratic social system’’ have ‘‘immense obstacles to overcome,’’ including ‘‘the ties of filial obedience’’ and the ‘‘sway of custom and the tyranny of opinion,’’ so that finally the ‘‘prejudice which they have defied separates them’’ (d, 596, 597). So the pursuit of marriage according to ‘‘taste and inclination’’ in aristocracy yields ‘‘irregular morals and wretchedness’’ in home life (d, 597). Social stability is instead crafted through arranged marriages that unite property, confirm class identity, and leave hearts free ‘‘to rove at large’’ (d, 596). Society is so firmly

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structured by such matters extraneous to love that the constant stream of romantic intrigue does not unsettle it. Democracy sweeps away such structures. Where family lineage and enshrined class identity no longer dictate marriage ties, ‘‘paternal authority’’ (transformed by democratization), ‘‘public opinion,’’ and the ‘‘social system’’ accept marriage based on personal inclination as ‘‘part of the natural and usual order of things’’ (d, 597). Of course, when free choice reigns supreme it seems to threaten society with chaos. However, Tocqueville observes, in the U.S., while people are free to marry whomever they desire, this very freedom of choice ‘‘hold[s] and keep[s]’’ a couple ‘‘by each other’s side’’ and makes ‘‘irregular morals before marriage very difficult’’ (d, 596, 595). On this score, U.S. marital life differs dramatically from that in democratizing Europe: while severe norms mark American sexual ties, democratizing Europe features instability in sexual relations. This is because U.S. and European democracies have separated from aristocracy differently. Recall that Tocqueville’s U.S. democracy, an ocean away from England’s impositions, has been structured not only by England’s lessons in political liberty, but also by the sober hand of Protestant religion and a conservative, companion gender order. Tocqueville writes that no comparable domestic social order survives in democratizing Europe and ‘‘almost all the disorders of society are born around the domestic hearth and not far from the nuptial bed.’’ It seems that in reacting against the legacy of a confining aristocratic regime, upon whose ashes they build their democracy, European men ‘‘develop a taste for disorder, restlessness of spirit, and instability of desires.’’ In contrast in the U.S., where democracy emerges in the absence of aristocracy rather than in the heat of revolution against it, sober fear and desire guide hearts and minds, reinvoking rather than rejecting structured order. Such conservatism is the hallmark U.S. response to democratic flux. Unlike the European man, ‘‘when the American returns from the turmoil of politics to the bosom of the family, he immediately finds a perfect picture of order and peace. There all his pleasures are simple and natural and his joys innocent and quiet, and as the regularity of life brings him happiness, he easily forms the habit of regulating his opinions as well as his tastes’’ (d, 291). Tocqueville attributes this ‘‘severity of the Americans’’ to the fact that they ‘‘regard marriage as a contract.’’ It is one that is ‘‘often burdensome but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfill, because they knew them all beforehand and were at liberty not to bind themselves to anything at all’’ (d, 596). Tocqueville’s analysis of U.S.

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marriage hearkens back to his account of democratized master-servant and master-worker relations, also based in contract, in which the idea of equality presumes and posits a sense of free choice and equality for the two contracting ‘‘citizens.’’ Behind this ideology of equality and its quest to dissolve relations of command and obedience, however, contractarianism shields and sustains new economic, political, and psychological hierarchies. U.S. marriage is also defined in contractual terms, also presuming free choice and equality between self-ruling individuals. But the society and marriages it yields are rooted unwaveringly in sex-based differentiation and inegalitarianism sustained at home and in public by unequally dispersed political rights and an unyielding public opinion. Paradoxically, though, while the U.S. husband and wife acknowledge that the man wields superior authority, they also consider themselves autonomous individuals equally responsible for choosing or rejecting their marriage contract. A woman every bit as much as a man is seen ‘‘freely’’ to choose to enter into the prescribed set of obligations, ‘‘knowing beforehand what will be expected of her,’’ like a worker ‘‘freely’’ agreeing to labor when there is little alternative. Like industry’s owners over their employees, the husbands-to-be are guaranteed a future authority over their wives, an arrangement deemed wholly legitimate. In the United States men are also prescribed a laxer moral code than are women. Tocqueville claims that ‘‘equality of conditions’’ could never ‘‘make man chaste, but it gives the irregularity of his morals a less dangerous character. As man no longer has leisure or opportunity to attack the virtue of those who wish to defend themselves, there are at the same time a great number of courtesans and a great many honest women’’ (d, 598). Because married women’s chastity is a key bulwark against democratic mayhem, men are held responsible, not for their own lack of chastity, but for seducing ‘‘honest’’ women (d, 602). While ‘‘Americans think nothing more precious than a woman’s honor,’’ husbands’ infidelity does ‘‘not break up families and does not weaken national morality’’ (d, 603, 598). In effect, democracy’s prevailing sexual norms are not about entrenching for both sexes the equality and individual sovereignty that democracy seeks in its principled moment, but, rather, express the reactionary impulse against the postaristocratic turmoil that universal equality and liberty could supposedly signify. U.S. sexual inequality is not based in ‘‘nature,’’ Tocqueville sees, but is a convention designed to counter democracy’s moral flux. Hence Tocqueville’s ambivalent conclusion that democracy’s sexual norms, while leading ‘‘to deplorable individual

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wretchedness,’’ do ‘‘not prevent the body social from being strong and alert’’ (d, 598).

Conclusion When Tocqueville claims that the same sensibilities govern all realms of a social state, including family and gender relations, he helps us to excavate the paradoxical contours of modern democracy. This reinterpretation of Democracy in America enables us to see how and why, in modern Western democracy, amid its historically unprecedented expressions of equality and self-rule, there appear new, subtler forms of hierarchy based in sexism, alongside the inherent inequalities of capitalism and racism.31 In the aftermath of aristocracy’s class order, gender and family are seized as key terrain for rebuilding social structure amid the flux that democratic equality heralds. At the same time, the democratic passion for the idea of equality compels Americans to proceed as though husband and wife, like master and servant, owner and worker, are self-governing equals, while concealing the psychologically complex underbelly of contractual relations. Tocqueville both criticizes and appreciates his Americans’ conservative response to democratic flux. That such flux is in fact dangerous remains undemonstrated. What is clear is that this conservative reaction feeds that which Tocqueville most fears: the tendency of democracy’s inhabitants to be politically passive and thereby enable state despotism. That is, so long as male ‘‘citizens’’ have subordinates in their wives and daughters (and in the poor and non-‘‘whites’’) to reassure them that they themselves have escaped the subjugation they would likely have endured under aristocracy, they will be that much more willing to surrender to what Tocqueville calls a ‘‘tutelary’’ state.32 After all, wielding power over others dulls the pain of submission to a higher, abstract authority.33 But this ‘‘solution’’ endangers that which Tocqueville most values— republican citizenship as political liberty.

Notes The author thanks Mary Dietz, Bruce Baum, Terence Ball, James Farr, M. J. Mayres, Eileen Sivert, Mark Reinhardt, and reviewers at Canadian Journal of Political Science, and State University of New York.

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1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1966; repr., New York: Anchor Books, 1969), 586 (citations are to the reprint edition). Hereafter this text is referred to as d. 2. ‘‘If you want to ascertain whether castes, and the ideas, habits, and barriers to which they give rise, are really abolished in any nation, look at the marriages which take place there. There you will find the decisive test.’’ Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Re´gime, trans. John Bonner (London: J. M. Dent, 1988), 66. 3. d, 586n1 (Tocqueville deems family part of ‘‘civil society’’), 305. In some ways, Tocqueville sees family relations inversely related to those in society. In aristocracy, people are linked in fixed ways for life to members of other classes and one’s own class (561). In aristocratic families, however, ‘‘hearts are seldom in harmony’’ (587, 588). While ‘‘nothing could have been tighter than the bond uniting lord and vassal in the feudal world,’’ in democracy the same men would ‘‘no longer know each other.’’ Whereas democracy loosens social ties, it ‘‘tightens natural ones. At the same time as [democracy] separates citizens, it brings kindred closer together’’ (589). But these observations are subordinate in Democracy in America to Tocqueville’s recurring, overarching claim that family and its ‘‘social state,’’ democratic or otherwise, share the same ethos. 4. John Stuart Mill, ‘‘M. de Tocqueville on Democracy in America,’’ Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical and Historical (New York: Henry Holt, 1874), 124. 5. See Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967). 6. Delba Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress,’ ’’ Political Theory 14 (May 1986): 240, 244, 245, 253, 255. 7. William Mathie, ‘‘God, Woman, and Morality: The Democratic Family in the New Political Science of Alexis de Tocqueville,’’ Review of Politics 57 (1995): 26, 29, 30. Bloom argues that, following Rousseau, Tocqueville believes that family serves an essential moral function in democracy by differing constitutionally from public life. The keepers of morality, women are different from, though equal to, men, thereby offsetting democracy’s selfish, licentious tendencies. Allan Bloom, ‘‘The Relation of the Sexes: Rousseauian Reflections on the Crisis of Our Times,’’ in Tocqueville’s Political Science: Classic Essays, ed. Peter Lawler (New York: Garland, 1992). 8. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 19. 9. Mark Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 68. Siedentop notes that for Tocqueville family is ‘‘a microcosm’’ that ‘‘reflects’’ changes in the ‘‘structure of society.’’ Larry Siedentop, Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 78. 10. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Power Trips and Other Journeys: Essays in Feminism as Civic Discourse (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 47 and Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 130. 11. Elshtain, Power Trips, 52. For Manent, ‘‘it is in the family that democracy pleads its case most eloquently,’’ and ‘‘if the mildness of democracy is revealed in the relation of parents to children, the moderating principle resides in the divergent roles of men and women.’’ Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. John Waggoner (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 83. 12. Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman, 129, 131. 13. Morton promises to pick up ‘‘where Elshtain left off,’’ but abandons her best insight to follow her less persuasive claim, that family as a unique haven of altruism acts as a one-way support for democratic politics and society that are, nevertheless, brash and competitive. F. L. Morton, ‘‘Sexual Equality and the Family in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,’’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 17 (1984): 311 and passim. Likewise, Kessler argues that the success of the U.S. marriages Tocqueville describes depends on the family’s isolation from democratic mores. Sanford Kessler, ‘‘Tocque-

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ville and Sexual Morality,’’ in Tocqueville’s Political Science: Classic Essays, ed. Peter Lawler (New York: Garland, 1992), 250. 14. See Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 13; Harvey Mitchell, Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 167; Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free, 33–34. 15. See Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), chap. 2. 16. See Terence Ball, ‘‘The Myth of Adam and American Identity,’’ Reappraising Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Russell Hanson, The Democratic Imagination in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 124 and chap. 4. 17. Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free, 21. 18. For instance, Linda Kerber, ‘‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,’’ Journal of American History 75 (1988): 9–39, and Michael J. Shapiro, ‘‘Literary Geography and Sovereign Violence: Resisting Tocqueville’s Family Romance,’’ Alternatives 25 (2000): 27–50. 19. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European discourse invested heavily in gender as a mode of social differentiation and structure. Landes argues that ‘‘gender consciousness was a paramount feature of post-revolutionary life’’ in France, since ‘‘bourgeois claims to universality raised hopes for the elimination of all social distinctions before the law. Viewed from women’s perspective, then, the Revolution’s most important legacy may well have been the cultural inscription of gender in social life.’’ Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 171. Hunt writes that ‘‘woman’’ has been a troubling figure especially since the French Revolution because it was not clear how far the 1789 egalitarian challenge should go. The ‘‘idea of a woman-man as monster came to dominate much of the thinking by male revolutionaries about women in the public sphere.’’ Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 5, 123, 90–91. Also see Barbara Welter, ‘‘The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,’’ American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74; Doris Kadish, Politicizing Gender: Narrative Strategies in the Aftermath of the French Revolution (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 20. So the family in its ‘‘aristocratic sense, no longer exists’’ (d, 585). 21. The idea of ‘‘manliness’’ as republican self-rule pervades the text; see Janara, Democracy Growing Up, chap. 3. Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft all appeal to manliness to characterize healthy republican actors. 22. With the law of primogeniture gone, inherited parcels of land are smaller and fathers and sons more frequently share land as mutually respectful equals (d, 587). 23. Claiming a strong public-private distinction in Tocqueville’s thought, Mathie goes so far as to suggest that Tocqueville does not ‘‘attach the slightest political or even social significance to the fraternal or filial relations within the democratic family’’ (15). 24. See note 15. 25. See Laura Janara, ‘‘Brothers and Others: Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism,’’ Political Theory 32, no. 6 (2004): 773–800. 26. Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘‘Fortnight in the Wilds,’’ Journey to America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Anchor, 1971), 354. See Janara, ‘‘Brothers and Others.’’ 27. See Laura Janara, ‘‘Commercial Capitalism and the Democratic Psyche: Tocquevillean Citizenship Under Siege,’’ History of Political Thought 22, no. 2 (2001): 317–50, or Democracy Growing Up, chap. 4. 28. Andre´ Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, trans. by Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 47, 50. 29. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Meridian, 1959), 148, 149.

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30. Precisely because these women are granted limited authority in the household alone, their care of others may be imbued with enormous energy that can look like emasculating control. 31. See Gerda Lerner, ‘‘The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of the Women in the Age of Jackson,’’ Midcontinent American Studies Journal 10 (Spring 1962): 5–15; Margaret George, ‘‘ ‘The World Historical Defeat’ of the Re´publicainnes-Re´volutionnaires,’’ Science and Society 40, no. 4 (1976–77): 410–37; Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, 81–82. 32. Today we are more likely to relinquish freedom of self-governance to corporate power. 33. See Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976).

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3 Tocqueville and the Feminization of the Bourgeoisie Dana Villa

Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution is not, at first glance, a text well suited to feminist analysis. Unlike Democracy in America, in which the role women play in creating and maintaining the ‘‘manners and mores’’ of democratic citizens is explicitly addressed (albeit in condescending, Rousseauesque terms), The Old Regime does not engage the question of gender, at least not directly. Yet there is, I think, a significant gendered dimension in The Old Regime, one that comes through in Tocqueville’s analysis of the civic interplay of social classes under the ancien re´gime—an interplay that is destroyed by the Revolution and the subsequent hegemony of bourgeois values.

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In what follows, I try to tease out this gendered dimension, focusing on Tocqueville’s treatment of the bourgeoisie in Democracy in America and The Old Regime. My goal is not to provide a comprehensive overview of Tocqueville’s attitude towards the French middle class: for that, a close reading of the Souvenirs would be in order. Rather, it is to show how the Tocquevillean concern with privatization and docility—two qualities he associates with the bourgeois class—is rooted in the masculinist idiom of the civic republican tradition. More than any other strand of Western political thought, civic republicanism—from Machiavelli to Rousseau and beyond—associated freedom with a set of public-oriented, ‘‘manly’’ virtues, virtues set in distinct opposition to the more private practices of the oikos, or household. The latter—the realm of biological and material reproduction—was, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, viewed for a long time as the realm of necessity and un-freedom. To live a life there—as children, women, and all other noncitizens must—was to be excluded from the realm of public freedom that only active civic equals (male heads of households) could know.1 The clear distinction between public and private realms presupposed by this conception is dissolved by what Arendt famously called the ‘‘rise of the social’’—that is, the channeling of hitherto ‘‘private’’ concerns into the public realm, a channeling historically performed by the bourgeois class and the emergence of a full-fledged market economy. The publicpolitical realm ceases to have an intrinsic, ‘‘manly’’ dignity in this new dispensation. It becomes, instead, an instrument of the essentially private and materialistic concerns of the bourgeois class. Tocqueville would not have agreed with all of Arendt’s analysis, but he certainly would have accepted its main outlines. The concern with ‘‘manly liberty’’ has faded in modern times, for reasons that are tied up with the rise of the modern state and the distinctly antipolitical concerns of the bourgeois class. Tocqueville sees this class as spreading a privatistic, materialistic ethos, one that undermines the ‘‘free moeurs’’—the masculine habits and attitudes—necessary for the actualization of political liberty. As the analysis of The Old Regime makes clear, the bourgeois class hardly bears the full blame for the retreat of public freedom in the modern world. Yet the bourgeois ethos is an essentially privatistic one. In Tocqueville’s view, it spreads not just a form of materialist corruption (the traditional republican concern), but also a more general ‘‘feminine’’ docility and submissiveness to political authority. It undercuts, in short,

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the bases of that ‘‘manly liberty’’ that Tocqueville spent a lifetime urging on his fellow countrymen. In the opening pages of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Marx and Engels provide a memorable—and rarely equaled—paean to the European bourgeoisie. Historically speaking, this class has played ‘‘a most revolutionary part.’’ Not only has it put an end to ‘‘all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations,’’ leaving ‘‘no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest.’’2 The need for a constantly expanding market for its products ‘‘chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.’’ It must ‘‘nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.’’ In place of the old national economies, the bourgeoisie creates a world economy, one characterized by ‘‘intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.’’3 This de facto globalization puts an end not only to merely national markets and industries. It also creates a cosmopolitan intellectual life—a world in which ‘‘national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible’’ as the ‘‘intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.’’4 Marx and Engels are quite clear as to the character of this new, globalized culture. Like its economic base, it too is bourgeois: The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt a bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.5 Commentators have often observed how the proletariat—the emerging ‘‘universal’’ class—stands in for Geist in the Marxian reconstruction of Hegelian Weltgeschichte. However, we can hardly ignore the enormous role Marx and Engels assign to the bourgeois class when it comes to humanizing the world—that is, in making it over (via industry and trade)

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into a recognizably human product. Thus the most rapturous passage of Marx and Engels’s ode to the bourgeoisie: The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured up out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?6 The dominant image here is of the bourgeois class as a demiurgic subject, one that steps into the role Hegel reserved for Geist. Tapping into previously unsuspected energies, resources, and powers, the bourgeoisie remakes the world to a far greater extent than had been achieved in the entire prior history of civilization. Its ‘‘revolutionary’’ character consists, then, in an unrivaled potency and productivity, a Faustian capacity for the unending transformation of the world and the unlimited expansion of human powers. Whatever else the continental bourgeoisie might be in Marx and Engels’s construction, they are hardly docile, passive, or impotent. While the Manifesto famously prophesied the overthrow of this class by an ultimately more virile and active proletariat, there can be little doubt that—in Marx and Engels’s view—the bourgeoisie deserve respect for the world-transforming character of their masculine self-assertion. Their relentlessly energetic economic activity achieves the humanist dream of dominating nature once and for all. True, they achieve this domination through the domination of other men. The fact remains, however, that it is the bourgeoisie that liberates humankind from its thralldom to overwhelming natural forces. The contrast with the civic republican tradition is here quite instructive. The hypermasculinist virtues of the ancient republics were cultivated largely to deal with the myriad dangers thrown up by the natural and political worlds. Thus, as Hanna Pitkin had suggested, Machiavelli’s chief political works—The Prince and the Discourses—can be read as instruction manuals for manly men striving to cope with the powerful

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forces unleashed by an untamed, unpredictable, and clearly female Fortuna.7 For the bourgeoisie, the defensive posture of civic republicanism was simply out of date. Overt masculinism aside, the civic humanist tradition was far too passive in orientation. Thus, even the virtu` of Cesare Borgia (and his father, the impetuous Pope Alexander) was defined by the disasters and opportunities thrown his way by unpredictable fortune.8 The bourgeoisie, by contrast, did not wait upon events. Nor did they ‘‘initiate’’ in quite the same way that Machiavelli’s men of outstanding virtu did. Faced with a given configuration of natural, social, and political forces, the bourgeois class remade reality by summoning up an entirely new— and unprecedented—set of economic and technological powers. If, in the end, these new powers escaped the control of the ‘‘sorcerer’’ who had conjured them into existence, there can be little doubt that the bourgeoisie qualified as a very ‘‘potent wizard’’ indeed.9 Compare this image of the bourgeois class to the one that emerges in Tocqueville’s chief political works. In the preface to The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), Tocqueville writes: People today, no longer attached to one another by any ties of case, class, guild or family, are all too inclined to be preoccupied with their own private interests, too given to looking out for themselves alone and withdrawing into a narrow individualism where all public virtues are smothered. Despotism, rather than struggling against this tendency, makes it irresistible, because it takes away from citizens all common feeling, all common needs, all need for communication, all occasion for common action. It walls them up inside their private lives. They already tended to keep themselves apart from one another: despotism isolates them; it chills their relations; it freezes them.10 This passage straightforwardly presents the atomization, isolation, and individualism of bourgeois society as the chief accomplices of political (administrative) despotism in the modern age. For Tocqueville, such ‘‘bourgeois’’ traits figure among the root causes of political impotence in formerly free peoples. Once a society has fallen prey to bourgeois privatism and materialism, there is only thing that can save it: Liberty alone can effectively combat the natural vices of these kinds of societies and prevent them from sliding down the slippery

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slope where they find themselves. Only freedom can bring citizens out of the isolation in which the very independence of their circumstances has led them to live. . . . Only freedom can tear people away from the worship of Mammon and the petty daily concerns of their personal affairs and teach them to always see and feel the nation above and beside them; only freedom can substitute higher and stronger passions for the love of material well-being, give rise to greater ambitions than the acquisition of a fortune, and create the atmosphere which allows one to see and judge human vices and virtues.11 We are thus confronted by two very different images of the bourgeoisie, equally gendered but pointing in opposite directions. On the one hand, we have Marx and Engels’s homage to bourgeois potency, strength, and world-transforming creativity; on the other, Tocqueville’s assertion of the debilitating influence of bourgeois passions. These passions undermine and finally destroy ‘‘manly’’ public virtues (the virtues of the citizen), leading to a supine (‘‘feminine’’) docility in the face of political power. The question we need to address is whether Tocqueville’s coding of the problem of citizenship and docility is (so to speak) excessively gendered and thus beyond redemption. In other words, does Tocqueville’s gendered coding of the distinction between bourgeois and citoyen reduce the problem of public freedom in the modern age to one of ‘‘manly independence’’ versus ‘‘feminine docility’’? Is he merely pleading—against Marx and a` la Arendt—that we divert more of our masculine self-assertion and competitive (or ‘‘agonistic’’) impulses into the public rather than the economic realm? Or does he have a more complex idea of public freedom and the virtues that support it up his sleeve? If so, what does that tell us about his seemingly feminized conception of docility (on the one hand) and the of the bourgeois class (on the other)?

‘‘Bourgeois’’ and ‘‘Middle Class’’ in Democracy in America There can be little doubt that Tocqueville masculinized public or civic freedom, just as he ‘‘feminized’’ docility and bourgeois society. In the second volume of Democracy in America, he notes that ‘‘the love of public tranquility is frequently the only passion which these [democratic and

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bourgeois] nations retain.’’12 Manly independence and a passion for selfgovernment gradually disappear, to be replaced by a craven subservience to a large and increasingly centralized administrative state. How does this happen? According to Tocqueville, the advent of equality and a democratic social condition produces, first, atomization (the result of the dissolution of social classes) and, second, a pervasive individualism. The latter phenomenon is less a moral failing than a kind of ‘‘category mistake,’’ one induced by the absence of a clear social hierarchy and the social identities that went along with it. Since we are no longer members of defined estates (peasant, nobility, bourgeoisie, clergy, and so on), we quickly—and wrongly—come to consider ourselves as ‘‘standing alone,’’ holding our whole destiny in our hands (da2, 99). The breaking of the aristocratic ‘‘social chain’’ that previously linked ‘‘all the members of the community’’ propels us into a purely private life, one devoted to family, friends, and the pursuit of material comforts and personal advancement (da2, 99). Such a life—quite close to the ‘‘commodious living’’ praised by Hobbes in Leviathan—is increasingly deaf to the claims of the public. People who live it see citizenship and its obligations as a time-consuming nuisance, a ‘‘troublesome impediment which diverts them from their occupations and their business’’ (da2, 141). To be sure, the analysis of democratic dissociation and individualism in Democracy in America strives for a certain ‘‘sociological’’ generality. These intimately connected phenomena are presented as flowing from the basic fact of equality, which is in turn the distinguishing characteristic of a democratic condition sociale (da2, 94–98). Yet however wide in application the metaphor of ‘‘atomization’’ might first appear, we need to remind ourselves that Tocqueville’s primary project was political and comparative, rather than social and theoretical. Thus, while it is tempting to tease a theory of modernization out of his analysis, Tocqueville himself remains tightly focused on comparison of the ‘‘two democracies,’’ France and America.13 This fact has important implications for how we read the passages in volume 2 of Democracy in America devoted to ‘‘the taste for physical wellbeing in America.’’ While Tocqueville insists that the ‘‘love of physical gratification’’ and material comforts in America is as moderate as it is general, he leaves little doubt that the overall tendency is (as the Marxists would say) a bourgeois one. ‘‘The passion for physical comforts is essentially a passion of the middle classes; with those classes it grows and

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spreads, with them it is preponderant. From them it mounts into the higher orders of society and descends into the mass of the people’’ (da2, 129). The American middle classes, like the French bourgeoisie, know both a self-absorbed individualism and a lust for material comforts. So why is it that the former are able to contain their individualism and moderate their taste for physical gratification, while the latter surrender themselves completely to these twin ‘‘feminizing’’ tendencies of ‘‘democratic times’’? A full answer to this question would involve canvassing the main arguments of volume 2 of Democracy in America, something beyond the scope of the present chapter. Suffice it to say here that it is the free moeurs of middle-class Americans—the attitudes and habits born of long experience in self-government during colonial times—that distinguishes them from their French counterparts. The democratic tendency toward dissociation born of equality and individualism is contained by the ‘‘free institutions’’ of the Americans. These have ‘‘infused political life’’ into all parts of the territory, thereby providing ordinary citizens with the opportunity to ‘‘act in concert’’ with each other (da2, 103). This widely dispersed, easily accessible public life balances the democratic tendency toward privatization and dissociation—a tendency that, in a centralized political culture such as that of France, goes largely unopposed. The ‘‘habit of association’’ that prevails in American political life spreads to civil society, where—as Tocqueville famously observed—there are few purposes or projects that people do not accomplish for themselves through associational means (da2, 106). In similar fashion, the taste for physical gratification among the American middle class is ‘‘contained’’ by a set of habits and attitudes that the French bourgeoisie (in Tocqueville’s estimation) conspicuously lack. First, there is fact that America remains, above all, a religious country, one untouched by the ‘‘ruin of religious belief’’ that was the legacy of the Enlightenment, a ‘‘progressive’’ nobility, and the French Revolution itself. The pervasive Christianity of the American middle class turns its attention to ‘‘immaterial’’ as well as material pleasures, protecting them from the desire for ‘‘sumptuous depravity’’ and other morally corrosive influences that Tocqueville thinks flow from any philosophically consistent materialism. Second, the ‘‘taste for physical gratification’’ is linked, in America, to a habitual attention to public affairs. ‘‘An American attends to his private concerns as if he were alone in the world, and the next minute he gives himself up to the common welfare as if he had

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forgotten them’’ (da2, 142). This double life of the Americans— paradoxical, to be sure—checks and balances the pressure toward a privatized existence born of individualism and the taste for material comfort. These factors—free moeurs, religiosity, a taste for political and civil association—in effect distinguish a ‘‘middle-class democracy’’ (America) from a ‘‘bourgeois democracy’’ (France). Tocqueville leaves little doubt about how important he considers the cultural presence of such habits, attitudes, and experiences—particularly when it comes to containing the potentially pathological tendencies of emergent democratic societies: When the taste for physical gratifications among [a democratic people] has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of the new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all. It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . These people think they are following the principle of self-interest, but the idea they entertain of that principle is a very crude one; and the better to look after what they call their own business, they neglect their chief business, which is to remain their own masters. (da2, 141) The tight link between the untrammeled pursuit of bourgeois self-interest and the culture of despotism is a persistent, if often neglected, theme in Tocqueville’s thought. It figures prominently in the ‘‘road to servitude’’ he outlines in volume 2, book 4 of Democracy in America. There we read Tocqueville’s description of the kind of citizen that bourgeois (that is, French, rather than American) democracy is cultivating: As the men who inhabit democratic countries have no superiors, no inferiors, and no habitual or necessary partners in their undertakings, they readily fall back upon themselves and consider themselves as beings apart. . . . Hence such men can never, without an effort, tear themselves from their private affairs to engage in public business; their natural bias leads them to abandon the

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latter to the sole visible and permanent representative of the interest of the community; that is to say, to the state. . . . Private life in democratic times is so busy, so excited, so full of wishes and of work, that hardly any energy or leisure remains to each individual for public life. (da2, 293) A fully privatized life—a fully bourgeois life—is a life lacking any viable public dimension whatsoever. Contra Marx’s analysis in ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’ (1843), Tocqueville argues that the bourgeois does not conquer the citoyen, reducing his public self to the service of his private interest. Rather, the bourgeois abandons his claim to public life as such, asking nothing from the state beyond than the guarantee of public tranquility. As suggested above, the bourgeois makes an essentially Hobbesian bargain. The ‘‘love of public liberty’’ and the ‘‘spirit of independence’’ that sustains public life are continually eroded by this corrupting bourgeois (privatistic and ‘‘feminine’’) yearning for public tranquility and the amassing of fortunes. Only the ‘‘free institutions and manly customs’’ of the American middle class prevent it from following the French bourgeoisie down the same road to servitude (da2, 298). At the end of this road we find the ‘‘flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd’’ that Tocqueville famously warned us about (da2, 319). Such a flock is less privatized or feminized than it is, simply, neutered. The important thing to remember about this analysis is that the ‘‘bourgeois virtues’’ hardly serve as a brake to this transformation of the citoyen into a ‘‘herd animal.’’ Rather, the spread of such ‘‘virtues’’ is its essential precondition (orr, 88). How can Tocqueville say this? One answer—intimated in the introduction to the present chapter—is that his distinctive brand of liberalism remained essentially tied to the civic republican tradition. Viewed from this angle, there is little that is surprising about his rough equation of bourgeois habits with democratic pathology and (ultimately) despotism. After all, both Machiavelli and Rousseau warned of the corrupting influence that wealth had upon manly, freedom-loving citizen-soldiers and virtuous peasants. In many respects, Tocqueville’s unflattering contrast of the French bourgeoisie with a more ‘‘manly’’ American middle class merely extends this series. This is a theoretical sequence in which the disinterested concern for public freedom is viewed as a prerogative of those who have learned—through military discipline, an institutionally

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maintained morality of the public good, or the ingrained habit of association—how to curb their servile desire for ‘‘physical gratification’’ and ‘‘material comfort.’’ To leave the issue here, however, would seriously oversimplify the picture Tocqueville wants to present. A number of complicating factors intrude. First there is the fact that Tocqueville, unlike Machiavelli and Rousseau, hardly wished to banish self-interest (which the civic republican tradition coded as strictly private and, thus, feminine) from the manly world of public freedom. Second, there is the fact that the ‘‘tutelary state’’ he dreaded does not necessarily take the form of the welfare or ‘‘mommy’’ state (as we are wont to say today). It is important to remember that his primary paradigms of ‘‘democratic’’ despotism were the military dictatorships of Napoleon I and Napoleon III. Third, while Tocqueville considered the French bourgeoisie to have been particularly craven and lacking in the ‘‘taste for freedom,’’ he did not think that they stood alone in this regard. The lack of ‘‘free moeurs’’ was a general feature of French society as a whole. Neither the aristocracy, nor the peasants, nor the clergy, nor the army possessed the public virtues that the bourgeoisie so completely lacked. While Tocqueville’s contempt for the bourgeois rule brought about by the revolution of 1830 and the July Monarchy can hardly be exaggerated, it is only when we turn to The Old Regime and the Revolution that we confront the much deeper problem.14

Class Separation and the Death of Public Virtue: ‘‘Collective Individualism’’ Why did the French lack ‘‘free moeurs’’? Had bourgeois individualism and its corrosive spirit destroyed them? Had they, in fact, ever existed? Or was France’s development such that some form of state centralization was written (so to speak) in its cultural and political dna? Tocqueville’s answers to these questions are found in The Old Regime. To state it at the outset, they are unexpected and counterintuitive— unexpected because Tocqueville’s analysis in his 1856 work significantly diminishes the role that ‘‘bourgeois’’ individualism plays in bringing about a privatized, atomized world; counterintuitive because Tocqueville does think that the French—or at least a significant portion of them—

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once had something approximating ‘‘free moeurs.’’ To be sure, these habits and attitudes barely survived under the ‘‘old regime’’ created by Louis XIV. However, more than just traces of such moeurs can be detected in the feudal constitution that preceded the ancien re´gime. While hardly a romantic idealizer of the Middle Ages, Tocqueville goes out of his way to emphasize the ‘‘democratic aspect’’ of the parish government found in medieval France.15 If France and the French were ever free, it would appear that they were so under the (highly decentralized) feudal constitution (orr, 127–30). How, precisely, does Tocqueville’s analysis in The Old Regime diminish the role played by ‘‘bourgeois’’ individualism in destroying public virtues and bringing about a politically disempowered style of life? The answer to this question can be found in Tocqueville’s substitution of the notion of ‘‘collective individualism’’ for individualism per se. The latter notion, at least as deployed in Democracy in America, was intended to convey an atomized society in which privatization ‘‘saps the virtues of public life,’’ ultimately destroying the private virtues as well and ending up in sheer selfishness (egoı¨sme) (da2, 98). In making these claims, Tocqueville unwittingly follows in the footsteps of Hegel.16 And, as Roger Boesche has demonstrated, he also expresses the instinctive distaste that writers, artists, and journalists of his generation had for the emerging bourgeois world. If the royalist newspaper La Gazette de France inveighed against the ‘‘moral decay of middle-class society’’ (arguing that ‘‘individualism, isolation, and all their consequences are the basis of this system’’), the working-class paper L’Atelier was no less fierce in its denunciation of the spreading chacun pour soi ethos. ‘‘People show us the egoist becoming richer, and they tell us to do as he does. The egoism that they seek to excite in us with a shocking perseverance is the most detestable sentiment to which a man can yield; it is the sentiment of the most powerful dissociation. And dissociation is anarchy.’’17 Dissociation was, for Tocqueville, the great danger posed by democracy in general and ‘‘bourgeois’’ democracy in particular. It fostered political impotence while underwriting the servile desire for public tranquility and the smooth accumulation of profit. These claims are at the center of the argument of volume 2 of Democracy in America. While less prominent in The Old Regime, it would be wrong to think that Tocqueville ever overcame his aristocratic contempt for the so-called bourgeois virtues. Utterly private in orientation, they were (in Tocqueville’s view) self-evidently

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‘‘unmanly’’ (orr, 88). No stronger condemnation could flow from a member of the noblesse de l’e´peé. Although his contempt remained constant, Tocqueville’s estimate of bourgeois individualism’s causal contribution to French servility underwent a significant change. While it is true that the bourgeoisie of his time had either vacated the public realm or treated it in an utterly cynical manner, they (as it turns out) were not really the root of the problem. The privatized ethos of bourgeois individualism was an effect, not a cause, and a secondary effect at that. What preceded it was a ‘‘collective individualism’’ born of the dissociation of class from class—a dissociation brought about by the ancien regime’s administrative centralization and destruction of the old feudal constitution of France. Tocqueville’s notion of ‘‘collective individualism’’ appears paradoxical to us, but it underlies his entire analysis in The Old Regime. The basic thought behind this somewhat odd notion is a simple one. Under the decentralized constitution of feudal France, the classes or ‘‘estates’’ had the more or less regular experience of cooperating in local government. The myriad vassals of any given noble landowner assembled every few weeks to judge, along with the lord, the ‘‘trials and lawsuits which occurred amongst the inhabitants’’ (orr, 155). Thus, ‘‘the rural class was drawn into contact with the nobility, and daily joined with them in the conduct of affairs.’’ Tocqueville goes on to tell us that ‘‘what the lord’s court did for the small rural proprietors, the provincial estates, and later the Estates-General, did for the bourgeoisie of the towns’’ (orr, 156). Indeed, ‘‘as a man, the bourgeois of the fourteenth century is doubtless inferior to the bourgeois of the eighteenth; but the bourgeoisie as a body held a higher and more secure place in political society in the former period. Its right to participate in government was uncontested’’ (orr, 156). As the government of the feudal manor became ‘‘disorganized’’ and the meetings of the Estates-General ‘‘rare’’ and finally nonexistent, the basic conditions for class cooperation in the activity of local self-government disappeared (orr, 156). An increasingly centralized royal structure dissolved ‘‘general freedoms’’ as well as ‘‘local liberties,’’ making the cooperative action of the estates all but superfluous. The result was that ‘‘the bourgeois and the noble no longer had contact with one another in public life. They no longer felt the need to come together and reach agreements; every day they were more independent of each other, but also more estranged’’ (orr, 156). Without the shared business of local admin-

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istration to tie them to the land, the nobility decamped to Versailles, while the bourgeoisie—formerly rich peasants—went to the towns. The peasantry was abandoned, and (as a result) the classes gradually become strangers to one another. In a few pithy sentences focusing on the fate of municipal self-government, Tocqueville traced a three-century arc of increasing alienation of class from class: The natural vanity of the French strengthened and sharpened itself in the continual friction among these groups’ self-esteem, and the legitimate pride of the citizen was forgotten. In the sixteenth century most of the groups of which I have just spoken already existed; but their members, after having taken care of the business of their own associations among themselves, constantly met with all the other inhabitants to deliberate together about the general interests of the city. In the eighteenth century, they had almost entirely withdrawn into themselves, for the acts of municipal life had become rare, and were always executed by officials. Every one of these little societies therefore lived only for itself, and was only interested in itself and matters which directly affected it. (orr, 162) Thus, while it would be wrong to speak of ‘‘individualism’’ in the Old Regime—everyone was, after all, a member of an estate and the various subgroupings within estates—one might well speak of a kind of ‘‘collective individualism.’’ This, according to Tocqueville, was a condition in which ‘‘the thousand little groups of which French society is composed thought only of itself’’—an individualism, in other words, of groups. Tocqueville uses the term ‘‘collective individualism’’ to connote the end of public life and the experience of public freedom, an experience the estates had known through their cooperation in feudal parish government. It is important to note that the villain in this piece is not the bourgeoisie; nor is it the peasantry or the aristocracy. It is, rather, the architects of absolute monarchy in France: Richelieu, Louis XIV, and their myriad helpers (the intendants, crown jurists, and so on). By sucking all power to the center, the French state deprived the classes of the need and opportunity for joint action with one another. It guaranteed that they would become increasingly selfish in their pursuit of their respective (class) interests and increasingly antagonistic in their relations with one another. Whatever experience of public freedom the French may have had under

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the feudal constitution evaporates with the success of the monarchy’s ‘‘divide and conquer’’ strategy. The end result was a social culture of increasing envy, resentment, and jealously guarded privileges among groups, and a political culture dominated almost entirely by hommes de lettres—that is, by intellectuals and writers with no experience whatsoever of practical politics. Unsurprisingly, such writers approached the mass of particularistic laws, privileges, administrative and manorial courts, customs, and so on with a rationalistic (destructive) bias (orr, 196–97). What is surprising is how deeply this literary disgust for all established institutions penetrated the classes themselves, leading to the paradoxical spectacle of a society that wanted to repudiate or destroy its entire past—to make a radical beginning ex nihilo.18 In Tocqueville’s later analysis, then, the end of public liberty and civic mores in France significantly predates the bourgeois nineteenth century. The concrete emergence of the sovereign state theorized by Hobbes and Bodin turns out to be the vital precondition for a strictly bourgeois, anticivic ethos—not the other way round.19 ‘‘Collective’’ individualism precedes, and lays the groundwork for, ‘‘bourgeois’’ individualism—the individualism of an utterly privatized life focused on friends, family, and self-interest. The ‘‘division of classes’’ wrought by a centralizing monarchy and its administrative machine destroys feudal political liberty and winds up making the privileges of one estate—the aristocracy—seem suddenly unbearable to the others. Of course, a public realm that has been vacated by all the classes provides a more or less open field for the seemingly infinite extension of the sovereign state. When the revolution arrived, the centuries-long lack of political experience—combined with the prior elimination of all secondary or intermediate powers—more or less guaranteed that the attempt to establish a new ‘‘space of freedom’’ would speedily abort. All that remained would be the imposing structure of the administrative state itself, now the source of all power, initiation, judgment, and action. This state confronted what had now become a thoroughly atomized—and thus thoroughly impotent—population. It was this situation that Napoleon I, and then Napoleon III, exploited to the fullest. My summary of Tocqueville’s argument in The Old Regime is open to two objections. First, it will be pointed out that the ‘‘individualism’’ he anatomized in Democracy in America was not an individualism born of ‘‘bourgeois society,’’ but rather of democracy as such. Hence, whatever the

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status of ‘‘bourgeois individualism’’ in Tocqueville’s later analysis, it did not really play a central role in his earlier one. Second, even if ‘‘collective individualism’’ precedes individualism proper, both phenomena have to be viewed as ‘‘effects’’—the first flowing from state centralization of administrative functions, the second from the social equality introduced by a democratic revolution. The first objection is correct, but it largely misses the point. Tocqueville’s genealogy of French submissiveness and docility in The Old Regime—a genealogy of an entire people’s ‘‘feminization’’—traces the roots of the disease more deeply than individualism in either its ‘‘generic’’ (democratic) or ‘‘bourgeois’’ incarnations. The destruction of what Tocqueville calls the ‘‘energy, the communal patriotism, the fertile and manly virtues’’ of civic (feudal) France predates the rise of both these more familiar forms of individualism.20 Hence Tocqueville’s recourse to the more causally burdened notion of a ‘‘collective’’ individualism. The second objection is also correct, but contradicts nothing I have said above. For Tocqueville, individualism—whether ‘‘collective’’ or ‘‘democratic’’ in nature—is indeed an ‘‘effect.’’ As a primary indicator of political impotence and lack of public (manly) virtue, individualism points to the emasculating (not to say castrating) power of the centralizing state and to the generally dissolvent character of democratic equality. These symptomatic characteristics do nothing, however, to lessen the importance of ‘‘collective individualism’’ as a causal precondition for both bourgeois and democratic forms of individualism—forms that, to repeat, are coded as essentially private, nonpolitical, and ‘‘feminine’’ in character. This is an important point, one that distinguishes Tocqueville’s account of bourgeois ‘‘responsibility’’ for the end of public freedom from the parallel analyses given by Marx and Weber. With respect to Marx, it is simply not the case that the most potent and creative class (the bourgeoisie) is somehow overcome, a` la ‘‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’’ by its own creations. After all, the bourgeoisie can hardly be said to have created the administrative state. Rather, they merely submitted to its structural-paternalistic dominance, abandoning their limited political role for an unbounded economic one. In this respect, they were truly ‘‘feminine’’ in Tocqueville’s eyes. They never fully possessed the ‘‘manly virtues’’ and ‘‘manly mores’’ that he saw as constituting the best heritage of his own class.21 But if the bourgeoisie abandoned their (limited) civic role in the course of their development,

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Tocqueville thinks we can hardly compare this fault to the aristocracy’s abdication of its essentially political vocation. After all, the bourgeoisie may have had a secure political status under the feudal constitution, but the aristocracy had (in Tocqueville’s view) a clear political calling. If any class can be held responsible for facilitating the state’s monopolization of the public realm, it is an aristocracy that succumbed to the lure of a privilege. Tocqueville’s analysis of class power and potency in The Old Regime is thus much closer to Weber than to Marx. In his 1895 inaugural lecture at Freiburg, Weber famously called for an enormous effort in political education. This effort was necessary if the still young German Machtstaat was to survive in the Darwinian realm of international political and economic competition.22 In the Antrittsrede, Weber argues that—when it comes to political maturity and the capacity to lead—the German bourgeoisie is conspicuously lacking in the requisite manly virtues. As he reminds his audience, ‘‘The bourgeoisie did not create the German state by its own efforts, and when it had been created, there stood at the head of the nation that Caesarist figure [Bismarck] made of distinctly un-bourgeois stuff.’’23 Worse, what ‘‘leading politicians’’ the bourgeoisie has given birth to daily prove themselves to be little more than ‘‘political epigones,’’ thanks to their smallminded ‘‘petty maneuvering.’’ Their constituencies reveal a similar lack of political judgment. The ‘‘upper bourgeoisie’’ simply yearns for a ‘‘new Caesar’’ to protect it, while the lower middle class remains mired in a political ‘‘philistinism,’’ completely unable to appreciate the pressing need for overseas expansion.24 Such widespread ‘‘political immaturity’’ is, in Weber’s view, shared by the German working class. The leadership of this class provokes nothing but scorn from Weber: ‘‘They are wretched minor political talents, lacking the great power instincts of a class with a vocation for political leadership.’’25 The moral of Weber’s story is clear: with the eclipse of the political leadership of the Junker class, Germany faces ‘‘an immense work of political education,’’ one that must teach the ‘‘rising’’ classes the fundamental realities of power politics. These classes must first digest the fact that Germans ‘‘do not have peace and happiness to hand down to our descendants, but rather the eternal struggle to preserve and raise the quality of our national species.’’26 Then and only then will they base their political judgments on reality rather than wishful thinking. Weber’s rhetoric in the Freiburg Antrittsrede is aggressive and masculi-

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nist in the extreme. Germany has been united (thanks to Bismarck), but its status as a Machtstaat is threatened by the political immaturity of the bourgeoisie and the working class. Neither class possesses the judgment or the stoic manliness demanded by Realpolitik. This is, needless to say, a long way from Tocqueville, the Machiavellianism of his ‘‘Essay on Algeria’’ and his obsession with French national greatness notwithstanding.27 What links them, however, is the topos of political infantilization and feminization, a topos that merges more or less seamlessly with an emphasis on manly independence as the true meaning of freedom. For both Tocqueville and Weber, the bourgeoisie and the working class are children in search of a protector. The middle class would gladly trade political freedom and responsibility for public order; the working class would gladly trade it for social welfare and the right to work. Neither class can see beyond the ‘‘daddy’’ or the ‘‘mommy’’ state, in large part because neither class has the political experience or ‘‘taste for freedom’’ necessary to transcend the ‘‘collective individualism’’ cultivated by state centralization (in the French case) or political Caesarism (in the German one). As a result, the prospects for the development of ‘‘free moeurs’’ and political judgment look dim indeed.

Freedom and Manliness The figure of the politically ‘‘immature’’ child, woman, or people has a long and largely dubious history in Western political thought. The lineaments of this history have been ably traced by feminist scholars as diverse as Pitkin, Jean Elshtain, Susan Okin, and Wendy Brown.28 Typically, as in Aristotle and John Locke, we find the insistence that the distinguishing characteristic of women and children (at least from the point of view of full political membership) is their ‘‘self-evident’’ lack of a developed capacity for reason and deliberation.29 This supposed lack is enough to disqualify them from political agency of any kind and to condemn them to a strictly private existence. Of course, male children can, with the right education or training, develop the requisite capacity over time and thus attain their ‘‘majority’’ and public standing. Tocqueville and Weber are both deeply implicated in this gendered approach to the questions of political maturity and political membership. Each codes the public realm as an arena of distinctly manly virtues, and

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each offers stinging criticism of those classes or groupings that have failed to develop such virtues. The terrain that their critiques move on, however, is one of culture and experience, not reason. For both Tocqueville and Weber, one can be eminently reasonable and still lack the moral/ cultural sine qua non that marks a genuinely political actor. Indeed, rationality taken to an extreme marks a distinctly unpolitical character. Think of the calculating and utterly private bourgeois condemned by Tocqueville, or the twin plagues of bureaucratization and rationalization that Weber saw as lethally constricting the space for manly (decisive) action. The great threat posed to the future is a bourgeois-bureaucratic world in which the manly desire for freedom and a public or ideal-driven existence no longer signifies. This shift from a supposedly universal but still male-identified reason to an explicitly masculine understanding of freedom and its prerequisites should not surprise us. Whatever discontinuities of analysis there are between Democracy in America and The Old Regime, the works are continuous in their fear of an emergent world of administrative despotism. This is a world in which solicitous servants of the state relieve us of the trouble of thinking and acting for ourselves. Similarly, Weber’s memorable depiction of a ‘‘new Oriental despotism’’ points toward a world in which politics—and thus freedom and manliness itself—has been totally absorbed by the prerogatives of rational administration. More reason would hardly help us escape from the ‘‘iron cage’’ of the late modern world.30 What would? Here I think that Tocqueville and Weber provide distinct versions of what we might call ‘‘freedom as manliness.’’ This is a conception of freedom that places far greater weight on idealism, noble causes, initiation, and ‘‘great’’ action than on reason, rule following, and the capacity to universalize one’s will. It is, perhaps, a predictable response to a political world increasingly characterized by enormous—and seemingly immoveable—bureaucratic structures, not to mention the claustrophobia induced by the specter of an ‘‘administered society’’ grounded on bourgeois conformism and obsequiousness. In any case, the love of action and freedom as an end in itself—values that we tend to associate with that most ‘‘masculine’’ of recent political theorists, Hannah Arendt—are already fully on display in Tocqueville. As he famously wrote in book 3 of The Old Regime: ‘‘That which, in all times, has so strongly attached certain men’s hearts to freedom, are its own attractions, its own peculiar charm, independent of its benefits; it is the pleasure of being able to speak, act, and breathe without constraint, under the

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government of God and the laws alone. Whoever seeks for anything from freedom but itself is made for slavery’’ (orr, 217; my emphasis). This insistence that a love of freedom for its own sake is the conditio sine qua non of a manly and dignified existence raises two pressing questions. First, if the roots of the administrative state are as deep as Tocqueville argues they are in The Old Regime, what hope is there that a population separated by class interest (and characterized by an increasingly bourgeois ethos) will ever rise above a basically feminine docility? Indeed, how is it that the French Revolution—however limited its real effects might have been—occurred at all, given the prior establishment of the centralized state (and the destruction of public liberty) under the Old Regime?31 Second, how can ‘‘free moeurs’’ be established on the basis of such unpromising ‘‘raw material’’ as a French populace that has become instinctively reliant upon the state, a populace that has allowed itself to be infantilized and ‘‘feminized’’ at the same time? With respect to the first question, Tocqueville is careful to argue that the centralized state established by the Old Regime, while effective in destroying class cooperation and public liberty, failed to destroy the most elementary condition of freedom, namely, a spirit of independence: ‘‘In seeing these citizens so divided and so withdrawn into themselves, a royal power so strong and wide, one might think that the spirit of independence has disappeared along with political freedom, and that all the French were equally bowed in subjection. But this was in no way the case; the government already managed all common affairs by itself and absolutely, but it was still far from being the master of all individuals’’ (orr, 171). Where and how did this ‘‘manly’’ spirit of independence manifest itself? Tocqueville surveys the three estates—aristocracy, clergy, and bourgeoisie—and manages to find traces of it in all three. Unsurprisingly, however, he finds the strongest traces in the aristocracy and the clergy.32 Thus, ‘‘almost all the guarantees against the abuse of power which we have had during the thirty-seven years of representative government were boldly demanded by the nobility.’’ Indeed, ‘‘one must regret that, instead of bending the nobility under the yoke of law, we have slaughtered and alienated it. In acting thus, we have deprived the nation of a necessary part of its substance, and given liberty a wound which can never be healed.’’ Tocqueville clearly considered the aristocratic class the natural home of a spirit of independence and a love of freedom ‘‘for its own sake’’: ‘‘A class which led for centuries had acquired, during that long,

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uncontested experience of greatness, a certain pride of heart, a natural confidence in its strength, a habit of being respected, which made it into the most resistant part of the social body. It not only had manly mores, it increased the virility of the other classes by its example. In destroying it, its enemies weakened themselves. Nothing could completely replace it’’ (orr, 173). In parallel fashion, Tocqueville praises the landowning clergy as ‘‘one of the most independent bodies in the nation, and the only one whose particular liberties compelled respect’’ (orr, 173). This status enabled the clergy to proclaim ‘‘more loudly than anyone else that the nation had the inalienable and imprescriptible right to assemble to make laws and freely vote taxes’’ (orr, 175). Even the bourgeoisie of the Old Regime, Tocqueville notes, was ‘‘much better prepared to show an independent mind than that of today,’’ since the men of the eighteenth century ‘‘hardly knew that kind of passion for material well being which is the mother of servitude . . . and [which] excels at making well behaved men and slack citizens’’ (orr, 176, 178). Tocqueville concludes his survey of the independent spirit of the estates under the Old Regime with a surprisingly stark historical judgment: One would therefore be very wrong to believe that the old regime was a time of servility and subordination. There was much more freedom then than in our own day; but it was a kind of freedom that was irregular and intermittent, always contracted within the limits of a class, always linked to the idea of exception and privilege. . . . Thus reduced and deformed, freedom was still fruitful. It was freedom that, in the very era when centralization worked more and more to equalize, to blend, and to tarnish all characters, preserved their native originality, their color, and their shape for a great many individuals, nourished self-respect in their hearts, and often made the desire for glory predominate over all other passions. Freedom alone formed those vigorous minds . . . who will make of the French Revolution the object of the simultaneous admiration and terror of generations to come. It would be very strange if such manly virtues had been able to grow from a soil where freedom no longer existed. (orr, 179) In short, the spirit of manly independence that characterized a once virile nobility stiffened the spine of the other estates as well, contributing to a spirit of generalized resistance against the encroachments of the inten-

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dants and the king’s jurists. It was this spirit of aristocratic independence—a ‘‘reduced and deformed’’ form of freedom, as Tocqueville says—that helped form the ‘‘vigorous minds’’ behind the French Revolution. What was missing, of course, was the solidarity and capacity for joint action that is so critical to the recovery of self-government. Despite its importance as a ‘‘submerged’’ or ‘‘second best’’ form of freedom, independence is, after all, essentially a mode of dissociation. And dissociation is—as Tocqueville insisted time and again—the ultimate source of political weakness and disempowerment. Tocqueville’s summary of the status of the ‘‘love of freedom’’—from the Old Regime to the postrevolutionary bourgeois world—thus goes something like this. The construction of a centralized state during the ancien re´gime destroyed the preconditions for class cooperation and— with it—the reality and experience of public liberty. What is preserved amid the ruins is a ‘‘localized,’’ estate-based spirit of independence and resistance. This independent spirit was a crucial school for the leaders of the French Revolution. Without it, they would never have initiated such a grand political and social transformation. However, a strictly class-based spirit of independence utterly failed to provide the basis for a renewed spirit of civic cooperation and public freedom. As a result, the centralized state was able to quickly reassert its dominance after the revolution. This renewed hegemony was further strengthened by two crucial factors. First, there was the virtual destruction of the aristocracy and clergy as independent estates. Second, there was the emergence of class conflict between an increasingly fragmented bourgeoisie and the masses themselves. These developments—along with the increasing force of the ‘‘servile passion’’ for material well-being—set the stage for both Napoleonic tyranny and the sad spectacle of the July Monarchy. Thus, the story Tocqueville tells in book 2 of The Old Regime is one in which ‘‘manly virtues’’ survive Louis XIV’s emasculating concentration of power, only to be virtually wiped out by the revolutionary conflagration and its unedifying aftermath. The peuple that emerges after the revolution are a much more homogenized, atomized, and docile assemblage than the estates that entered into it (orr, 191). Apparently all powerful as a collective entity, this peuple is in fact made up of fragmented classes and extremely weak individuals. These all naturally look to that ‘‘imposing power which alone rises above the level of universal depression’’ to protect and preserve their interests (da2, 295, 138). The ‘‘compromise’’ between popular sovereignty and administrative despotism that Tocque-

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ville described in the concluding pages of Democracy in America becomes a rout (da2, 319). In assessing this story, and the role ‘‘freedom as manliness’’ plays within it, we need to keep a couple of things in mind. First, there can be little doubt concerning the central importance Tocqueville assigns to ‘‘manly virtues’’ and the spirit of independence in The Old Regime. If the centralized state had not been so successful in its ‘‘divide and conquer’’ strategy—a strategy with which the estates were complicit in a variety of ways—a ‘‘love of public freedom’’ might have been generated from the love of independence. But—and this is the second point—‘‘manly virtues’’ alone cannot constitute the sum and substance of genuinely civic life. True, their gradual eradication in the course of the revolution and its bourgeois aftermath helped plunge the civic ideal into obscurity. However, such ‘‘manly virtues’’ constituted what was, at best, a ‘‘disorderly and unhealthy freedom,’’ one much closer to anarchy than to democratic freedom. Thus, while potentially contributing to the overthrow of despotism, such virtues were inadequate to ‘‘the free and peaceable empire of law’’ (orr, 179).33 This is not to say that—at the end of the day—Tocqueville rejected the masculinist heritage of the civic republican tradition or the romance with ‘‘greatness’’ that (in his view) characterized a ‘‘virile’’ nobility. Quite the contrary. He was, however, cognizant of the limits of ‘‘freedom as independence,’’ and painfully aware of the need for association—as experience, as a strategy, and as political ‘‘school’’ for atomized individuals. Democratic civil and political association were the artificial means by which the extremes of independence—whether aristocratic/anarchic or bourgeois/private—were kept at bay. It would be misleading to call association a feminine principle in an otherwise masculinist conception of civic liberty and class- or caste-based autonomy. However, when making our assessment of Tocqueville’s debt to the masculinism of the civic republican tradition, we should bear in mind a dictum from the notes to The Old Regime and the Revolution. ‘‘No one,’’ Tocqueville writes, ‘‘is less independent than a citizen of a free state.’’34

Conclusion Tocqueville had, of course, emphasized the singular importance of the associational principle in Democracy in America.35 The genealogy of

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French docility he provides in The Old Regime reiterates this importance, albeit from a ‘‘negative’’ standpoint. Thanks to Old Regime centralization and the rule of the intendants, the French people lost what remained of their ‘‘habit of association.’’ After the Revolution, social and political conditions were such as to make this habit—perhaps the most important of Tocqueville’s ‘‘free moeurs’’—virtually impossible to reacquire. Privatized and suspicious of one another, bourgeois and proletarian looked to the state to fulfill their most pressing needs: security and public order for the former, social welfare and an enforced equality for the latter. The bourgeois versus working-class politics of the mid-nineteenth century— culminating in the abortive revolution of 1848 and the embrace of Napoleonic despotism by bourgeois and peasant soon thereafter—profoundly alienated Tocqueville. Public freedom and a democratic structure of (self-) governance seemed to be an ideal that few, if any, shared in the France of his day (orr, 88). It is therefore hardly surprising that Tocqueville’s rhetoric is replete with appeals to the ‘‘greatness’’ and ‘‘great men’’ of days of yore, and to the lost ‘‘manly virtues’’ of a ‘‘virile nobility.’’ The ‘‘masculine’’ world of ideal ends and noble causes seemed to have been drowned in a slavish (‘‘feminine’’) desire for security and material well-being. In this sense, there is more than a residual aristocratic component to Tocqueville’s plea for public freedom, one that resonates with Nietzsche’s ‘‘radical’’ aristocratism and his contempt for the ‘‘herdlike’’ (docile and conformist) masses. But if Tocqueville felt contempt for the values and practices of bourgeois society—values and practices he could scarcely help coding as privatized and feminine in character—he could never bring himself to ‘‘racialize’’ the different estates, setting them on different moral-biological planes. The story of the French Revolution and its aftermath was the story of a decline in the value of public freedom, not the story of a decline of aristocratic races (as in Gobineau) or of ‘‘the slave revolt in morality’’ (as in Nietzsche). As I have argued, Tocqueville saw this decline as accelerated by the advent of bourgeois civilization and its instrumentalist view of politics. He did not think, however, that this decline was caused by it. Contra Marx, the real locus of power in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe was not the bourgeois class, but the bureaucratic-institutional structures of the sovereign state. It was Marx’s failure to see this fact—his propensity to view the state as little more than the ‘‘executive committee’’ of the bourgeois class—that led to Marxism’s fatal embrace

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of the state as a strategically useful instrument that would, in time, supposedly ‘‘wither away.’’ The development of the administrative state spelled the possible (if not probable) end of political governance for Tocqueville.36 The only thing that stood in the way of this development was the ‘‘feminine’’ habit of association joined to a ‘‘masculine’’ spirit of independence. If the French had the latter without the former, the Americans can be said to have had the former without the latter. ‘‘Civil society’’—the great creation of American ‘‘free moeurs’’—quickly came to be a locus of conformism, its inherent pluralism notwithstanding. In conclusion, it should be stressed that Tocqueville provides no easy answers to the late modern phenomenon of political disempowerment and civic emasculation. One could attempt to escape this entire quandary by pointing out the apparently obvious: namely, that Tocqueville—like Marx and Weber after him—was responding to a perceived loss of agency (read: virility) which was actually little more that a symptom born of the crisis of liberal male subjectivity. Such a feminist/Lacanian ‘‘solution’’ to the problem is, however, unconvincing, if only because the feeling and reality of disempowerment has become so pervasive. Thus, political theorists who call for a more ‘‘agonistic’’ feminism (for example, Bonnie Honig) are acknowledging that theorists such as Machiavelli or Tocqueville got certain things right.37 ‘‘Manly,’’ contestatory, or competitive virtues may not provide the core of a renewed or viable sense of the political, but neither can they utterly dispensed with. They need, rather, to be creatively appropriated—that is, torn out of their original contexts, demilitarized, recoded, and ultimately set to work in the service of more inclusive ideas of public freedom and political (as opposed to administrative) governance. Such an appropriation is, I think, quite possible in the case of Tocqueville. What I have been calling his ‘‘feminization’’ of the bourgeoisie turns entirely on the linked phenomena of individualisme and privatization, phenomena that are antipublic (and thus ‘‘unmanly’’) in an archaic sense. However, once we leave the patriarchal coding of the public as ‘‘male’’ and the private as ‘‘female’’ behind, the critical power of Tocqueville’s analysis emerges anew. Of course, getting rid of such patriarchal trappings was not Tocqueville’s strong suit. It would be wrong to conclude from these failings that his obsessive concern with public freedom—or, indeed, with ‘‘manly virtues’’ in general—is something that needs to be tossed in its entirety onto the ash heap of history. Docility and an overrel-

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iance upon the state and its agents remain central problems for us, problems that only a more assertive and civic-minded form of ‘‘acting together’’ can begin to resolve.

Notes 1. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 1–58. 2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘‘Manifesto of the Communist Party,’’ in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 475–76. 3. Ibid., 476. 4. Ibid., 477. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. See Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo` Machiavelli (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 138–69. 8. See Hannah Arendt, ‘‘What is Freedom?’’ in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Press, 1968), 137. 9. Marx and Engels, ‘‘Manifesto,’’ 478. The ‘‘potent wizard’’ characterization is borrowed from Arendt’s characterization of Disraeli’s self-presentation. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976), 68–78. 10. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, vol. 1, ed. François Furet and Françoise Me´lonio, trans. Alan S. Kahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 87; hereafter this work is cited as orr. Tocqueville continues: ‘‘In these kinds of societies, where nothing is fixed, everyone is constantly tormented by the fear of falling and the ambition to rise. Money has acquired an astonishing mobility, ceaselessly changing hands, transforming the status of individuals, raising or lowering families, and at the same time becoming the chief means by which to distinguish between people. Thus, there is virtually no one who is not constantly compelled to make desperate efforts to keep it or make it. The desire to enrich oneself at any price, the preference for business, the love of profit, the search for material pleasures and comfort are therefore the most widespread desires. These desires spread easily among all classes, even among those previously most distant from them, and if nothing stops them they soon succeed in demoralizing and degrading the entire nation. But it is the very essence of despotism to favor and extend them. These debilitating passions help despotism, they occupy men’s minds and turn them away from public affairs, while making them tremble at the very idea of revolution.’’ 11. Ibid., 88. 12. Alex de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, ed. Phillips Bradley, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage, 1990), 293–94. Hereafter this work is cited as da2. 13. See Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968), especially chaps. 2, 3, 7, and 8. 14. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995), 5–6. 15. See orr, bk. 2, chap. 3. 16. See my article ‘‘Hegel, Tocqueville, and ‘Individualism,’ ’’ Review of Politics 67, no. 4 (2005): 659–86. 17. Quoted in Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 45–46.

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18. See, in this regard, Furet and Me´lonio’s introduction to orr, especially 12–19. 19. This thesis obviously collides with Marxist and neo-Marxist accounts of the rise of the modern state, notably the one given by C. B. Macpherson in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 20. orr, 104. Tocqueville uses this phrase to describe free German cities prior to their decline, but these adjective could just as well apply to the civic-feudal France he delineates later in orr. 21. The Old Regime is full of recriminations against a once public-spirited caste—the aristocracy— which abandons its public functions and withdraws into itself. If ‘‘patriotic manliness’’ ever had a home in France, it was—in Tocqueville’s understanding—with the ancestors of his own (now horribly diminished) class. 22. See Max Weber, ‘‘The Nation State and Economic Policy,’’ in Weber, Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1–28. 23. Ibid., 23. 24. Ibid., 24–25. 25. Ibid., 25. 26. Ibid., 27, 16. 27. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, edited and translated by Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 59–116. For Tocqueville’s obsession with greatness and national prestige—the twin sirens of all masculinist politics—see Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), especially 386–94. See also Tocqueville’s famous letter to J. S. Mill (March 18, 1841) in Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 149–52. Here Tocqueville heartily endorses the saber-rattling of the July Monarchy as a necessary means to avoid ‘‘national humiliation.’’ Mill was appalled by the chauvinism of his ‘‘liberal’’ friend. 28. See Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman; Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Jean Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Wendy L. Brown, Manhood and Politics (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 29. See Aristotle, Politics, 1259b32; John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, sections 59–62. 30. See Max Weber, ‘‘Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany,’’ in Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 1402. 31. Tocqueville’s main argument in orr is that the French Revolution—Edmund Burke and appearances to the contrary—was actually much less discontinuous with the past than previously thought. The ancien re´gime creates the bureaucratic state, and the French Revolution merely completes the process. See orr, bk. 1, chap. 5, ‘‘What Did the French Revolution Really Accomplish?’’ 32. orr, 172: ‘‘Several of the privileges, prejudices, and false ideas which most hindered the establishment of an ordered and beneficent freedom, preserved the spirit of independence among a great number of subjects, and inclined them to stiffen their necks against the abuses of authority. The nobles very much despised the administration proper, although they asked its help from time to time. They retained, even in the loss of their old power, something of their ancestors’ pride, as opposed to servitude as to law. They were not interested in the slightest in the general freedom of citizens, and were quite willing that the hand of power should weigh upon those around them; but they did not intend that it should touch them, and to make sure of this they were ready to run great risks.’’ 33. Of course, Tocqueville preferred a bit of anarchism to the docility and servility he generally saw around him. See da2, 287–88. 34. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 275.

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35. See especially da2, bk. 2, chaps. 4–7. 36. Sheldon Wolin makes precisely this point in his magisterial Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 339–42. 37. See Bonnie Honig, ‘‘Towards an Agonistic Feminism,’’ in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 215–38.

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4 A Family Resemblance Tocqueville and Wollstonecraftian Protofeminism

Eileen Hunt Botting

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) has usually been understood as an early critic of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European protofeminism.1 Indeed, he criticized what he called the European view of the equality of the sexes in volume 2 of Democracy in America (1840).2 And I extend my thanks to Jill Locke, Cheryl Welch, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful commentary on this chapter. I also thank Ruth Abbey, Christine Carey, Aurelian Craiutu, Drew Cramer, Neil Delaney, Lyndall Gordon, Laura Janara, Jonathan MacFarlane, Maribel Morey, Jennifer Pitts, Rogers M. Smith, Steven B. Smith, Alvin B. Tillery Jr., Stephen K. White, Elizabeth Wingrove, and the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University for their assistance with this project.

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yet, in his discussion of the moral and intellectual autonomy of the American girl, and her struggle to preserve some vestige of this autonomy within the patriarchal constraints of law, culture, and marriage, Tocqueville’s arguments sound surprisingly akin to those of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) and her philosophical followers, the most famous exponents of an egalitarian conception of women’s rights at the time. Previous scholarship has not addressed the ways in which the transatlantic public discourse on women’s rights inspired by Wollstonecraft’s landmark 1792 book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, likely served as a vital part of the background against which Tocqueville’s own views on sex equality and female autonomy unfolded in the 1840 Democracy.3 At least two degrees of separation stood between Tocqueville’s postrevolutionary consideration of the question of women’s rights and Wollstonecraft’s framing of this question during the French revolutionary era. The first degree of separation is negative in quality: the lack of evidence that Tocqueville read or referenced Wollstonecraft, who died eight years before his birth. This initial degree of separation points to the fact of the historical gap between their lives and works. Yet a bridge can be built across this gap, in retrospect, through the comparative textual study of their intriguing similarities and differences on the question of women’s rights. The second degree of separation between them concerns the means of Wollstonecraft’s broad cultural impact, and thus has a positive dimension. Wollstonecraft’s works on women’s rights and those of her prominent followers—though unread by Tocqueville—were an indelible part of the intellectual landscape of his life and times. Given Wollstonecraft’s philosophical presence in early nineteenth-century debates about women, education, and citizenship in France, Britain, and the United States, it is all but impossible that Tocqueville did not encounter her ideas and their impact at home and abroad (even if he would not have been able to attribute them to her).4 This second degree of separation points to the fact of the overlap in cultural context between them, which can be mapped in retrospect by the comparative historical study of their lives and works. What follows, then, is the first comparative study to chart the considerable evidence of Tocqueville’s secondhand and unwitting engagement of the protofeminist philosophy that Wollstonecraft and her school had borne onto the cultural horizon of Western modernity. To do so, I employ Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of a ‘‘family resemblance’’ as an interpre-

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tive lens for the comparative textual and historical analysis of Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft’s protofeminist views. In his Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein argued that the similarities or shared meanings between words are best understood as relational, as kin are related within a family. He used an analogy between games and families to illustrate his point. The similarities between different games (such as tennis and chess) are like the similarities between different members of the same family (such as a mother and son). He used the term ‘‘family resemblance’’ to describe the various similarities, both general and particular, that linked different words (such as tennis and chess) in overlapping meanings (such as games).5 He indicated that the overlap in meaning between words was defined as much by the similarities between them as by their equally salient differences: ‘‘The kinship is just as undeniable as the difference.’’6 For Wittgenstein, the foreground similarities between words are seen against the background of differences between them. Although developed in the context of his philosophy of language, Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘‘family resemblance’’ has fruitful applications in any comparative historical analysis, whether it be of persons, texts, or larger social and political phenomena. On a linguistic level, it helps us to grasp the hermeneutic usefulness of generic descriptive terms (for example, protofeminist) for what might seem, at first, the counterintuitive comparative categorization of seemingly divergent thinkers (such as Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft). The term protofeminist can be meaningfully used to refer to both Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft, even if it cannot be strictly defined and does not capture all of their real differences. We know how to meaningfully use the word protofeminist to range over all those varied instances of ‘‘protofeminists’’ such as Wollstonecraft and Tocqueville, even though we cannot define protofeminist in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions so as to capture all and only those persons or arguments that are ‘‘protofeminist.’’7 Building on Wittgenstein’s insight into the fluidity of language, I employ a broad definition of protofeminist in this study and other scholarship. Protofeminist simply describes terms and arguments that anticipate modern feminist terms and arguments, but were employed prior to the rise of the use of the term feminist in the late nineteenth century.8 At the level of comparative textual analysis, Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘‘family resemblance’’ highlights how the similarities between Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft’s protofeminist views are relational in quality: their foreground similarities stand out as we study them against the back-

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ground of their differences. On the one hand, Tocqueville shared the Wollstonecraftian view that education should cultivate the equal moral and intellectual capacities of the sexes. Yet he stood apart from the Wollstonecraftian argument for the civil and political equality of the sexes that was adopted by the more radical wing of her school of thought during his time. In this way, Tocqueville joined the crowd of early nineteenth-century political theorists on both sides of the Atlantic who supported the postrevolutionary push for reform of female education and yet failed to endorse the legal and political reforms necessary to realize sex equality and female autonomy in the broad, enduring, and democratic scale envisioned by Wollstonecraft and her pupils.9 By underscoring the family resemblance between Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft’s arguments on sex equality and female autonomy, we productively complicate the background story of the evolution of protofeminist discourse during the postrevolutionary era. In this tale, traditionally told by conservatives and feminists alike, Tocqueville has been cast as a father of antifeminism. By reading him alongside the mother of modern feminisms, we generate a new iteration of the master narrative and its various subplots. Tocqueville emerges more as a sibling rival to Wollstonecraft and her protofeminist peers than as a simple enemy of their egalitarian politics, and the postrevolutionary era, though indisputably reactionary in temper, shows its enduring fascination with the radical question of the rights of girls and women.

Girls and Women in the 1840 Democracy There are few references to girls or women, and no extended discussion of their role in American democracy, in volume 1 of Democracy in America.10 In his preface to volume 2, Tocqueville informed the reader that the focus of the work was the sources of the ‘‘conceptions of public morality’’ that underlie American democracy, rather than the laws and political institutions that were the subject of volume 1 (dia, 417; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 7). He then devoted a lengthy portion of volume 2, extending from chapter 8 to chapter 12 of part 3, to a discussion of the place of the democratic family, and particularly the roles of girls and women within it, in the development of American mores or public morality. This extended discussion of girls, women, and the family represents Tocquevil-

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le’s most sustained and philosophically interesting meditation on sex equality and female autonomy across the whole of his oeuvre.11 In his famous 1840 essay on Democracy in America in the Edinburgh Review, John Stuart Mill dismissed these chapters on girls, women, and the family as irrelevant to the greater purpose of the work.12 Many Tocqueville scholars followed suit by ignoring or downplaying the significance of Tocqueville’s writings on these subjects.13 Recent scholarship has rectified this trend with illuminating discussions of Tocqueville’s views on the structure of the democratic family, women’s role in inculcating religion and mores, the political relevance of chastity and sexual morality, and economic and moral justifications for sex role differentiation.14 Although scholars have speculated on how Tocqueville’s views on sex equality conflict with modern feminism, less attention has been paid to Tocqueville’s response to the protofeminists of his own time, and none to his unwitting and secondhand engagement of the primary concerns of Wollstonecraftian protofeminism.15 Moreover, little attention has been paid to what the 1840 Democracy teaches us about Tocqueville’s views on female education, which look quite progressive even when compared to the more radical views of the period. In this chapter I challenge the marginalization of the study of Tocqueville’s views on female education and women’s rights in the extant scholarship on his political thought. While these subjects may not have received as much direct and extended attention as other topics in the 1840 Democracy, they are significantly linked to the major theme of the work: the relationship between education, public morality, and civic and political participation in modern democracy. The brevity of Tocqueville’s statements on female education and women’s rights do not necessarily render them peripheral or extraneous to the broader argument of his book. Neither should his brevity be mistaken for carelessness or a lack of concern regarding these subjects; indeed, his reticence to discuss his views on these matters at length may have been reflective of their controversial status in 1830s public discourse. In contrast to Kerber—who dismissed Tocqueville’s portraits of the American girl and woman as skewed ‘‘stereotypes’’ on the basis of the limited range of women he met in the United States—I propose that Tocqueville crafted his American girl as a philosophical ideal-type that represented the promise of American democratic education in contrast to the corrupt European practices of female education.16 To offer a counterpoint to the work of Laura Janara—who concluded that the American girl is a ‘‘shadow figure’’ on the periphery

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of the patriarchal society that constrains her in the psychological drama of Democracy in America—I call attention to how the American girl takes center stage in Tocqueville’s chapter ‘‘The Education of Girls in the United States,’’ while Wollstonecraft and her school stand in the ‘‘shadows’’ as an unseen strand of the cultural background that helped to make his imagination of her possible.17

From the American Girl to the Adulterous Wife: Tocqueville’s Conflicted Response to Wollstonecraftian Protofeminism One of the most poignant dramas of the 1840 Democracy is Tocqueville’s story of the education of the happily autonomous American girl and her stark transition into holding the sober and limiting roles of woman and wife. A subplot of this tale is Tocqueville’s anxiety that his ideal American girl—who ‘‘almost frightened’’ him because of her commanding intellect—might grow up to challenge the constraints placed upon her youthful freedom in (what he tellingly called) ‘‘the yoke’’ of matrimony (dia, 591; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 207; dia, 593; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 210). The narrative that runs from the chapter ‘‘The Education of Girls in the United States’’ to the chapter ‘‘How the American Views the Equality of the Sexes’’ is bookmarked with a pair of female icons characterized by their robust sense of personal autonomy: the free-spirited ‘‘American girl’’ and the licentious ‘‘adulterous wife noisily proclaiming the rights of women’’ (dia, 602; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 220–21). In these chapters, Tocqueville struggles with his alternating sympathy and detachment toward what seems the girl’s sad choice between silent submission or indecent rebellion toward the marital ‘‘yoke’’ placed upon the freedom she was taught to prize above all else. The education of the American girl, so free in comparison to the adult roles for which it supposedly prepares her, seems only to lead to two possible tragic fates: a life of quiet domestic sacrifice, or a life—out of joint with her time—that risks scandal to assert her rights in love and politics. Several scholars have pointed to Tocqueville’s interest in Rousseau— the foremost eighteenth-century apologist for domestic patriarchy—to explain his anxiety and antagonism toward women’s appropriation of tra-

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ditional male roles, especially in politics and the public sphere.18 His lessthan-favorable portrait of the ‘‘noisy’’ and ‘‘adulterous’’ women’s rights advocate is a prime case in point. Although he shared Rousseau’s fear of ‘‘feeble men and unseemly women,’’ and defended a Rousseauian system of sex role differentiation within the marital household and adult roles in civil society, Tocqueville did not simply offer a derivative version of Rousseau’s Emile (1762) in his discussion of girls and women in Democracy in America (dia, 601; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 219). As we shall see, Tocqueville’s American girl has more in common with Wollstonecraft’s ideal girl than with Sophie, the heroine of Rousseau’s Emile. Tocqueville’s American girl—like the Wollstonecraftian girl—is educated to be the intellectual equal and perhaps superior of her brothers, not directed to pursue a different, and often lesser, set of rational and intellectual skills than those of men; she is morally and intellectually autonomous, rather than dependent upon the rule of religious catechesis or manipulative parental guidance; she is independent in mind and body, not restricted to the indoor world of domesticity; and she is chaste though sexually aware, not a subtle coquette educated to both please and control her male companions.19 It is through his sympathetic portrait of the American girl that Tocqueville revealed much of his ‘‘family resemblance’’ with Wollstonecraftian protofeminism, particularly on the issues of female autonomy and female education. Yet the 1840 Democracy also contains Tocqueville’s less-than-sympathetic portrait of the women’s rights advocates of the period. At the beginning of the chapter ‘‘How the American Views the Equality of the Sexes,’’ Tocqueville criticized the ‘‘Europeans’’ who believed that the sexes should be equal and similar in every sphere of life, including ‘‘public affairs.’’ He then upheld the unnamed ‘‘adulterous wife’’ as the exemplar of this dangerous European school of protofeminism and lauded the women of the United States for resisting such unseemly behavior (dia, 601–2; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 219–21). This ‘‘adulterous wife’’ probably represented, in Tocqueville’s mind, a composite of several women’s rights advocates of the postrevolutionary era. Prior to composing the 1840 Democracy, he knew of Madame de Stae¨l, the Saint Simonians, George Sand, and Harriet Martineau.20 While these French and English protofeminists might be plausible inspirations for his caricature of the ‘‘noisy’’ defender of the ‘‘rights of women,’’ Tocqueville never provided commentary on his sources for this passage. For this reason, it is impossible to decipher conclusively the iden-

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tity of the ‘‘adulterous wife,’’ composite or otherwise. Tocqueville’s passing jibe at the ‘‘adulterous wife’’ at the very least indicates his general awareness of women’s rights advocacy and the public’s association of it with shameful behavior that threatened to subvert the stabilizing influence of traditional sexual mores. While there is no evidence of his consciousness of Wollstonecraft, she and her pupils (such as Frances Wright and Sarah Grimke´) were often seen as scandalous defenders of women’s rights during this period.21 Along with the protofeminists with whom we know Tocqueville was acquainted, they provided the cultural context within which he could conjure such a caricature of their radical brand of political activism. Tocqueville almost did not publish the chapter in which he raised the specter of the ‘‘adulterous wife noisily proclaiming the rights of women, while stamping the most hallowed duties underfoot’’ (dia, 602; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 220–21). He only included this chapter—‘‘How the American Views the Equality of the Sexes’’—in the 1840 Democracy after his friends Louis de Kergorlay and Gustave de Beaumont agreed it was suitable for publication.22 He may have been concerned that his audience would recognize a provocative subtext of the chapter: his simultaneous attraction to, and repulsion toward, the issue of the rights of girls and women in the democratizing West. Indeed, Tocqueville’s notes in a draft of the chapter suggest that he linked the American understanding of the equality of the sexes to its roots in British culture. In his marginalia to the draft chapter, titled ‘‘The Americans Understand the Equality of Man and Woman,’’ in ‘‘Tome IV’’ of the manuscript of Democracy in America, he made a tantalizing comment. Near the end of the draft chapter, he noted that he planned to write a new chapter on a phenomenon he called ‘‘l’anglification.’’23 While the published version of the 1840 Democracy does not contain such a chapter, Tocqueville’s initial use of the term ‘‘l’anglification’’ in the context of his positive account of how democratic education had promoted the moral and intellectual equality, but not the social equality, of the sexes in America is important for understanding his ‘‘family resemblance’’ to the late eighteenth-, early nineteenth-century egalitarian school of protofeminism founded by the Englishwoman Wollstonecraft. Tocqueville—who wrote elsewhere in his notes to the 1840 Democracy that ‘‘I think that an enlightened man of good sense and good will would be a Radical in England’’—seems to have been deeply interested in the question of whether, and to what extent, the sexes should be ‘‘anglified,’’

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or rendered equals in a way most strongly associated with the visionary thought of English radicals such as Wollstonecraft and his friend John Stuart Mill. Given Tocqueville’s general Anglophilia, his residence in England and association with English radicals such as Mill prior to the composition of the 1840 Democracy, and his rebellious marriage to the middle-class Englishwoman Marie Mottley, it seems likely that the choice of the word ‘‘anglification’’ was laden with significance—both psychological and political—for him. Perhaps because of its controversial import, or at the advice of his friends and editors Kergorlay and Beaumont, Tocqueville refrained from defining the phenomenon of ‘‘anglification’’ and developing its connection to the realization of greater educational and social equality between the sexes in the published version of the 1840 Democracy. From the comparison of the manuscript chapter ‘‘The Americans Understand the Equality of Man and Woman’’ and its published version ‘‘How the American Views the Equality of the Sexes,’’ we can conclude that Tocqueville was certainly preoccupied with comparing Anglo, European, and American culture on the question of sex equality at the time he composed the 1840 Democracy—with the iconic Wollstonecraft and her school remaining at the level of unacknowledged background context in both his published and unpublished writings on these themes.

Wollstonecraft in Tocqueville’s France, America, and England Wollstonecraft and her egalitarian school of protofeminism were fixtures on the cultural and political landscape of the postrevolutionary era. The prominence of Wollstonecraft’s works, students, and cultural impact can be charted in the background of Tocqueville’s life and travels in France, America, and England prior to the publication of the 1840 Democracy. By tracing out how ‘‘Wollstonecraftism’’—as one American minister described this school of thought in 1803—inflected the culture of Tocqueville’s time, we uncover a historical framework within which the ‘‘family resemblance’’ of these two thinkers in the questions of sex equality and female autonomy appears in sharp relief.24 All Wollstonecraft’s original works and translations—from Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) to The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798)—were published in multiple editions in London, Dublin, and Ed-

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inburgh, some throughout the nineteenth century.25 Wollstonecraft’s most famous work, the Rights of Woman, was translated into French and published in Paris in 1792, soon after it first appeared in London. Another translation, by Ce´sar Gardeton—a French defender of women’s rights—was published in Paris in 1826.26 Two other works by Wollstonecraft were translated into French: The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and Original Stories from Real Life (1799), both published in Paris.27 Wollstonecraft, who lived in Paris and socialized with leading French, British, and American radicals during the Terror, also published one of the earliest histories of the French Revolution, in London in 1794. A number of Wollstonecraft’s works were published in multiple editions in America, including five separate editions of the Rights of Woman between 1792 and 1833 as well as excerpts of the work in a number of leading American magazines.28 Wollstonecraft’s impact in the United States was strikingly deep, perhaps as a result of what Tocqueville noted as the young nation’s extraordinary receptivity toward ideals of equality and democracy. The liberal publisher Matthew Carey, with whom Tocqueville spent time in Philadelphia between October 1831 and February 1832, published the vast majority of the American editions of Wollstonecraft’s and William Godwin’s works. The public association of Carey and Wollstonecraft was so strong in mid-nineteenth-century America that an anthology titled The condition, influence, rights and appeal of women, which included selections from both thinkers’ writings and named them both in its subtitle, was published in Albany, New York, in 1845.29 Thanks in part to Carey, there were more copies of Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman in private libraries in America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–92).30 Her works were especially popular among leading intellectuals in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, three cities in which Tocqueville spent considerable time socializing with elites. The early nineteenth-century U.S. vice president Aaron Burr openly and enthusiastically raised his daughter Theodosia according to Wollstonecraft’s philosophy of education. Echoing Wollstonecraft’s argument that the soul has no sex, Burr aspired for his daughter to ‘‘convince the world what neither sex appear to believe—that women have souls!’’31 Abigail Adams debated Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman with her husband, John Adams, and referred to herself as a ‘‘pupil of Wollstonecraft’’ in a 1794 letter written to this other vice president of the early republic.32

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Reflecting the educational interests of these political elites, a number of prominent private schools for girls were populated by other influential ‘‘pupils’’ of Wollstonecraft in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, including private tutor and protofeminist essayist Judith Sargent Murray in Boston, student commencement speakers Ann Harker and Priscilla Mason of Philadelphia’s Young Ladies Academy, and tutor Timothy Fuller (the father of Margaret Fuller) at Leicester Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts.33 More American girls were educated to be the intellectual and moral equals of their brothers in the wake of the Enlightenment and its new theories of egalitarian education, including those of Wollstonecraft. The new system of public, coeducational, elementary day schools established after the American Revolutionary War would have been applauded by the author of the Rights of Woman as a practical step toward the realization of her philosophy of education.34 A number of girls raised during the first three decades of the nineteenth century—among them Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony—received rigorous classical educations and broad exposure to science, history, literature, and philosophy at a young age, whether in the cultural environs of Harvard, private academies such as the Johnstown Academy and the Troy Female Seminary, or progressive Quaker communities. Someone like Elizabeth Cady Stanton—the daughter of a U.S. congressman, fluent in ancient Greek, and sixteen at the time Tocqueville visited America—would have been the living embodiment of Tocqueville’s ideal American girl. Tocqueville visited England—the homeland of Wollstonecraft—in 1833 and 1835, immediately prior to composing the 1840 Democracy. Before he left England in 1835, he told his friend John Stuart Mill that he had overcome his initial prejudices against the ‘‘democratic party’’ and instead had grown to deeply sympathize with the main cause of the English radicals: to empower the majority of citizens to govern the state. Likewise, in his notes for the 1840 Democracy, Tocqueville wrote, ‘‘I think that an enlightened man of good sense and good will would be a Radical in England. I have never met these three qualities together in a French radical.’’35 If we take Tocqueville at his word, and understand him as an ambivalent English radical at heart, torn between the democratic future and the aristocratic past of Europe, then his many personal connections to the English radicals of the 1830s take on deeper intellectual significance.36 Tocqueville socialized with many prominent radicals and utilitarians during his trips to England, including Mill.37 The English rad-

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icals and utilitarians of the 1830s traced their intellectual roots to their Enlightenment forefathers and foremothers, such as Paine, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft. Tocqueville’s association with the English radicals, immediately prior to the composition of the 1840 Democracy, is one of the strongest, yet still indirect, ties he had to the ‘‘Wollstonecraftism’’ standing backstage to the drama of his own intellectual development. With this fact in mind, in the remainder of this chapter I provide a comparative study of Tocqueville’s chapters on girls and women in the 1840 Democracy and Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman, to set forth the strongest possible case for the ‘‘family resemblance’’ in their protofeminist and other radical and ‘‘anglified’’ political ideas.

The American Versus the European Girl Tocqueville began the chapter ‘‘Education of Girls in the United States’’ with a discussion of the religious basis and moral purpose of the American girl’s education. He argued that America’s Protestant and democratic culture created an environment in which girls experienced moral, intellectual, and physical freedom at a level found nowhere else in the world. In her freedom, however, the American girl was not licentious; the moral purpose of her freedom was to give her the opportunity to learn how to take care of herself, think for herself, and ultimately defend her own chastity. Although they were very religious, Americans did not rely solely on the inculcation of religious beliefs regarding adultery and other sexual sins to ensure that their daughters would protect their own chastity in the name of Christianity. Tocqueville noted that Americans instead ‘‘give arms to her reasoning powers’’ with an empirical and rationalistic method of education reminiscent of Enlightenment theories of male education popularized by Locke and Rousseau and, most famously, applied to girls by Wollstonecraft in the Rights of Woman (dia, 591; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 208). The American girl’s mother freed her from her care ‘‘stage by stage’’ so that before ‘‘she has completely left childhood behind she already thinks for herself, speaks freely, and acts on her own’’ (dia, 590; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 206). Because she was exposed to ‘‘all the doings of the world,’’ including its ‘‘vices and dangers,’’ she could not be naive about sexuality, violence, or politics (dia, 590; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 206). Instead, she gathered empirical knowledge of the world around her, dissecting it

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with her own reason and making her own judgments about how to navigate its pitfalls and opportunities. By learning to exercise her reason in matters of both intellectual study and practical judgment, the American girl became ‘‘full of confidence in her own powers’’ as a morally, physically, and intellectually autonomous being (dia, 590; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 206). Anticipating some of Tocqueville’s praise for the American approach to female education, Wollstonecraft offered a snapshot of what a girl might look like, and act like, if educated according to the principles of the Rights of Woman. As she critiqued Rousseau’s defense of sequestering girls within the home with only dolls to entertain them, she wrote: ‘‘I will venture to affirm, that a girl, whose spirits have not been damped by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp, and the doll will never excite attention unless confinement allows her no alternative.’’38 Wollstonecraft’s ideal girl is one who plays outdoors, experiencing the full breadth of life and learning from her energetic engagement with it. Any doll or domestic enclave pales in comparison to what the world—opened to her by her enlightened parents—can teach her. Wollstonecraft goes so far as to conclude that ‘‘most of the women, in the circle of my observation, who have acted like rational creatures, or shewn any vigour of intellect, have accidentally been allowed to run wild’’ as children (vrw, 115). Her proposed reforms for education aimed to make these happy accidents the general rule. If boys and girls were allowed to ‘‘play harmlessly together,’’ both at home and at school, an egalitarian culture would develop between the sexes in which they would respect their similarities in body and mind as more important than their differences (vrw, 115, 263). Superior to even a ‘‘philosopher’’ in her rational dexterity and linguistic skills, Tocqueville’s American girl seems to embody the unprecedented educational goals of the most progressive protofeminist thinkers of the time, especially Wollstonecraft (dia, 591; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 207). She certainly does not seem to be a duplicate of Rousseau’s own feminine ideal-type, Sophie, whose ‘‘mind’’ did not ‘‘resemble’’ a man’s, whose rational abilities were not directed toward abstract reasoning or advanced intellectual development, and who was not encouraged to freely socialize with men in civil society.39 Prefiguring Tocqueville’s portrait of the American girl, Wollstonecraft wrote a positive review of J. P. Brissot’s Travels in the United States when it was published in 1791, in which she commented especially kindly on this Frenchman’s glowing account of the free, yet

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moral, mingling of the sexes in America: ‘‘There cannot be a clearer proof of the purity of morals, that still prevails in America, than the easy unreserved behavior of the women.’’40 While there is no evidence that Tocqueville read either this review or the book that it discussed, the striking similarity of his and Wollstonecraft’s responses to the compatibility of freedom and moral purity amid the social mixing of the sexes in America suggests that they shared a hope that girls might be educated in a new, more independent fashion in modern democracies and that America was the place where this long-overdue process was beginning. Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman also demonstrates the interest she shared with Tocqueville in the education of girls who are rational and self-governing, worldly wise yet chaste. Like Tocqueville’s Americans, Wollstonecraft believed that Protestant theology and religion should serve as the moral basis of the education of children, but she did not think that religion alone could preserve children from vice. She also supported the development of the rational powers of girls and boys so that they could learn to rely only on themselves and God for moral direction (vrw, 106). Wollstonecraft likewise shared Tocqueville’s concern that a rational female education should enable girls to protect their own chastity while being exposed to the dangers and vices of the world. Yet she would have criticized Tocqueville’s exclusive association of the virtue of chastity with women and would have disagreed with his primary designation of chastity, rather than the full range of moral virtues, as the goal of female education. She argued that ‘‘until men are more chaste women will be immodest’’ (vrw, 213). To her, chastity (or sexual self-restraint) and modesty (or sober self-understanding) were virtues that both sexes must aspire to practice in tandem, or else they would never be realized in their genuine forms. Both Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft believed that if girls were educated to be rational, self-governing human beings like their male counterparts, they would develop a genuine form of modesty, or sober selfunderstanding. Their joint understanding of modesty differed completely from the Rousseauian view of modesty as a subtle, alluring, and morally commanding form of feminine coquetry, which ultimately placed the girl’s unstable self-image in the hands of her admirers (vrw, 168, 207–8). Both also believed that the chastity, or sexual self-restraint, of girls depended on their knowledge of the facts of human sexuality. Tocqueville favorably observed how the American girl ‘‘wants to please’’ men ‘‘but she knows exactly what it costs,’’ so that ‘‘her morals are pure rather than

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her mind chaste’’ (dia, 591; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 207). Wollstonecraft had likewise advised that children be ‘‘told that their mothers carry and nourish them in the same way’’ as ‘‘cats with their kittens,’’ so that they harbored no delusions about the serious consequences of sex—which, for women of the time, ranged from ‘‘common and legal prostitution’’ to death from childbirth (vrw, 213, 239). Eyes wide open to the dangers that sexual desire posed, especially for women of their time, Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft’s ideal girl would know how and why to resist its fulfillment before, or in a bad, marriage (vrw, 213, 229). Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft both defined their ideals of female education against the corrupt theories and practices of contemporary European female education. There are several fascinating parallels in their criticisms of the European girl. Wollstonecraft pitied any European girl or woman educated to be like Rousseau’s Sophie as ‘‘a fanciful kind of halfbeing,’’ deprived of the chance to develop the moral virtues or the mental or physical strength necessary for a good and happy life (vrw, 110). Likewise, Tocqueville argued that European girls and women, who were ‘‘denied some of the greatest attributes of humanity,’’ were sadly seen as ‘‘seductive but incomplete beings’’ in the eyes of men, and worse yet, in their own eyes (dia, 602; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 221). Wollstonecraft criticized the way European girls and women turned their weakness, ignorance, and artificial femininity into a kind of corrupt power: ‘‘Females have been insulated, as it were; and, while they have been stripped of the virtues that should clothe humanity, they have been decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny’’ (vrw, 107). In this way, Wollstonecraft extended her critique of political tyranny to women’s corrupt manipulation of men. Similarly, Tocqueville lamented that European men ‘‘so easily submit to the despotic sway of women’’ and that European women ‘‘almost think it a privilege to be able to appear futile, weak and timid’’ and praised ‘‘the women of America’’ for never laying claim ‘‘to rights of that sort’’ (dia, 602; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 221). Just as Wollstonecraft criticized the ‘‘insulated’’ education of the European girl, Tocqueville decried the ‘‘timid, withdrawn, almost cloistered’’ education of the European girl, which does nothing to prepare her for governing herself amid the ‘‘disorder inseparable from democratic society’’ (vrw, 107; dia, 591; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 207). Echoing Wollstonecraft’s moral concern with taming tyranny within the hearts of common men and women as well as their rulers, Tocqueville described how the American system of education prepares its women for a lifetime of mature

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self-governance in a democratic society that supported vast, and potentially dangerous, personal freedom: ‘‘In such circumstances they have calculated that there was little chance of repressing in woman the most tyrannical passions of the human heart and that it was a safer policy to teach her to control them herself’’ (dia, 591; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 207). Although she does not view democracy as fundamentally prone to disorder, Wollstonecraft agreed with Tocqueville that all societies must train human beings to control their ‘‘tyrannical passions’’ so that they did not become tyrants themselves. If women became ‘‘despots,’’ then they would spread ‘‘licentiousness’’ through ‘‘the whole aggregate of society’’ via their roles as the mothers and primary educators of the next generation—an outcome that both thinkers wished to prevent by educating women to be rational, self-governing, moral equals to men (vrw, 111). Although he perceived ‘‘dangers’’ in the progressive form of female education practiced in America, Tocqueville ultimately supported ‘‘democratic education’’ as ‘‘necessary’’ for protecting women in Europe and other democratizing societies against the ‘‘dangers with which the institutions and mores of democracy surround them.’’ He claimed that democratic education ‘‘tends to develop judgment at the cost of imagination and to make women chaste and cold rather than tender and loving companions of men,’’ but argued that these are ‘‘secondary evils’’ which ‘‘should be faced for the sake of the greater good’’ of society (dia, 592; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 208). Wollstonecraft also suggested that her theory of egalitarian education would promote chastity, genuine modesty, and temperate friendship between the sexes, rather than fan the flames of sexual passion (vrw, 99–100, 214–18). Although Wollstonecraft would have protested Tocqueville’s use of the term ‘‘manly’’ to describe the intellect of the American woman on the grounds that it gave a ‘‘sexual character to the mind,’’ both thinkers predicted, and accepted, that democratic education would produce women who can be equal or even superior to men in intellect and moral character yet retain a natural, rather than artificial, feminine beauty in their outward demeanor (vrw, 188, 201, 240, 267; dia, 601; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 220).

The Wollstonecraftian Girl Within the Rousseauian Wife In the chapters ‘‘The Young Woman as Wife’’ and ‘‘How Equality Helps to Maintain Good Morals in America,’’ Tocqueville set forth a Woll-

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stonecraftian defense of the right of both sexes to the free choice of a spouse, yet retained a Rousseauian defense of sex role differentiation within the marital bond and adult roles in the greater society. Both Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft viewed the free choice of a spouse as the ethical foundation of democratic marriage and contrasted it to the morally and socially corrosive practice of arranged marriage in aristocratic Europe. They both perceived that aristocratic marriages produced adulterous spouses, because such marriages were arranged for the sake of family wealth, not freely chosen by two people who loved and respected each other (dia, 596; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 213–14; vrw, 220, 247). Wollstonecraft condemned the ‘‘intrigues of married women, particularly in high life, and in countries where women are suitably married, according to their respective ranks, by their parents’’ (vrw, 220). Tocqueville likewise critically observed, ‘‘Nothing does more to make illegitimate love seem legitimate in the eyes of both who experience it and of the watching crowd than forced marriages or ones entered into by chance’’ (dia, 596; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 213–14). Arranged marriage, for both, was a recipe for moral disaster, and both thus married for love. Although Wollstonecraft would have likely praised Tocqueville for his choice of a life partner— Marie Mottley, after all, shared her middle-class, self-educated, English background—she surely would have lambasted his subsequent hypocrisy in succumbing to the temptation of extramarital affairs despite the auspicious beginnings of his marriage. Following Rousseau, Tocqueville understood sex role differentiation within marriage as the key to the moral and economic health of the family and to the political health of any democratic republic. In Emile, Rousseau had articulated the most famous philosophical defense of sex role differentiation of the time: he argued that women’s primary moral duty was to perpetuate the mores of society through their roles as wives and mothers, and men’s primary moral duty was to maintain justice and prosperity in society as family patriarchs and republican citizens. Tocqueville’s refusal to endorse the view that men and women should share the same parental duties within the family, and equal rights in civil society and the state, reflected his ultimately contradictory effort to distance himself from protofeminist political goals while espousing a theory of female education that shared a striking family resemblance with ‘‘Wollstonecraftism.’’ In ‘‘The Young Woman as Wife,’’ Tocqueville described the American girl’s transition from the freedom of her childhood to the cloistered life of married life: ‘‘For the former, her father’s house is a home of freedom

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and pleasure; for the latter, her husband’s is almost a cloister’’ (dia, 592; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 209). In an ironic twist, the American girl finds herself in the ‘‘cloistered’’ conditions of the European girl once she is married. Tocqueville explained that such a stark transition from freedom to bondage was necessarily produced by the religious and economic mores that formed the basis of American culture: ‘‘The Americans are both a Puritan nation and a trading nation. Therefore both their religious beliefs and their industrial habits lead them to demand much abnegation on the woman’s part and a continual sacrifice of pleasure for the sake of business, which is seldom expected in Europe’’ (dia, 592; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 209). The Americans believed that the moral and economic health of the family and society at large depended upon men focusing their energies on making and saving money, and women running frugal, religious homes and serving as the primary exemplars of virtuous self-denial for their husband and children. Wollstonecraft had also been preoccupied with the rise of commercialism and its effects on family life and the moral character of women. She argued that ‘‘the respect paid to property flow’’ was a ‘‘poisoned fountain’’ that produced ‘‘most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene’’ (vrw, 230). In particular, women and families were corrupted by the idleness and vanity enabled by the pursuit and accumulation of wealth. Like Wollstonecraft, Tocqueville seemed to recognize the shallowness of modern commercialism, or the Puritan trading ethic, by identifying it as a form of the tyranny of the majority, or the despotic influence of majority opinion upon individual life choices in a democracy. Tocqueville took special note of how American wives were affected by the tyranny of public opinion: ‘‘In America inexorable public opinion carefully keeps woman within the little sphere of domestic interests and duties and will not let her go beyond them’’ (dia, 592; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 209). If read in the light of Tocqueville’s fervent criticism of the tyranny of public opinion throughout Democracy in America, this line suggests that American women, trapped in the ‘‘little sphere’’ of the home, were the victims of the ‘‘inexorable public opinion’’ produced by the Puritan trading ethic. In the introduction to the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft employed a parallel metaphor to evoke the constricting space of the domestic realm, lamenting how women were forced by society ‘‘to remain immured in their families groping in the dark’’ (vrw, 69). For both Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft, the dark, little sphere of the home was like a cave or a prison in which women found themselves bound.

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And yet, while he recognized the American woman’s constriction within the bonds of marriage and family life, Tocqueville refrained from making a Wollstonecraftian argument for the right of women to bridge the domestic and public spheres alongside their male counterparts. Instead, he praised the American girl’s submission to the ‘‘inexorable public opinion’’ that women belonged in the home once married, and argued that ‘‘she finds the strength required for such an act of submission in the firmness of her understanding and the manly habits inculcated by her education’’ (dia, 593; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 209). Tocqueville insisted that she was not merely the victim of public opinion, because her own ‘‘cold and austere powers of reasoning’’ and her indomitable ‘‘strength of will’’ freely imposed this ‘‘sacrifice’’ on her (dia, 593; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 210). Tocqueville’s defense of the American woman’s fully conscious and voluntary subjugation to ‘‘inexorable public opinion’’ reveals a major rift between his view of the purpose of female autonomy and Wollstonecraft’s view that women should be educated to be autonomous beings so that they could be both virtuous mothers and exemplary citizens of a free and self-governing republic. On the one hand, Tocqueville wished to support women’s early education according to Wollstonecraftian principles so that they became fully autonomous human beings; on the other hand, he endorsed a Rousseauian system of sex role differentiation within marriage, which restricted women to the domestic realm and prevented them from realizing autonomy in the realms of civil society and the state. After the freedom of her girlhood, Tocqueville’s American woman had the opportunity only to exercise a severely limited form of moral autonomy in her free choice of a husband and her free acceptance of the bonds of marriage and family life thereafter. Yet unlike the European girl, whose immaturity allowed her to submit to a poor marital match arranged by her parents, the American girl ‘‘never gets caught in the bonds of matrimony as in a snare set to catch her simplicity and ignorance. She knows beforehand what will be expected of her, and she herself has freely accepted the yoke. She suffers her new state bravely, for she has chosen it’’ (dia, 593; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 210). Here Tocqueville construes the freedom of the American wife in terms of what is absent; she is free insofar as she is not forced to take the ‘‘yoke’’ of marriage. Wollstonecraft, in contrast, emphasized not only the lack of force as a condition of female autonomy in choosing and keeping a spouse, but also the enduring quality of the choice itself. ‘‘Slavish’’ submission to a ‘‘tyrant’’ in marriage, in her view, was not befitting for a self-governing woman (vrw, 76, 100). For Tocque-

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ville, a man gazing from the outside, there was something noble about this submission, whereas for Wollstonecraft—a woman on the inside—it was nothing but brutish. Tocqueville upheld the wives on the American frontier as the ultimate embodiments of this austere form of female autonomy and self-denial: ‘‘Fever, solitude and boredom had not broken the resilience of their courage. Their features were changed and faded, but their looks were firm. They seemed both sad and resolute’’ (dia, 594; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 211). He argued that the source of the enduring ‘‘inner strength’’ of the frontier women was the ‘‘education of their early years’’: ‘‘So, in America the wife is still the same person that she was as a girl; her part in life has changed, and her ways are different, but the spirit is the same’’ (dia, 594; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 211). In other words, the Wollstonecraftian girl continued to live within the Rousseauian wife as her spiritual core. There is something poignant, even tragic, about Tocqueville’s description of the American girl’s courageous choice of moral and social duty over personal freedom, however.41 He seemed to lament the severity of her choice, the limitation of her identity by ‘‘inexorable public opinion,’’ and the constriction of the inner Wollstonecraftian girl within the ‘‘sad and resolute’’ Rousseauian wife, even as he supported the system of sex role differentiation that constrained her.

Tocqueville’s Inner Radical Tocqueville concluded the chapter ‘‘How the American Views the Equality of the Sexes’’ with a round of hollow praise for American sex role differentiation that revealed his unrecognized debt, and ambivalent response, to the egalitarian protofeminist school of thought most famously represented by Wollstonecraft. William Mathie and Delba Winthrop suggested that Tocqueville’s hyperbolic description of the American combination of progressive female education with traditional sex role differentiation as the ‘‘true conception of democratic progress,’’ even though it produced sad wives and materialistic husbands, was a sarcastic and cynical commentary on the inability of democratic politics to produce happiness for either men or women through either family life or democratic citizenship.42 While they perceptively noted Tocqueville’s sarcastic tone in this passage, Mathie and Winthrop did not address the

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possibility that it may have been subtly directed toward the contradictions and ambivalence in his own thinking about the social roles of women in a democratic age, not simply to suggest that women would not be any happier as citizens. With his sympathetic portrait of the noble yet sad American wife, Tocqueville alerted the reader to his anticipation of the moral, social, and political failure of the American attempt to reconcile Rousseauian sex role differentiation with progressive Wollstonecraftian education, and the failure of his own attempt to defend it. Tocqueville would have been fully aware that the two philosophies had ultimately contradictory goals for women’s self-development and social roles, and he undoubtedly suspected that they could only be temporarily maintained in tandem, since Wollstonecraft’s school ultimately better fit the ethos of the democratic age. If the women of America were truly ‘‘superior’’ in character and intellect to not only European women but also American men, as Tocqueville boldly claimed, how long would they remain ‘‘sad yet resolute’’ in their submission to the whims of ‘‘inexorable public opinion’’ before they used their reason to demand the civil and political rights that their girlhood education prepared them to deserve and practice? (dia, 592, 594, 603; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 209, 211, 222). Would women educated to be both rational and self-sacrificing remain in the home because they would be no ‘‘happier’’ with the same civil and political rights as men, or would they seek justice, over and above happiness, by striving to realize the rights set forth in the Declaration of Independence for all persons of the United States? Indeed, only eight years after the publication of the 1840 Democracy, the American abolitionists and devoted readers of the Rights of Woman Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott held the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Perhaps Tocqueville was ‘‘almost frightened’’ by the girls he met in America because he anticipated, with profound ambivalence, that the smartest among them would grow up to be noisy defenders of the civil and political rights of women such as Mott and Stanton (dia, 591; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 207). Tocqueville’s conflicted response to the fate of the American girl embodied his own conflicted response to Wollstonecraftian protofeminism. Just as the American girl dwelled within the American wife, an ambivalent English radical, unwittingly schooled in the thought of Wollstonecraft, lived within the heart of Tocqueville.

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Wollstonecraft, Tocqueville, and the Genesis of Modern Feminisms Consideration of the unexpected family resemblance between Wollstonecraft and Tocqueville on issues central to the women’s rights discourse of the postrevolutionary era productively complicates the story of the genesis of modern feminisms. First, the comparative interpretation of this unlikely pair generates new insights into their respective theoretical responses to the question of how girls and women should be incorporated into modern democratic culture and politics. Situated in dialogue with Tocqueville, Wollstonecraft’s relatively conservative concerns with morality, religion, and civic virtue appear in high resolution. Set against the background of Wollstonecraft’s broad cultural impact in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville’s relatively progressive views on female education, female autonomy, democratic marriage, the corrosive effects of commercialism, and the costs of traditional sex role differentiation are brought into sharper focus. By fostering a conversation between the first internationally renowned theorist of women’s rights and a thinker traditionally taken to be a unilateral critic of the intellectual and social movements she sparked, we unearth hidden dimensions of the evolutionary narrative of modern feminisms. Just as a French aristocrat developed a new science of politics in response to the British radicals and the American practice of democracy, postrevolutionary feminisms unfolded in a creative conversation with the conservative reactions to them. To list but one example, Catharine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) used Tocqueville’s philosophy of the family from the 1840 Democracy as a foundation for its theory of female education. Beecher’s proposals for the reform of female education intriguingly bridged the Wollstonecraftian emphasis on female physical education with the Tocquevillean emphasis on the stoic psychic interior of the autonomous wife and thus crafted a new and vastly influential vision of the American woman’s empowerment—both personal and civic—through the performance of her domestic duties.43 In unfurling the family resemblance between Tocqueville and Wollstonecraft, we also highlight the ways that French, Anglo, and American strands of early nineteenth-century protofeminism were woven together in a way that challenges the usefulness of certain contemporary feminist categories of historical and theoretical analysis. Looking backward, schol-

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ars such as Mona Ozouf have tended to divide feminism into ‘‘equality’’ and ‘‘difference’’ camps, with the egalitarian thinkers firmly situated in Britain and America, and the difference thinkers grounded in France and the broader European continent. Other scholars, such as Bonnie Anderson, have seen the Atlantic as a conduit, not a barrier, for the dynamic interplay of French, Anglo, and American perspectives in the development of modern feminisms.44 Through the triangulation of Wollstonecraft’s philosophical impact on postrevolutionary women’s rights discourse in France, Britain, and the United States, this study contributes to the latter school’s thesis that a transatlantic, international dialogue on women’s rights rose out of the French revolutionary period in a way that creatively interfaced the issues of sex equality and sex difference.45 The Anglo school of women’s rights, rooted in the work of Wollstonecraft, was perhaps especially suited for transplantation and cross-fertilization in the North American and European continents because of its organic, holistic way of understanding the relationship between sex equality and sex difference. Women and men generally shared certain traits as human beings—such as the capacity to reason—but they also had distinct bodies that differentiated them as male and female, and distinct roles prescribed by society that engendered them as masculine or feminine. Wollstonecraft and her British pupils, such as Frances Wright, Harriet Martineau, Mary Shelley, and Harriet Taylor, sought to understand how the identities of men and women were a product of their common and distinct, natural and conventional qualities. Indeed, it could be said that Wollstonecraft and her school aimed to show a family resemblance between the sexes that hinged on the discernment of how they simultaneously overlapped and diverged in their identities. From Charles Brockden Brown and Hannah Mather Crocker in the United States, to Fe´licite´ Gue´riot Saint-Martin and Tocqueville in France, a significant crowd of postrevolutionary thinkers took a philosophical interest in this radical ‘‘anglified’’ way of conceptualizing the family resemblance of women and men.46 Women and men were both human, but they were also bearers of sexed bodies and gendered social roles. This modern articulation of sex identities within the broader category of human identity represented both a revolutionary and a pragmatic starting point for rethinking and reforming the situation of women on the horizon of the democratizing West. The counterintuitive study of the ‘‘family resemblance’’ between Wollstonecraft and Tocqueville thus unburies the pro-

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foundly humanistic foundations upon which the complex, multilayered story of modern feminisms rests.

Notes 1. I use the term ‘‘protofeminist’’ to describe the use of terms and arguments that anticipate certain modern feminist arguments, yet were employed in a time when the term feminist was unknown. The term ‘‘feminisme’’ was first used in France in the 1870s and not regularly used in European and American discourse until the early twentieth century. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 3, 14; Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 19. Scholars who portrayed Tocqueville as a critic of European protofeminism included Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 84; Rogers Smith, ‘‘Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,’’ American Political Science Review, 87, no. 3 (1993): 553; Reiji Matsumoto, ‘‘Tocqueville on the Family,’’ Tocqueville Review 8 (1986/1987): 147–48; Delba Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Women and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress,’ ’’ Political Theory 14 (1986): 241; and Susan Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 19. 2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence and ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper Perennial, 1969), 600–601 (hereafter cited as dia); Oeuvres, papiers et correspondences, ed. J. P. Mayer, 18 vols. (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1951), vol. 1, pt. 2, 219 (hereafter cited as opc). 3. Matsumoto raised Wollstonecraft’s name, alongside John Stuart Mill’s, only to reject the possibility that Tocqueville directly or indirectly engaged Wollstonecraft or British protofeminism in the 1840 Democracy. Matsumoto, ‘‘Tocqueville on the Family,’’ 148. 4. I thank Jill Locke for helping me put this argument into words, especially with the concept of ‘‘degrees of separation.’’ 5. ‘‘I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc., overlap and criss-cross in the same way.—And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.’’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 27–28. 6. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 31. 7. I thank the anonymous reviewer for suggesting the application of Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘‘family resemblance’’ to this study. I also thank Neil Delaney for his input on this application, including the wording of this sentence. 8. See note 1. 9. Examples include Abigail and John Adams, Charles Brockden Brown, Judith Sargent Murray, Hannah Mather Crocker in the United States; Robert Owen, Percy and Mary Shelley, Frances Wright, and Harriet Martineau in Britain; and Fe´licite´ Gue´riot Saint-Martin, Fanny Raoul, Ce´sar Gardeton, and Flora Tristan in France. Eileen Hunt Botting and Christine Carey, ‘‘Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates,’’ American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 4 (2004): 707–22; Drew Cramer, ‘‘The Critical Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft in Early Nineteenth-Century France,’’ senior thesis, University of Notre Dame, 2006; Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 411–52. 10. For Tocqueville’s handful of references to women in vol. 1, see dia, 243, 291, 317, 320. 11. In this chapter I thus focus on the 1840 Democracy.

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12. John Stuart Mill, introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), xxxii. 13. George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938); J. P. Mayer, Prophet of a Mass Age: A Study of Alexis de Tocqueville (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1939); Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1968). 14. Matsumoto, ‘‘Tocqueville on the Family’’; William Mathie, ‘‘God, Woman, and Morality: The Democratic Family in the New Political Science of Alexis de Tocqueville,’’ Review of Politics, 57, no. 1 (1995): 7–30; Sanford Kessler, ‘‘Tocqueville on Sexual Morality,’’ Interpretation 16, no. 3 (1989): 465–80; F. L. Morton, ‘‘Sexual Equality and the Family in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,’’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 17, no. 2 (1984): 309–24; Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Women.’’ 15. Colleen Shogan, ‘‘Tocqueville’s ‘Feminism in America:’ A Reconsideration of Women’s Equality and Dignity,’’ Journal of Contemporary Thought 13 (2001): 55–69. 16. Linda Kerber, ‘‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,’’ Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 10n. 17. Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 163, 165, 169. 18. Kessler, ‘‘Tocqueville on Sexual Morality,’’ 466; Allan Bloom, ‘‘Rousseau on the Equality of the Sexes,’’ in Justice and Equality Here and Now, ed. Frank Lucash (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 69; Morton, ‘‘Sexual Equality and the Family,’’ 314n. 19. Rousseau, Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 357–82; Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 156–73. 20. On Martineau, see Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, 726. For a handful of references to de Stae¨l, the Saint-Simonians, and Sand in Tocqueville’s writings and correspondence prior to 1840, see opc, vol. 5, pt. 1, 449; vol. 10, 105; vol. 13, pt. 1, 385. 21. For their own responses to their public persecution for speaking out on women’s rights in the late 1820s and 1830s, see Frances Wright, Course of Popular Lectures (New York, 1829), and Sarah Grimke´, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (Boston: I. Knapp, 1838). 22. James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 34. 23. Tocqueville, ‘‘Les ame´ricains comprennent l’e´galite´ de l’homme et de la femme,’’ 13, in Tocqueville, ‘‘De la Democratie en Amerique Manuscript Tome IV,’’ Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. 24. Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 51. 25. John Windle, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, 1759–1797: A Bibliography of the First and Early Editions with Briefer Notes on Later Editions and Translations (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2000), 1–42. 26. Cramer, ‘‘The Critical Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft.’’ 27. Windle, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, 11, 19, 28. 28. Ibid., 16–19; Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames, 39; Thie´baux, ‘‘Mary Wollstonecraft in Federalist America: 1791–1802,’’ 197–202. 29. The condition, influence, rights and appeal of women, from Joseph A. Segur, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Carey, Matthew Hertell [i.e., Thomas Hertel, Matthew Carey], William Thompson, Alexander Walker, John Milton, and other philogynists, 3rd ed. (Albany, N.Y.: Stereotyped and printed for the publisher, 1845), in International Women’s Periodicals (Woodbridge, Conn.: Primary Source Media), Microfilm, Reel 196, No. 1299.

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30. David Lundberg and Henry F. May, ‘‘The Enlightened Reader in America,’’ American Quarterly 28 (Spring 1976): 14. 31. Aaron Burr, ‘‘Letter to Theodosia Burr, 8 February 1793,’’ in Memoirs of Aaron Burr, ed. Matthew Davis, vol. 1 (New York: De Capo Press, 1836), 360. 32. Abigail Adams, ‘‘Letter to John Adams, 2 February 1794,’’ The Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2002), http://www.masshist.org/ digitaladams/. 33. Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames, 42–46; Laurie James, Men, Women, and Margaret Fuller (New York: Golden Heritage Press, 1990), 18. 34. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 251–56. 35. Drescher, Tocqueville and England, 98. 36. Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 37. Drescher, Tocqueville and England, 56. 38. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 115 (hereafter cited as vrw). 39. Rousseau, Emile, 358, 363, 377, 381, 382. 40. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘‘Review of J. P. Brissot’s Nouveau Voyage Dans Les Etats-Unies de L’Amerique Septentrionale, fait en 1788,’’ Analytical Review 11 (1791), in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd, vol. 7 (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 391. 41. Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 200. 42. Mathie, ‘‘God, Woman, and Morality,’’ 30; Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Women,’’ 240. dia, 603; opc, vol. 1, pt. 2, 211. 43. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar (New York: Schocken Books, 1977). 44. Mona Ozouf, Women’s Words: Essays on French Singularity, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 45. I am grateful to Jill Locke for suggesting the use of the term ‘‘triangulation.’’ 46. Cramer, ‘‘The Critical Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’’; Botting and Carey, ‘‘Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact.’’

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5 Aristocratic Mourning Tocqueville, John Quincy Adams, and the Affairs of Andrew Jackson

Jill Locke It is only government by a single man that in the long run irons out diversities and makes each member of a nation indifferent to his neighbor’s lot. —Alexis de Tocqueville I did not come here to make a cabinet for the Ladies of this place. —Andrew Jackson

Tocqueville in America Unlike many of his contemporaries, Alexis de Tocqueville did not bemoan the passing of the ancien re´gime. Tocqueville famously described its eventual destruction as an ‘‘inevitable yet so completely unforeseen’’ Many thanks to Eileen Hunt Botting, Richard Boyd, Mary Dietz, Michaele Ferguson, David Gutterman, Greg Kaster, Kristen Nelson, Alisa Rosenthal, Cheryl Welch, Eric Vrooman, and Karen Zivi for their careful readings, suggestions, and general assistance with this chapter. Preliminary research was supported by a Gustavus Adolphus College Student-Faculty Presidential Research Grant.

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end to centuries of French corruption, unjust taxation, the forces of migration and industrialization, and the generally dangerous process of administrative centralization, by which ‘‘Paris had mastered France.’’1 Indeed, though nostalgia predominates much of the neo-Tocquevillean literature, Tocqueville’s own view of the past is more sober and pragmatic than that of his current enthusiasts.2 One might say that Tocqueville thought the issues deserved more than nostalgia; concerned parties ought to attend to the business of understanding and managing the democratic future, which was clearly here to stay. And yet, however much Tocqueville’s account of prerevolutionary France lacks a nostalgic cast, he did wish to preserve aristocratic elements within the context of democratic progress. An aristocratic sensibility, Tocqueville maintained, could ward off the individualistic tendencies of egalitarian societies. In his travels to the young, putatively classless and egalitarian United States, he was eager to learn whether or not democratic societies might yield surrogates to provide these civilizing elements. The French experience had proved that democracies were subject to manifold risks, not the least of which were the avaricious tendencies arising from an economic free-for-all and the absence of a class charged with the well-being of the nation. So attentive to procuring his private fortune and remaking himself, the democratic citizen lacked the time, incentive, and inclination to study philosophy, appreciate great literature, or care about much beyond his own domain. The coarseness of the democratic spirit offended the young aristocrat on both aesthetic and political grounds. Adding to Tocqueville’s anxieties about a future no longer beholden to aristocratic virtues and enamored of democratic ones was the question of sexual mores in a democracy. While republican revolutionaries highlighted the decadence of aristocratic women as a plague on France, Tocqueville’s exhaustive account of the causes of French decline lacks the republican concern with sexual mores or women’s virtue as harbingers of unrest.3 Under a properly governed aristocracy, Tocqueville seems to suggest, a little gender disorder and a few extramarital affairs did not necessarily pose a threat. It is only in the context of his discussion of postrevolutionary France that Tocqueville raises the concern about the ways in which the absence of fixed gender roles and sexual mores has exacerbated the chaos of French politics.4 On this point Tocqueville echoes Rousseau’s lesson quite well: without the stabilizing effects of class difference, sexual mores would assume new significance and need stricter

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enforcement.5 But unlike Rousseau, Tocqueville does not appear dogmatic on these issues; he is interested in the salutary function said mores might fulfill in place of certain aspects of aristocratic life and in service of protecting liberty.6 Nor does he approve of the heavy-handed, Napoleonic approach to instantiating morals.7 Speaking to the havoc of the French democratic effort and the stated goal of Tocqueville’s travels to the United States as ‘‘discover[ing] lessons from which we may profit,’’ much of the current scholarship highlights the ways in which Tocqueville’s critique of American democracy reveals his political anxieties about postrevolutionary France.8 Scholars such as Laura Janara, Cheryl Welch, and Sheldon Wolin have persuasively emphasized that Tocqueville is a French theorist of democracy invested in a particular set of French problems, and his writings on America are best understood through this lens.9 U.S. presidents may love to cite Tocqueville on democracy, this line of reasoning suggests, but Tocqueville was not interested in—or particularly impressed by—the particulars of what he found there. His focus remained at home, where he was vigorously engaged in debates about French politics and reforms. As Welch notes, Democracy in America (1835, 1840) can be understood as a painstaking effort not to write about America—witness the ways in which Tocqueville assiduously works to disentangle the ‘‘democratic’’ from the ‘‘American’’ part of his story, rendering the latter mere ‘‘tangents.’’10 By this score, Tocqueville’s fascinating commentary on the functional benefits of the Americans’ strict sexual mores reflects his impressions of the work they might perform for the French.11 Both complementing and complicating the ways in which Democracy evidences Tocqueville’s Francocentrism, this chapter draws the reader’s attention back to the political climate of the United States in 1831–32, specifically the sexual politics of the populist Jackson administration, which eclipsed the regime of John Quincy Adams. Thus this work shares the methodological sensibilities of those scholars who have plumbed early nineteenth-century French history to illuminate Tocqueville’s anxieties and investments. It charts new territory, however, in directing that study toward the United States during the same period. While the details of the 1820s–1840s are well known among U.S. historians and scholars of the U.S. presidency, Tocqueville scholarship to date lacks any extensive discussion of the specifics of the political climate Tocqueville encountered while in America, much less its gender politics, as they relate to Democracy.12 While I do not dispute the point that Democracy speaks to

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postrevolutionary France, I maintain that a closer investigation into the Jacksonian era reveals the ways in which it explains early American politics—and Tocqueville’s investment in their development—as well. In short, Tocqueville was impressed by an America—the quasi-aristocratic iteration that was destroyed by Andrew Jackson. Through a historical exposition of the debates about sexual mores during the Jackson presidency, I argue that Tocqueville is in fact deeply engaged in American politics of the period and strongly concerned with the moral and social problems posed by the Jacksonian presidency. While France’s future may have been front and center in Tocqueville’s mind, reading Tocqueville’s anxieties about postrevolutionary democratization against the backdrop of Jackson’s triumph over Adams, in particular, reveals in deeper resolution the extent of his fears about the historical trajectory of the American brand of democracy. To manage these fears, I argue, Tocqueville presents Jacksonian democracy as a force to be reckoned with, but not a fait accompli. Democracy pays the Jacksonian element its due, but also highlights the American forces that might check it by naturalizing the strictness of women’s mores, the religious dimensions of American public life, the vitality of New England towns, and the American spirit of local democracy.13 In this chapter I first explore the unsuccessful effort to scandalize Jackson’s marriage in the 1828 election as an indicator of changing notions of power and popular morality. From there, I recount what came to be known the Eaton affair of 1831, in which Jackson attacked the wives of his cabinet members for their unwillingness to socialize with his friend the promiscuous Margaret Eaton, who had married Jackson’s secretary of war. In a closing discussion of Democracy and selections from Tocqueville’s travel writings in America, I argue that however ambivalent Tocqueville may have been about Puritan morality and girls’ lost liberty in marriage, he saw them as two of the only forces to check the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson, a figure whom he—and the interlocutors he most admired—held in notoriously low esteem. I conclude that Tocqueville presents a particularly narrow conception of American marriage and the forces of women’s virtue in order to steer democracy back toward the values of the American aristocracy, embodied in the person of John Quincy Adams. This is especially clear in Tocqueville’s near-belligerent denial of the ways in which nineteenth-century American girls were resisting the conventions of marriage and Americans, in general, were coming to see romance and marriage as mutually reinforcing. Thus when

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Tocqueville speaks of democracy as needing to be ‘‘re-awaken[ed],’’ he is unlikely to be referring to a European past, which had no democratic history to speak of. Rather, the democracy worth ‘‘re-awakening’’ is a peculiarly aristocratic-republican form—as regrettably chaste as it often was—dwindling in nineteenth-century America.14

The Death of American Aristocracy and the Rise of Andrew Jackson One month before Tocqueville and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, landed in Rhode Island, Andrew Jackson had fired his entire cabinet in an explicit effort to control the political influence of the cabinet members’ wives. His mantra had become ‘‘I did not come here to make a cabinet for the Ladies of this place,’’ and he made good on this promise.15 The ‘‘Ladies,’’ in simple terms, had become too powerful—in the sway they held over their husbands and, by extension, the president. The story behind Jackson’s cabinet is a colorful one that speaks to the concerns and paradoxes inhabiting Democracy. It begins in 1824 with the presidential race between Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and General Andrew Jackson, the feted war hero who was responsible for acquiring a vast amount of territory for the young republic and leading the victory over the British at New Orleans in the War of 1812.16 His political ascent seemed to be the logical extension of the democraticrepublic tradition in America, as he lacked familial ties to the ruling elite and had proved his loyalty to the nation in the potentially universal tradition of the citizen-soldier.17 Jackson constructed his presidential candidacy and his entire public persona in explicit opposition to the old American aristocracy.18 Although Tocqueville repeatedly observes the general social equality that he finds in America, a uniquely republican form of aristocracy was alive and well in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.19 This was not the nascent industrial aristocracy Tocqueville describes as a ‘‘monstrosity in the general fabric of society,’’ but the members of a learned class who descended from the nation’s founders and represented a moral and philosophical commitment to leadership in service of something greater than themselves.20 John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s opponent in both 1824 and 1828, personified this class. As heir to one of the most

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prominent political families, he understood his duty to lead in terms of noblesse oblige. He had trained to serve his country not on the battlefield but in elite European schools and while accompanying his father, President John Adams, on extensive foreign missions, which prepared him for the career that preceded his presidency. Fluent in French, Adams was translating for diplomatic envoys as early as the age of fourteen.21 In Europe, he honed his intellectual acumen, beginning a ‘‘lifelong habit of browsing bookstores, buying what he thought valuable and interesting and sending them home to start his own private library.’’22 Adams was intensely preoccupied with establishing the United States as a nation with international prominence; in a Eurocentric universe, this involved becoming a nation with a serious intellectual climate.23 Tocqueville found Adams’s upright character, as well as the ‘‘ease’’ and ‘‘elegance’’ of his French, impressive.24 Moreover, Adams—unlike Jackson—shared Tocqueville’s view of the horrors of slavery, and the two used similar language to explain its incompatibility with democracy and liberty.25 By 1824, Jackson posed a real threat to the New England elite. He had become, as a result of his war victories, ‘‘the most popular man in the nation.’’ Many of Adams’s diplomatic victories (as secretary of state under President James Monroe) were only possible because of Jackson’s military prowess.26 Adams was therefore in the awkward position of implicitly highlighting the general’s strengths while making the case for his own presidential qualifications. He sought to reconcile this dilemma by preempting the Jackson candidacy, going so far as to have his wife, Louisa Adams, give an extravagant ball in honor of the general, with the hopes that Jackson would become his running mate.27 Jackson had other plans in mind: he became a candidate in his own right. By means that only confirmed Jackson’s case against the insidiousness of the American aristocracy, Adams won the 1824 election. Although Jackson had a plurality of both popular and electoral votes, he did not have a majority. The House of Representatives was to make the final decision among the top three finishers, in compliance with the Twelfth Amendment (1804). Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, had placed fourth and was therefore eliminated from the final slate of candidates, and he would go on to have tremendous influence on the outcome. The third candidate, William H. Crawford, had been debilitated during the final days of the campaign, and the Republicans simply kept his name on the ticket to preserve a party spot.28 As far as Clay was concerned, he was deciding between the first two finishers, Adams and Jackson. And this

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would not be a hard decision: Clay did not think that ‘‘killing 2,500 Englishmen at N. Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy’’ and Adams had promised to serve Clay’s ‘‘own future interests.’’29 Self-interest and opposition to Jackson proved alchemical. Clay cast his vote for Adams and in so doing, fueled the pro-Jackson forces. Thus by 1828, Jackson was ready to position his candidacy as the only legitimate (that is, democratic) option against Adams’s bid for reelection. He highlighted the injustice of the 1824 election, during which the people had preferred him and cast the contest as an explicit battle between aristocracy and democracy. Adams’s illustrious career of foreign service, his fluency in French, and his connections abroad soon became liabilities. His intellectual habits were demonized as elitist, and Jackson took special aim at Adams’s plan to develop a national university.30 Adams’s love of billiards, cultivated abroad and transplanted into the White House, became a symbolic lightening rod for the antiaristocratic sentiment flowing throughout the country.31 Of special interest to this study is the vast difference in the candidates’ views of sexual morality and women’s influence and the symmetry between Adams’s worldview and that which Tocqueville describes in Democracy. Literally schooled in the practice of republican motherhood, John Quincy Adams believed that women’s virtue and chastity were essential because of women’s roles in educating and shaping the morals of their husbands and sons.32 Adams had become rapt by the evangelical messages of the Second Great Awakening, which complemented the values that his parents (and his mother, in particular) had impressed upon him.33 A similar picture of American mores emerges in Tocqueville’s account of the ways in which women’s moral work tempers many of democracy’s (potential) excesses.34 While Tocqueville does report with some regret the coldness of American marriage, the ‘‘constant denial of pleasure for the sake of business,’’ and the missing ‘‘charms [of the] . . . European girl,’’ all of which are enforced by ‘‘inflexible public opinion,’’ his account also teems with a sense of relief.35 Here again, he reflects an Adamsian bargain. John Quincy also saw American women’s strict morals as politically necessary rather than personally fulfilling. Heeding his mother’s counsel, he had forsaken his real love, Mary Frazier, for the more practical and fiscally prudent choice of Louisa Johnson.36 Tocqueville, like Adams, was willing to take seriously the potential goods of companionate marriages, even if they lacked passion and romance.37 Toc-

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queville may acknowledge some tragedy in the American girls’ surrender of liberty and men’s surrender of romance, but his emphasis on the ways in which the disorder of French public life cannot be separated from the ‘‘disorder of the marital bed’’ indicates that these are worthwhile tradeoffs.38 He implies that the French would do well to have such problems. While the French experimented with top-down, Napoleonic efforts to inculcate virtue, Tocqueville praised the American effort to locate schools of virtue in hearth and home. No one better embodied the idea of republican mothers as virtuous satellites of moral instruction than Abigail Adams, who both advised her husband, John Adams, and ‘‘constantly warned Johnny about the temptations and allurements of Europe and begged him to show strength in warding them off.’’39 Abigail Adams was the consummate moral educator who impressed upon him a strong link between becoming a great statesman who would bring honor to his family and his country and the maintenance of strict morals. Neither she nor his father ‘‘ever wrote to their son without instructing, criticizing, berating, warning, or admonishing him—all for his own good of course.’’40 In one letter she warned that she and his father would rather find John Quincy dead than ‘‘see in [him] an immoral profligate or a Graceless child.’’ If he did not ‘‘keep a strict guard upon [himself], . . . the odious monster [would] soon loose its terror by becoming familiar.’’41 Adams had spent his whole life abroad honoring his mother’s counsel against the temptations of European sin, and he was far from ready to let it to take root in America by way of a Jackson presidency. As president, Adams had promised to improve the morals of his fellow Americans. His plan for the country’s future, ‘‘unveiled during his first annual message to Congress, projected a strong, unified nation-state, with a federal government active in physical and moral ‘internal improvements.’ ’’42 Because of Adams’s elite pedigree, Jackson readily equated the concern for sexual morality—indeed, the very tradition of republican motherhood Adams had learned from his mother—as antidemocratic. Jackson did not argue (as future feminists would) that gender roles offended democratic principles; he opposed women’s suffrage and was far more hostile to women’s power in the public sphere than was Adams. Rather, Jackson made the case that Adams was a ‘‘meddler’’ who distrusted the people’s ability to make their own decisions about virtue and the persons with whom they associate. Jackson’s past, in fact, gave Adams the perfect opportunity to promote his own view of sexual morality and

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marital fidelity while making a case for ‘‘meddling’’ in the ‘‘private’’ lives of citizens and candidates alike. Defending the morality he believed to be under attack from Jacksonian democracy, Adams pathologized Jackson’s marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards. The two wed in 1791, when Rachel was still married to her first husband, Lewis Robards. Rachel’s bigamy and Jackson’s ‘‘theft’’ of another man’s wife, Adams would argue, only confirmed Jackson’s ill manners and lack of regard for feminine virtue, marital chastity, and morality at large. The Jacksons insisted that this was a simple mistake—a claim generally supported by historians’ accounts of the incident.43 Rachel thought the divorce had been finalized, but the Virginia legislature had merely granted Lewis permission to sue for divorce in civil court. (He did not sue until 1793.)44 Once advised of the legal details, the Jacksons held a second marriage ceremony in 1794. But in 1828, decades after they had legally married, Adams used Rachel’s unwitting bigamy to attack the general’s character.45 Anxious to capitalize upon fears of Jackson’s Tennessee—that is, ill-bred—morals, Adams portrayed him as a reckless seducer and ‘‘wife stealer’’ who could malign the nation’s fragile virtues just as he had maligned Rachel Robards’s. In one breath, Rachel was called a ‘‘loose, impetuous, and immoral woman who willingly cast off her lawful husband for an arrogant and impassioned young suitor’’ and also a helpless victim of Jackson’s guileful seductions.46 Echoing Tocqueville’s observation that male infidelity is acceptable in America so long as the woman in question is not honorable (married), the message was clear: ‘‘A vote for Jackson was a vote for sin.’’47 Anticipating (or explicitly influencing) the Tocquevillean account, Adams analogized national unity and marriage on several levels. First, a healthy nation required its citizens to be safely ensconced in monogamous marriages; and second, infidels and bigamists would not only destroy their own marriages but also the unity of the nation.48 Committed to their belief that Jackson would destroy the fragile republic, the Adams coalition pulled no punches. A column in the Cincinnati Gazette stated, ‘‘ ‘In the summer of 1790,’ . . . ‘Gen. Jackson prevailed upon the wife of Lewis Roberts [sic] of Mercer county, Kentucky, to desert her husband, and live with himself, in the character of a wife.’ ’’49 Another leaflet read, ‘‘Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian Land’’?50 Adams saw no republican controversy in conscripting the federal state to nationalize a particular code of morals.51 Monogamous marriage was, he insisted, a lit-

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mus test for republican character.52 And the people deserved to know the facts behind this menacing man with such ‘‘callous disregard for the laws of marriage’’ if he were to become president. Adams would insist that such disregard symbolized ‘‘the raw power of evil over institutional efforts to uphold virtue.’’ Predictably, Rachel was attacked as well: ‘‘Because the woman who was slated to share [the president’s] bed at the White House was deemed unchaste,’’ writes Norma Basch in her study of the 1828 election, ‘‘she [also] stood as a threat, albeit a lesser one, to the larger civic order.’’53 In spite (or perhaps because) of pamphlets and posters that became the gold standard of dirty campaigning, voters overwhelmingly preferred Jackson. Still angry about 1824, they were drawn to Jackson’s antiaristocratic message and the burgeoning notion of domestic privacy—a notion conspicuously absent from Tocqueville’s America.54 Playing up the commonsense and common law spirit of their marriage, Jackson—who had his own designs on centralized power—had portrayed Adams as a meddling zealot who would leave nothing—even the most intimate matters—to the discretion and regulation of the people themselves. The battle unfolded as a moral war between those who believed that public officials deserved the right to privacy and those who insisted that ‘‘a candidate should regard the relentless scrutiny of his private life as a test of his republican principles’’—a test one happily takes when running for public office.55 As much as the Adams camp tried to make ‘‘the fundamental ground rules of marriage’’ (that is, lifelong monogamy) synonymous with republicanism, historians suggest that Jackson’s case for popular sovereignty in such matters won over the voters, following the lead of Tennesseans who had never worried about the legal status of Jackson’s marriage.56 The culture of Adams and its attendant values were rendered both antidemocratic and un-American, fading in the wake of Jacksonian populism.

Jackson Confronts the ‘‘Washington Ladies’’ The attacks on Rachel Jackson’s character during the 1828 campaign may not have cost Andrew Jackson the election, but the resulting stress precipitated Rachel’s premature death.57 She lived to see the campaign victory, but died of a heart attack just before the inauguration. Jackson

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entered his presidency as a widower, a man without a woman at his side who could check his baser tendencies. Because of their existing fears of Jackson’s character, this absence made Washington society quite nervous. The company of Rachel Jackson, ‘‘pipe-smoking’’ or otherwise, was better than no marital company at all.58 Jackson’s choice for secretary of war, John Eaton, had just married Margaret Timberlake, a recent widow with a questionable reputation. Margaret had previously been married to a prominent navy purser, but she never embraced the social expectations of society women. In particular, her reputation had been tarnished by her work as a barmaid at her father’s hotel and saloon—a position that placed her in close proximity to her father’s patrons and boarders, the most powerful men in Washington, and precipitated her relationship with the purser.59 Although Tocqueville emphasized the awesome freedom enjoyed by American girls, bartending was not an acceptable position for a woman of any age and did not befit one ‘‘with lofty social ambitions.’’60 As Kristen Wood writes in her study of the Eaton affair, ‘‘Respectable ladies were rarely seen in taverns at this time and certainly never worked there.’’61 Margaret did not concern herself with such matters and continued to tend bar long after her first marriage and well into her second. In fact, Margaret Eaton enjoyed the extent to which her behavior disturbed the ‘‘women’’ of Washington, the highly influential wives, daughters, and mothers of Washington’s most powerful men. As Wood notes, ‘‘Margaret seemed determined to fulfill the stereotype that any woman in such a setting must be sexually promiscuous. By the time she was sixteen, she had already tried to elope twice.’’62 In her autobiography she boasted, ‘‘While I was still in pantalets and rolling hoops with other girls I had the attentions of men, young and old, enough to turn a girl’s head.’’63 According to Wood, ‘‘Some women may also have resented the time that their husbands or sons spent in the company of this woman ‘of much beauty.’ Most were simply disgusted by her unrestrained conversations with men and her refusal to seclude herself while her husband was away on his voyages.’’64 Her proximity to the recently widowed Jackson rendered her especially threatening, and Tocqueville, in fact, reports that Jackson’s secretary of the Treasury believed that the two had become lovers.65 With Margaret’s behavior (and the response it provoked) in mind, Tocqueville’s description of women in America must be modified as follows: a wife, ‘‘in her husband’s home, [is expected to live] in almost cloistered surroundings.’’66 Margaret, of course, did not. She was hardly

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alone in this violation; the anxious defense of republican femininity as an ideal likely arose from the extent to which, in the age of Andrew Jackson, it was increasingly violated in practice. Margaret’s popularity suggests that ‘‘democratic’’ men apparently wanted more than a mere moral teacher in a female companion. She was neither the ‘‘icy’’ or dull wife, as Tocqueville reported American married women to be, nor the ubiquitous prostitute.67 Confirming the worst fears of Washington women about her closeness to power, Margaret’s position at the bar led her to meet her father’s boarder, Tennessee senator John Eaton. Rumors promptly circulated that they were conducting an affair, and ‘‘when [her husband] died at sea in mysterious circumstances in 1828, Washington gossips whispered . . . that he had killed himself upon learning of his wife’s infidelity.’’68 Shortly thereafter and just before Jackson’s inauguration in 1829, Margaret and John Eaton were wed, and when women in Washington learned that Jackson would offer Eaton a cabinet post, they insisted that Margaret Eaton could not become a ‘‘cabinet lady.’’69 Because of the initial controversy over her first marriage, she had been shut out of Washington society at least since the Monroe administration. When Floride Calhoun, wife of John C. Calhoun, would not acknowledge her at the inaugural ball, she fired the ‘‘first official shot in . . . the ‘Petticoat War.’ ’’70 As it took over the Jacksonian presidency, it became known as the ‘‘Eaton malaria.’’71 From Jackson’s perspective, both the moral police of the Adams campaign and the meddling cabinet wives (and the husbands who bowed to them) were not evidence of genuine morality, but only of excessive feminine power in the public sphere and aristocratic proclivities toward scandal and intrigue. Jackson coded the ‘‘forces of slander’’ in the 1828 campaign, which he blamed for his wife’s death, in explicitly feminized terms.72 He would not abide for another smear campaign against an honest woman. ‘‘According to Margaret’s recollections, Jackson said to her, ‘I tell you, Margaret, I had rather have live vermin on my back than the tongue of one of these Washington women on my reputation.’ ’’73 Perhaps to avenge Rachel’s death, perhaps to put Washington women in their place and send a message to their emasculated husbands, perhaps to assert his own authority, Jackson took up Margaret Eaton’s defense as if it were his own. Doing so consumed his entire first term—his response to the charges against Margaret ‘‘was longer than his inaugural address’’ and a full ‘‘ninety-three pages of [his] papers are devoted to refuting these charges.’’74 Jackson set out to prove the decency of Margaret Eaton and

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the friend he had encouraged to marry her and demanded that his cabinet members accept Margaret into their homes.75 The intransigence of both sides sent day-to-day business of national politics to a halt. Jackson, determined not to be puppet of his cabinet members’ wives, was ready to be done with all of them. His closest cabinet ally, Secretary of State Van Buren, offered to step down with the hopes that others would follow. When they failed to do so, Jackson demanded the resignation of his cabinet and of Vice President Calhoun. (Van Buren became vice president for the second term.) Evidencing a small victory for the Washington women, Margaret and John Eaton were literally banished from the country—reassigned to a post in Spain, where Jackson believed their scandalous history would be unremarkable.76 Indeed, Jackson understood—perhaps better than Adams or Tocqueville— the ways in which the logic of republican motherhood could ultimately run afoul of the doctrine of separate spheres as it supported women’s education and (indirect) interest in public life.77 The ‘‘sharp-tongued Washington women,’’ as Margaret Eaton called them, may have provided moral education for America, but they were not quiet and obedient republican brides.78 Like the Robards affair, discussed earlier, the Eaton affair can be read through a Tocquevillean prism. The conduct of the Jackson administration was often framed in explicitly European terms. Jackson represented Tocqueville’s worries about the corrupting influences of absolute authority irrespective of the particular form of government.79 From a Tocquevillean perspective, it is entirely consistent that Jackson’s inaugural festivities had been compared to the storming of the Bastille even as Jackson was routinely caricatured as a despotic, European monarch. Commentators in the aftermath of the cabinet ‘‘disappearance’’ likened it to a scandal unbefitting America and of a European character.80 Furthering this picture of Jackson, one 1832 portrait, titled Born to Command: King Andrew the First, represents Jackson literally trampling on the Constitution with a staff in one hand; in the other hand is a document with ‘‘veto’’ written on it and a dead eagle dangling down below.81 A recurrent theme in Tocqueville’s work is the ways in which the absence of social striation renders citizens vulnerable to (and eager for) the yoke of national administration.82 Although some have emphasized Tocqueville’s own ambivalence and sadness about the fate of women in democratic America, this history helps to illuminate the reasons why Tocqueville believed that the sacri-

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fices made by girls (and the marriages these produced) were ‘‘minor ills which must be braved for a greater good.’’83 Tocqueville not only needed to criticize Jackson’s wanton tendencies; he also needed to construct the democratic future against them. For Tocqueville, the threat of tyranny was far more dangerous than the demise of romance or the young girl’s compromised liberty. The ways in which the feminine forces of public opinion with regard to sexual chastity challenged Jackson bring Tocqueville’s willingness to accept the trade-off of cold and dispassionate women into sharp relief. The ‘‘ladies’’ in Jackson’s midst proved most effective at stymieing his authoritarian efforts, and Tocqueville’s belief that curtailed liberty for the ‘‘ladies’’ could potentially salvage (male) liberty rendered his approval for women’s chastity a fairly uncomplicated calculation.

Democracy Against Jackson This historical context suggests that the democratic story told in Democracy in America both explains and effaces the Robards and Eaton affairs, as well as the broader historical developments of the 1830s.84 While it is true that the norms and expectations of republican chastity are a powerful weapon against wayward women and general democratic excess, the era of Andrew Jackson was challenging their potency at every turn. As Jackson’s popularity indicates, the expectations of republican chastity and impermeable marital covenants were unraveling in Tocqueville’s midst.85 In their place are nascent ideas of (adult) women’s independence, romance, and privacy, which largely escape Tocqueville’s commentary. In both the North and the South, late eighteenth and early to midnineteenth-century women increasingly rejected marital expectations in favor of remaining single.86 Throughout the America traversed by Tocqueville one could find women who feared and dreaded the pending exchange of (relative) youthful freedoms for marital privilege and responsibility. The burgeoning ideal of marriage by choice, which so pleased Tocqueville, opened up the possibility of refusing marriage altogether. Furthermore, as Jackson appeared to understand very well, the reforms in female education that Tocqueville described as training grounds for wifely submission were part and parcel of the radicalism associated with the mid- and late century. Women began to demand property rights before

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Tocqueville published the first volume of Democracy in 1835. Speakers at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 trumpeted demands to expand rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence to include and acknowledge women. In 1855, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell solemnized their marriage with a protest against women’s lost freedom in marriage, and Stone retained her surname. Experiments in ‘‘free love’’ communal living burgeoned.87 As active participants in civic, intellectual, and cultural life, women reformers drew upon whatever philosophical and political tradition was available to them—be it nascent socialism, republican motherhood, or Enlightenment liberalism and individual rights. Seeds of midcentury upheaval were in fact well sown by the time Tocqueville arrived in America. Having just begun to address the shortcomings of their education, many women were challenging their status and the marital form that nurtured it. However ‘‘chosen’’ American marriage may have appeared to Tocqueville’s European eyes, evidence of widespread unhappiness was visible to anyone inclined to look. At a minimum, Americans’ notoriety for divorce among Europeans would have alerted Tocqueville to the fraudulent character of American marital happiness.88 Instead of describing the ways in which American marriages had developed a reputation for being fickle and short-lived, Tocqueville insists that ‘‘America is certainly the country where the bonds of marriage are most respected and where the concept of conjugal bliss has its highest and truest expression.’’89 Although still idealized as an institution designed to sustain lifelong monogamy, American marriage was failing to live up to its reputation.90 ‘‘Not long after 1800,’’ Nancy Cott explains, ‘‘almost every state legislature entertained petitions for divorce and a dozen states stipulated grounds for divorce suits to be brought in the courts. . . . The original southern states took slightly more time (to the early 1840s) to open their courts to divorce suits.’’91 More common than divorce were desertion and separation, enabled by the vast space of the American republic and frontier, as well as the ‘‘multi-jurisdictional complexity of the American polity,’’ with laws varying from state to state.92 Coverture laws dictated that wives left behind could not engage in contracts, business, or legal negotiations because they had no legal persona in their domicile.93 This routine short- and long-term abandonment spurred both men and women to uproot and reinvent themselves as widowed, separated, and unmarried—‘‘they moved unconstrained, across state boundaries, apart and together.’’94 As had been the case with Rachel Robards, this reinvention typically involved a second or third marriage.

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It did not constitute bigamy in the sense of multiple spouses under one roof, but it was bigamy in the legal sense, and it was common enough that states changed their marriage laws in light of this reality. In 1830, New York adapted its laws to allow for remarriage after five years of goodfaith separation or desertion.95 Because Tocqueville insists that respectable American women regulate the potential chaos of America’s decentralized constitutional order, he does not elaborate the ways in which they both delighted in and suffered because of it. In light of the historical context, Tocqueville’s confident portrait of American marriage and morals may be understood in two ways. First, it represents a normative intervention on Tocqueville’s part, one in which he seeks to excise that piece of U.S. history from his representation of democracy at large and democracy in America, in particular. Second, it suggests wishful thinking on the part of a young social scientist who was diagnosing democracy’s fate and future. However anxious Tocqueville might have been about democracy in Europe, and however much he was only ‘‘begrudgingly impressed’’ by democracy in America, as a pragmatic reformer he wanted desperately to believe that democracy’s shortcomings could, in the end, be worked out.96 Tocqueville’s specific accounts of President Andrew Jackson reveal the Frenchman’s optimism about democracy’s potential to remedy its own dangers. In a 6 November 1831 entry, Tocqueville ponders why democratic ‘‘progress’’ and expansion have winnowed away excellence and destroyed the upper class. America presents him with the puzzle of why the democratization of knowledge does not translate into a democratization of ‘‘great abilities in the direction of society.’’97 He goes on to describe Jackson as a ‘‘heartless despot, alone intent on preserving his power.’’ But he concludes with a cool certainty that Jackson’s days are numbered: Ambition is [Jackson’s] crime and will yet prove his curse. Intrigue is his vocation, and will yet overthrow and confound him. Corruption is his element and will yet re-act upon him to his utter dismay and confusion. He has been a successful as well as a desperate political gangster, but the hour of retribution is at hand; he must disgorge his winnings, throw away his false dice, and seek the hermitage, there to blaspheme and execrate his folly, for to repent is not a virtue within the capacity of his heart to obtain.98 This entry is especially striking given that it is preceded by a 25 October entry in which he observes, ‘‘Since I have been in America I have almost

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got proof that all the enlightened classes are opposed to General Jackson, but the people holds to him and he has numbers in his favor.99 And yet, in language that mirrors his account of the inevitable demise of the ancien re´gime, he asserts that the people will awaken to Jackson’s demagogic and tyrannical ways, if not replacing him with an aristocrat, then potentially embracing some of aristocracy’s better values themselves. Therefore, to add to Laura Janara’s claim that ‘‘Tocqueville is not convinced that American democracy is definitively secured as a site of liberty,’’ one might say that he is also not convinced that American democracy is definitively secured as a site of tyranny.100 As Françoise Me´lonio emphasizes, although Tocqueville did not see a just and democratic future as the working out of Providence or teleology, his message to the French nevertheless invokes both tropes to convey his anxious optimism. ‘‘Wake up before it is too late,’’ he urges. ‘‘The movement toward democracy ‘is not yet so fast that it cannot be guided.’ . . . Like prophets and sermonizers, Tocqueville argues that there were risks associated with ‘delayed conversion.’ ’’101

Ou` Est l’Amour? Let us consider a final puzzle that this history illuminates. Within the historical literature, the nineteenth-century United States is generally marked with the ideal of romantic love, nurtured along by the American commitment to marital freedom (as opposed to arranged marriages) and the antinomian tradition by which marriage is a matter between man, woman, and God.102 Yet Tocqueville never describes marriage in romantic terms. Rather, he gives it a pragmatic and somber cast. Although departing from the European tradition of arranged marriages that Tocqueville criticizes, marriage in Tocqueville’s America shares the missing self-fulfillment of European marriages, rooted as they both were in resigned duty to something beyond the self. Yet both the historiography and the logic of Tocqueville’s own account contradict this picture. Historically speaking, the commonplace nature of divorce, desertion, and separation and the ways in which young women refused to marry the men whom their parents chose for them reflect not only the changing U.S. territory, but also the development of Western marriage in terms of romantic companionship and the idealization of the

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soul mate.103 Indeed, Tocqueville’s own praise for the rejection of arranged marriages and the longevity of American marriage points to romantic underpinnings. The American marriage tradition is said to protect morals of women both before and after they marry. In the first case, Tocqueville reasons, girls who have been promised a husband of their choosing (rather than of their parents’ choosing) are more likely to remain chaste until their wedding because they know that they will not have to find their beloved outside the bonds of marriage. Tocqueville elaborates, ‘‘No girl then feels that she cannot become the wife of the man who likes her best, which makes the disruption of moral behavior before marriage very uncommon. For, however believable a passion may be, in no way will a woman be persuaded that she is loved when her lover is perfectly free to marry her and does not do so.’’104 Here Tocqueville both acknowledges the impulse toward l’amour in America and implies that it finds a home in the bonds of marriage. Unlike the ‘‘transient and clandestine liaisons’’ that prevail in aristocratic nations, American marriages appear to endure in perpetuity. Because ‘‘public opinion is unforgiving’’ toward women who flaunt this initial bond, affairs are absent in America, where, Tocqueville suggests, both men and women have the pleasure of marrying those who in aristocracies would remain mere lovers.105 The presumption of the preceding passage is that the girl’s ‘‘lover’’ and her spouse ultimately become one and the same. One may better understand Tocqueville’s failure to emphasize the burgeoning element of love in American courtship and marriage by returning to the Robards and Eaton affairs. Recall that love and marriage cohabit in the marriage of Andrew and Rachel Jackson as well as that of John and Margaret Eaton. Moreover, because these marriages are chosen against the forces of public opinion, they are blessed with the capacity to endure in the name of love, rather than duty. Jacksonian-style marriages provide some stability in their longevity and endurance, but their connection to the emotion of love imports a degree of instability. If men and women choose poorly, or if they are coerced into marrying someone whom they do not love, the emergent doctrine of love in marriage authorizes their separation, desertion, and remarriage. If both men and women are given the authority to remarry and uproot in order to follow their hearts, marriage cannot serve the role of ‘‘model association’’ with which Tocqueville hopes to endow it.106 Thus it is not really ‘‘democratic’’ marriage that Tocqueville admires for its stabilizing—if somewhat cold— attributes. The quasi-aristocratic marriage of John Quincy and Louisa

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Adams, sealed in pragmatism rather than passion, better reflects the marriages Tocqueville affirms as simultaneously democratic and order-producing.107 In the end, Tocqueville’s presentation of democratic women as the nation’s resolute moral servants renders him unable to affirm the relative happiness that women such as Rachel Jackson and Margaret Eaton found in their marriages to men who resisted republican mores. If romance was a serious concern for Tocqueville, he could have easily found it in America. But doing so would have countenanced the democratic forces he found so troubling and contradicted his message for France.

Aristocracy in America In this chapter, I have argued that a distinctly American form of aristocracy lurks in the background of Democracy. Whereas European aristocratic women lacked moral chastity and the ability to instruct their husbands on matters of serious politics, the American aristocratic tradition represents a way for Tocqueville to imagine a democratic future free from the debauchery, chaos, and crass egalitarianism he so fears.108 Thus the ‘‘republican’’ wife is an aristocrat of sorts. Although American aristocrats lack the financial security marking Europeans, they are free from the avaricious and appetitive tendencies of democratic and bourgeois men. Furthermore, unlike the imagined aristocratic woman who curries her influence in the private and morally suspect space of the salon, the American aristocratic woman expresses her opinions to her husbands and sons in rational terms that need not be sequestered away, but can withstand the light of day.109 This is not to suggest that Tocqueville embraces, tout court, all that the American aristocracy or John Quincy Adams represents. Given Tocqueville’s anxieties about administrative centralization, Adams’s promise to nationalize a code of strict morals would surely make Tocqueville apprehensive. But the American aristocrat’s vision of moral cohesion cannot be equated with the (unsuccessful) Napoleonic effort of the Civil Code. Whereas the latter case reflected an exogenous effort to impose a set of morals that had not grown naturally from French history, the national morals envisioned by Adams are framed in the language of a return to Americans’ founding morality. As such, it is consistent with the spirit

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of ‘‘decentralized administration [that] does not foreclose space and inclination for active citizenship,’’ which Tocqueville praises.110 To emphasize Laura Janara’s point that in ‘‘Democracy in America’s subtext, administration is assigned the delimited role of the nineteenth-century good mother/ wife,’’ Tocqueville’s understanding of the American approach to administration bears no resemblance to its European counterpart.111 Arguably, in emphasizing its delimited nature, Tocqueville is decidedly not speaking of the Jacksonian presidency, so often analogized to European monarchy, but to the long-standing tradition of Adams’s aristocratic-republicanism. Adams saw his national moral agenda as giving voice to the values of republican motherhood, tapping into the idea of moral women as virtuous satellites, whose moral perspective, in fact, promised to protect the nation (and its male citizens) from an overweening centralized state. Therefore while Tocqueville the Frenchman may have criticized Adams’s obsession with General Jackson’s bigamous marriage, Tocqueville the political scientist believed in the necessity of chaste morals in the context of a young democracy-in-process. Irrespective of the fact that Tocqueville was a lapsed Catholic, and certainly not an evangelical Christian schooled in the Second Great Awakening, in America he learned to appreciate the functional benefits of a highly gendered religious sensibility.112 Tocqueville elaborates: ‘‘Religion is often powerless to restrain man in the face of the countless temptations offered by wealth and cannot moderate his eagerness to become rich’’—an eagerness that Tocqueville finds generally repulsive. ‘‘But it reigns supreme in the souls of women,’’ he affirms, ‘‘and they are the protectors of morals.’’113 We might better see a lost spirit of Adams in Democracy if we look at the fallout from the Eaton affair. The Washington women did not fully restore moral order. Margaret and John Eaton left town, but so did they. And the Democrats’ power only surged in the scandal’s aftermath, ‘‘undermining the legitimacy of women’s claims to political significance or moral guardianship and truncating the national political careers of Margaret Eaton’s leading antagonists.’’114 Embodying the old aphorism that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, Tocqueville took seriously the potential goods of republican motherhood precisely because Andrew Jackson had been so threatened by it. That Jackson twice triumphed over Adams and again over the ‘‘meddling’’ of his cabinet members’ wives helps explain why Tocqueville insists that women’s special moral voice must be nurtured and preserved. Furthermore, it is significant that Tocqueville presents the moral work

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of republican motherhood in such circumscribed terms. Republican mothers were to support and augment the manliness of their husbands and sons’ capacity to rule. In Tocqueville’s (and Adams’s) account, female moral duty was never to upset or emasculate men’s marital authority. Tocqueville expands on this point: ‘‘Nor have Americans ever imagined that the result of democratic principle would be to overturn a husband’s authority or to introduce any ambiguity about who is in charge in the family.’’115 Note the difference between Tocqueville’s republican women and the ‘‘Washington wives.’’ So eager to protect the nation’s morals and secure the capital from Margaret Eaton’s influence, the Washington wives stepped beyond the republican script of obedient counselors. Their sense of national duty had them giving orders to their husbands and ultimately compromising their husbands’ positions of public influence. For Tocqueville, and for Adams, this represents republican motherhood run amok, and it is accordingly excised from Democracy. In the America that Tocqueville describes, women such as Margaret Eaton are so quickly and automatically tarnished with the weapon of public opinion that there is no need for the aggressive, arguably ‘‘manly’’ efforts of the Washington wives.116 The moral work is done behind the scenes, preempting any national crisis akin to the Eaton affair. And thus as Tocqueville presents American aristocratic values as democracy’s moral checks, he also effaces the extent to which republican motherhood might undo the gender hierarchies he reports with such enthusiasm and self-assurance. Tocqueville justifies these effacements on the grounds that it was never his intention to describe actually existing democracy in America, but only to divine a general account from the specifically American milieu. However, to say that he effaces many of the controversies and struggles of Jacksonian democracy is not to say that he ignores them. His portrait of democratic life dovetails with the aristocratic-democratic contests of Adams and Jackson. By the time Tocqueville finished the second volume of Democracy (1840), Jacksonian hegemony was all but sealed. Jackson was overwhelmingly reelected in 1832, and his second-term vice president, Martin Van Buren, who had stood by him during the Eaton affair, sailed into office in 1836. As Kristen Wood emphasizes, the Jacksonian era denied women any political responsibility, ‘‘preferr[ing] to see only men as significant actors on the national stage.’’117 Across the board, the Jacksonian solution was far too immoderate to serve the new and changing world that needed Tocqueville’s cool reflections.118 Furthermore, Toc-

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queville understood all too well the potential for Europe to take on a Jacksonian dimension. It was no coincidence that Jackson’s most oppressive tendencies were analogized to the tactics of European despots. By exaggerating the vitality of the American aristocracy’s mores, Tocqueville could intervene in the course of democratic history. Where John Quincy Adams and the Washington Ladies had failed, he could succeed. He would do so by invoking their claims against Jackson as intact and intrinsically democratic moderating influences. Theirs was the vision of democracy, inflected by aristocratic culture, which Tocqueville sought to reawaken to sustain the nation and obstruct the threat of tyranny.

Notes 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (1856; New York: Anchor Books, 1983), 1, 76. 2. See Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 3. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution; Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); Elizabeth R. Kindleberger, ‘‘Charlotte Corday in Text and Image: A Case Study in the French Revolution and Women’s History,’’ French Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (1994): 969–1000. 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 341. This work is hereafter cited as dia. Mona Ozouf discusses the view that gender difference was relatively insignificant (compared to, for example, social and class difference) in prerevolutionary France. Mona Ozouf, Women’s Words, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 229–83. See also Thomas Lacquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), especially chap. 6, ‘‘Sex Socialized.’’ 5. Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Elizabeth Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Zerilli, Signifying Woman. 6. Note that Tocqueville identifies the aristocracy, postrevolution, as the properly moral class. He writes, ‘‘Remnants of this same aristocracy exhibit now a certain austerity of principles, whereas the breakdown of morality appears to have spread into the middle and lower classes of society.’’ He continues, ‘‘The Revolution . . . put into [the aristocracy’s] hands, without their being conscious of this independently, a respect for religious beliefs, a love of order, of peaceful pleasures, of family joys and prosperity’’ (dia, 695). Cheryl Welch explains the significance of these passages as evidence of an identification of the American woman who ‘‘treks into the wilderness, devotes herself totally to heath and home out of duty rather than egoism, and gazes with quiet determination and religious resignation at the next generation [and] . . . is more French than American, more aristocratic than democratic. More precisely, she is a romanticized distillation of the experience of the French nobility, held up as a reproach to the petty individualism and lax morality that Tocqueville saw infecting

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democratic social life in Europe.’’ Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 203–4. 7. Rebecca Rogers, ‘‘Boarding Schools, Women Teachers, and Domesticity: Reforming Girls’ Secondary Education in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,’’ French Historical Studies 19, no. 1 (1995): 153–81; ‘‘Competing Visions of Girls’ Secondary Education in Post-revolutionary France,’’ History of Education Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1994): 147–70. 8. dia, 23. 9. Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); Welch, De Tocqueville; Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) . 10. Welch, De Tocqueville, 61–65. 11. dia, 689–95. 12. For a general overview of Jacksonian America, see Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1969). 13. Although I take seriously Tocqueville’s investments in American democracy, my view differs from that of Marvin Meyers, who argues that Democracy in America provides a genuine, synthetic portrait of ‘‘democratic man’’ in the United States. See Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 24–41. I am grateful to Eileen Hunt Botting for helping me to articulate the difference between my reading of Tocqueville and those readings that emphasize his Francocentrism. 14. dia, 16. 15. Kristen E. Wood, ‘‘ ‘One Woman So Dangerous to Public Morals’: Gender and Power in the Eaton Affair,’’ Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Summer 1997): 238. 16. Robert V. Remini, John Quincy Adams (New York: Times Books, 2002), 64. 17. For an overview of the citizen-soldier tradition and its significance, see R. Claire Snyder, Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). 18. Norma Basch, ‘‘Marriage, Morals, and Politics in the Election of 1828,’’ Journal of American History 80, no. 3 (1993): 890–918. 19. Alan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8. 20. dia, 647; Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 192. 21. Remini, John Quincy Adams, 11. At sixteen, he helped his father draft international treaties and cultivated a friendship with Thomas Jefferson, with whom he spent many days and evenings ‘‘talking about literature, science, the arts, history, and government’’ (16). 22. Remini, John Quincy Adams, 12. 23. For a wonderful analysis of Tocqueville’s investment in France occupying similar international greatness, see Richard Boyd’s chapter in the present volume. 24. Alexis de Tocqueville, Journey to America, trans. George Lawrence (1959; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 60. 25. On the role of John Quincy Adams in the antislavery movement, see William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 26. Remini, John Quincy Adams, 64. 27. Ibid., 65 28. Ibid., 69 29. Ibid., 69 30. Ibid., 84–85 31. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 130.

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32. Linda K. Kerber, ‘‘The Republican Mother,’’ in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, ed. Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 33. Basch, ‘‘Marriage, Morals, and Politics,’’ 895. 34. dia, 684. 35. Ibid., 684, 686–87. 36. Remini, John Quincy Adams, 20–21. 37. dia, 690–91. 38. Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 170–73; Welch, De Tocqueville, 209. 39. Remini, John Quincy Adams, 9. 40. Ibid., 13 41. Ibid. 42. Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 191. 43. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); John Marszalak, The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson’s White House (New York: Free Press, 1997); Basch, ‘‘Marriage, Morals, and Politics.’’ 44. Basch, ‘‘Marriage, Morals, and Politics,’’ 890–91; Cott, Public Vows, 36. 45. Basch, ‘‘Marriage, Morals, and Politics,’’ 891. 46. Ibid., 891 47. dia, 693; Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 180; Basch, ‘‘Marriage, Morals, and Politics,’’ 897. 48. Allgor, Parlor Politics, 193–94; Basch, ‘‘Marriage, Morals, and Politics,’’ 893. 49. Remini, Andrew Jackson, 118–19. 50. Basch, ‘‘Marriage, Morals, and Politics,’’ 903. 51. Ibid., 895; Allgor, Parlor Politics, 191. 52. Basch, ‘‘Marriage, Morals, and Politics,’’ 895. 53. Ibid., 894. 54. Remini, Andrew Jackson, 74–99. 55. Basch, ‘‘Marriage, Morals, and Politics,’’ 900–901. 56. Marszalak, The Petticoat Affair, 8. The ‘‘scandal’’ of Rachel’s bigamy and Jackson’s willingness to marry her was in fact never a scandal at all. On scandal, see Paul Apostolidis and Juliet Williams, eds., Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 3–4. 57. Allgor, Parlor Politics, 196–97. 58. Ibid., 225. 59. Wood, ‘‘ ‘One Woman So Dangerous,’ ’’ 244. 60. dia, 684–86; Wood, ‘‘ ‘One Woman So Dangerous,’ ’’ 245. 61. Wood, ‘‘ ‘One Woman So Dangerous,’ 244. 62. Ibid., 244–45. 63. Ibid., 245. 64. Ibid. 65. Tocqueville, Journey to America, 162. 66. dia, 686. 67. Ibid., 43. 68. Wood, ‘‘ ‘One Woman So Dangerous,’ ’’ 246 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 245; Allgor, Parlor Politics, 202. 71. Pessen, Jacksonian America, 309. 72. Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 176. 73. Allgor, Parlor Politics, 201. 74. Ibid., 203–4. 75. Ibid., 203, 200.

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76. Ibid., 210, 235. 77. Kerber, ‘‘The Republican Mother,’’ 93; R. Claire Snyder, ‘‘Radical Civic Virtue: Women in 19th-Century Civil Society,’’ New Political Science 26, no. 1 (2004): 51–69. 78. dia, 697; Marszalak, The Petticoat Affairs, vi. 79. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 60. 80. Allgor, Parlor Politics, 192, 201. 81. Ibid., 192. 82. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 60. 83. dia, 686; Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 161, 163, 36 84. I am grateful to Richard Boyd and Mary Dietz for pushing me to show how Democracy not only effaces, but also explains, the Robards and Eaton affairs. 85. Tocqueville writes of marriage as contrat, translated as ‘‘contract,’’ yet the English covenant better captures his full expression, ‘‘[Les Ame´ricains] conside`rent le mariage comme un contrat souvent one´reux’’ (Americans considered marriage an often onerous covenant) with its connotations of ongoing burden and duty. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la de´mocratie en Ame´rique, Tome II (1835; Paris: Librairie Philosophique, 1990), 175. 86. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America; The Generations of 1780–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 2–5; Michael O’Brien, ed. An Evening when Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827–67 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 1–2. 87. Cott, Public Vows, 68. For an extended study, see John Spurlock, Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (New York: New York University Press, 1988). 88. Cott, Public Vows, 51; Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 23–28. 89. dia, 340–41. 90. Hartog, Man and Wife in America, 311. 91. Cott, Public Vows, 49. 92. Hartog, Man and Wife in America, 15. 93. Ibid., 90. 94. Ibid., 20. 95. Ibid., 88. 96. Richard Boyd, ‘‘The Value of Civility?’’ Urban Studies 43, nos. 5–6 (2006): 873. 97. Tocqueville, Journey to America, 160. 98. Ibid., 161. 99. Tocqueville, Journey to America, 156. See also dia, 212. 100. Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 29. 101. Françoise Me´lonio, Tocqueville and the French, trans. Beth G. Raps (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 18. 102. Hartog, Man and Wife in America; Cott, Public Vows. 103. Adam Haslett, ‘‘Love Supreme: Gay Nuptials and the Making of Modern Marriage,’’ New Yorker, May 31, 2004. 104. dia, 690. 105. Ibid., 690–91. 106. Ibid., 698. 107. Remini, John Quincy Adams, 20–21. 108. I am grateful to Eileen Hunt Botting for helping me to articulate this distinction between the role of aristocratic wives in America and Europe. 109. On the significance of the salon as a dark, feminine, cavernous space of danger, see JeanJacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allen Bloom, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 101. For commentary on the republican concern with the

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feminine power of the salon, see Steven Kale, French Salons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 110. Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 140. 111. Ibid., 141. 112. Isaac Kramnick, introduction to Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin Books, 2003), xiii. 113. dia, 341; emphasis added. 114. Wood, ‘‘ ‘One Woman So Dangerous,’ ’’ 242. 115. dia, 697. 116. Ibid., 691. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 16.

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6 Sympathy, Equality, and Consent Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau on Women and Democracy in America

Lisa Pace Vetter

In Democracy in America Tocqueville offers women a Faustian bargain by insisting that they accept ‘‘moral’’ and ‘‘intellectual’’ elevation that approaches the ‘‘level of man’’ in exchange for ‘‘social’’ subordination to their husbands. Women shall focus all their efforts on the affairs of the ‘‘domestic sphere’’ for the sake of preserving the common good.1 According to Sheldon Wolin, women and the family serve as ‘‘a check whose influence is directed at moderating democracy while resisting the extenSincere thanks to Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting for their helpful comments and suggestions. Portions of this chapter appear in Lisa Pace Vetter, ‘‘Harriet Martineau on the Theory and Practice of Democracy in America,’’ Political Theory 36 (June 2008): 424–55.

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sion of democracy into the structures of the family.’’2 Thus ‘‘Tocqueville developed the construction of the virtuous woman and presented it as an American achievement, one of the few American social artifacts that he recommends unreservedly for emulation.’’3 In this chapter I shall explore an often overlooked aspect of Tocqueville’s theorizing, namely, the extent to which women and families are also tainted by the corrosive effects of individualism, which compromises their ability to counter the alienation and self-centered acquisitiveness of democratic man. Framing Tocqueville’s discussion of women in America is a reflection on the role of compassion and sympathy in mitigating the effects of individualism. For Tocqueville, one of the highest prices Americans pay for equality is a loosening of the bonds between them as citizens. Instead, the bonds within the ‘‘brotherhood’’ of families, namely, between fathers and sons and between brothers, will be strengthened— bonds that rest primarily on homogeneous experiences and upbringing.4 As this chapter shows, the combination of the weakening of social bonds and the strengthening of familial ones contributes to an understanding of compassion or sympathy that does not clearly help citizens understand or engage the ‘‘other,’’ those who are truly different from themselves: women, slaves, and Native Americans. Because American men have not acquired the proper tools for interaction with others, the voluntary associations in which they participate and the religious teachings they receive will not serve to mitigate the destructive effects of democratization on compassion and sympathy, as is often argued, but rather compound the difficulties. Men will continue to associate with those who are like themselves and exclude those who are not, and the religious teachings they receive will likely support the Faustian bargain offered to American women rather than challenge it. Scriptural authority had long been employed to exclude women from public life. These democratic men would likely shut their ears to the scriptural counterarguments that emphasized the fundamental equality with men, which were increasingly used to justify the expansion of women’s political role.5 Tocqueville does not offer up democratic woman ‘‘unreservedly for emulation,’’ however, but with a deep sense of loss and tragic resignation. To heighten the sense of tragedy, Tocqueville provides important yet often overlooked indicators that American women could enjoy equality with men in his account of Lake Oneida in ‘‘A Fortnight in the Wilds’’ and in his discussion of the early education of American girls. Tocqueville preserves a fundamental tension between the potential for liberty and

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equality for American women, on the one hand, and the need for the subordination and separation of American women, on the other. The uneasy truce between men and women contributes to his goal, which, for Mark Reinhardt, is to ‘‘establish a consensus that will allow dissention to flourish and endure.’’ Yet Tocqueville ‘‘does not leave room for nearly enough dissonance’’ to allow Americans to confront fundamental problems of racism and slavery.6 Building on Reinhardt’s observation, I argue that the compromised state of sympathy and compassion and the prevalence of homogeneity among the ‘‘brotherhood’’ of white, male citizens serve to preclude the ‘‘dissonance’’ needed to confront women’s oppression. Moreover, Tocqueville’s male readers, like their American counterparts, will ultimately acquiesce in tragedy when it comes to their own women, turning toward the future with grim determination and detachment. Thus Tocqueville effectively relegates the injustice of women’s oppression to the category of problems that, like racism and slavery, ‘‘provoke sadness and resignation more than anger and action’’ and are ‘‘governed by the disabling logic of fatality.’’7 To highlight the strengths and weaknesses of Tocqueville’s account of women, his views will be compared with those of a contemporary, Harriet Martineau, an Englishwoman who traveled to America in 1834–36 and wrote about her observations in a three-volume study titled Society in America (1837) and a sequel, Retrospect on Western Travel (1838). Martineau combines a refined version of Adam Smith’s concept of sympathy and aspects of his moral theory with Mary Wollstonecraft’s views on the oppression of women to attack the hypocrisy of American society when it came to women and argues for the necessity of reform. Building on Smith’s concept of sympathy, Martineau also devises a method of observing different cultures that encourages simultaneous engagement to and detachment from those who are examined. Martineau’s reliance on the concept of sympathy and on sympathetic engagement allows openness and flexibility in the face of cultural diversity and encourages understanding of the similarities and differences among groups and individuals. It also allows her to participate in a dialogue with her own readers, through a form of indirect persuasion that appeals to different perspectives. Instead of leaving readers with a sense of tragic resignation, Martineau encourages her audience to actively engage the ‘‘other,’’ to experience the tensions between the promise of the founding principles of America and the actual situation of women in America and to recognize the need for change. She thereby provides the basis of what William Connolly refers

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to as the ‘‘element of empathy,’’ which for him is deficient in Tocqueville’s work, a force that ‘‘across the space of difference and contestation serves as the cultural currency of democracy.’’ For Connolly, empathy ‘‘creates the cultural precondition for a pathos of distance, for a respect by each collective identity . . . for differences giving it definition.’’8 Martineau’s sympathetic engagement allows for a kind of pluralism that is essential to modern democracies and that Connolly and others find lacking in Tocqueville’s theory.9

Welcome to the ‘‘Boys Club’’: Tocqueville’s Democratic ‘‘Brotherhood’’ In her influential tract A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), published one year after the second volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1840), Catharine Beecher draws extensively from Tocqueville’s work to advance a view of feminine domesticity that stood in ardent opposition to women’s rights advocates, many of whom were also abolitionists. She writes: [In America] it is established, both by opinion and by practice, that woman has an equal interest in all social and civil concerns; and that no domestic, civil, or political, institution, is right, which sacrifices her interest to promote that of the other sex. But in order to secure her the more firmly in all these privileges, it is decided, that, in the domestic relation, she take a subordinate station, and that, in civil and political concerns, her interests be intrusted to the other sex, without her taking any part in voting, or in making and administering laws. The result of this order of things has been fairly tested, and is thus portrayed by M. De Tocqueville, a writer, who, for intelligence, fidelity, and ability, ranks second to none.10 In an extensive footnote, Beecher contrasts Tocqueville’s account of women in America with that of Martineau. For Beecher the case presented by Martineau in Society in America is a ‘‘singular exception’’ to the widespread belief that ‘‘morals are far more strict’’ in America thanks to women’s ‘‘voluntary surrender of their own will.’’ Beecher declares that it

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‘‘is not possible for language to give representations more false in every item’’ than Martineau’s, and concludes that the Englishwoman is merely ‘‘the pitiable dupe of that love of hoaxing so often found in our Country.’’11 Not only does Beecher fail to appreciate the sophistication of Martineau’s views. In her enthusiasm for Tocqueville Beecher also fails to notice that his account of women and the family is deeply fraught with tension; she leaves no room for the tragic sense of loss and regret that is conveyed so poignantly by her French comrade. To highlight these neglected aspects of Tocqueville’s account, let us look carefully at the larger context in which his remarks on women and the family arise. Turning from reflections on the increasing gentleness of mores in egalitarian societies and the increasing ease of relations between Americans, Tocqueville writes: ‘‘When men feel a natural compassion for the sufferings of others, when they are brought together in easy and frequent intercourse and no susceptibilities keep them apart, it is easy to understand that they will give each other mutual support when needed’’ (d, 571). Although equality leads to increased interaction among Americans and provides ample opportunities to tap into humanity’s ‘‘natural compassion,’’ Tocqueville is careful to qualify his enthusiasm, explaining that ‘‘the Americans, always cold in manner and often coarse, are hardly ever insensitive, and though they may be in no hurry to volunteer services, yet they do not refuse them’’ (d, 571; emphasis added). It is not purely out of generosity that Americans volunteer to help others, but rather out of the recognition of their own vulnerability. ‘‘Equality which makes men feel their freedom,’’ Tocqueville explains, ‘‘also shows them their weakness. They are free, but liable to a thousand accidents, and experience is not slow to teach them that although they may not usually need the help of others, a moment will almost always arrive when they cannot do without it’’ (d, 571). With these remarks Tocqueville highlights an important tension in democratic America between increasing familiarity and interaction among Americans, on the one hand, and their increasing coldness and self-interestedness, on the other. With proximity paradoxically comes distance between increasingly free and equal Americans. This tension is reflected in several relationships, namely, between masters and servants; fathers and sons; elder and younger brothers; and finally, husband and wife.12 Whereas in aristocratic societies the gulf between master and servant

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is unbridgeable, in democratic societies such as America, ‘‘there is still a class of valets and a class of masters, but they are not forever composed of the same individuals.’’ Because ‘‘servants do not form a race apart,’’ they ‘‘share the education, opinions, feelings, virtues, and vices of their contemporaries’’ (d, 576). But again with this proximity comes paradoxical distance, for while servant and master are in constant physical contact, ‘‘their souls remain apart.’’ They may work together, yet they rarely share ‘‘common interests’’ (d, 577). Indeed, Tocqueville emphasizes the lingering tensions between aristocrats and servants in postrevolutionary democracies like France. ‘‘In the secret places of his soul,’’ Tocqueville writes, ‘‘the master still considers that he is of a different and superior race’’ (d, 578). Likewise, ‘‘a confused and incomplete picture of equality forms itself in the servants’ minds. . . . They agree to serve but are ashamed to obey.’’ Tocqueville goes so far as to describe this tense dynamic as ‘‘an unspoken intestinal war between permanently suspicious rival powers’’ (d, 579). Sympathy, compassion, and the ‘‘temporary and freely made agreement’’ only go so far in bridging the gap between ‘‘others,’’ in this case, between master and servant. Each prizes his freedom and nominal equality, yet the servant secretly resents that in his freedom he has chosen subservience, and the master privately begrudges the need to subordinate his superiority. Likewise, in American democracy, masters ‘‘do not claim their [servants’] love or devotion; it is enough if [the servants] are punctual or honest’’ (d, 578). With these provocative descriptions the reader is carried along on the inexorable wave of democratic egalitarianism but at the same time tugged backward by the undertow of lingering aristocratic mores. The result is an enduring sense of regret and resignation: regret that these tensions persist, and resignation in the face of an irreversible ‘‘progress’’ that paradoxically locks these tensions in place. The tide of egalitarianism has profound effects on the American family as well. Tocqueville proclaims that the era of ‘‘domestic dictatorship’’ is finally over. The ‘‘relations between fathers and sons become more intimate and gentle; there is less of rule and authority, often more of confidence and affection’’ (d, 587). Along similar lines, he writes, ‘‘the affectionate and frank intimacy of childhood easily takes root among’’ brothers in American democracy (d, 588). Whereas self-interest drives Americans to help one another, it is ‘‘not interest,’’ but rather ‘‘common memories and the unhampered sympathy of thoughts and tastes’’ that bind brothers together (d, 589). In this case, the ‘‘other’’ is one’s own

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kin, united not only by family ties but also by sex. Tocqueville’s emphasis on the ‘‘brotherhood’’ that emerges not only between sons but also between fathers and sons is unambiguous. To this brotherhood could be added the relations between male masters and male servants, who also have a common American heritage. Sympathy and compassion operate primarily among American men. By implication, ‘‘others’’ who do not have a common heritage and experience would be excluded from these intimate sympathetic interactions. Tocqueville’s initial impressions of American girls and young women show that they too enjoy the benefits of democratic egalitarianism. Unlike their aristocratic counterparts, American girls do not suffer under a ‘‘domestic dictatorship’’ ruled by men or languish in seclusion. Indeed, they seem to enjoy a gender-neutral upbringing. Tocqueville contends that American parents ‘‘are in a hurry’’ to give their daughters ‘‘precocious knowledge of everything’’ (d, 591). American boys and girls enjoy an unprecedented level of freedom and attain a significant level of selfgovernment. Girls, presumably like boys, are taught to use their reasoning powers, especially to make judgments ‘‘without illusion’’ and ‘‘without fear.’’ Almost like a precocious little boy, the young American girl ‘‘already thinks for herself, speaks freely, and acts on her own’’ (d, 590). The verbal skills of American girls continue to develop with age, as they ‘‘contrive to steer thoughts and language through the traps of sprightly conversation’’ (d, 591). Tocqueville’s surprised and fearful reaction to this audacious spectacle, along with his subsequent reference to the education of girls in terms of the ‘‘manly habits’’ it inculcates, further reinforce the gender neutrality of their upbringing: their independence and forthrightness appear masculine when compared with his aristocratic notions of femininity. Because young girls enjoy the same easy relations that give rise to sympathy and compassion, it would stand to reason that American women would engage in the kind of sympathetic interaction enjoyed by men. This, combined with the facility of speech enjoyed by American girls, would seem to encourage women to participate actively in political life, perhaps even by engaging in public speaking. Yet here the tragic elements of Tocqueville’s descriptions of egalitarianism reemerge, as girls and women are ultimately excluded from the American ‘‘brotherhood.’’ Like the ‘‘cold’’ and ‘‘coarse’’ American citizen who only unenthusiastically helps others, Tocqueville’s American woman pays a price for her freedom: ‘‘I know that such an education has its dangers; I know too that

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it tends to develop judgment at the cost of imagination and to make women chaste and cold rather than tender and loving companions of men’’ (d, 592; emphasis added). Along similar lines, ‘‘when the time as come to choose a husband,’’ the young American woman’s ‘‘cold and austere powers of reasoning,’’ shaped and reinforced ‘‘by a free view of the world,’’ teach her that ‘‘a light and free spirit within the bonds of marriage is an ever-lasting source of trouble, not pleasure’’ (d, 593; emphasis added).13 Further, like the master and servant whose distance, and in some cases ‘‘intestinal conflict,’’ is veiled by their consensual contract, the American woman ‘‘has freely accepted the yoke.’’ She ‘‘suffers her new state bravely, for she has chosen it’’ (d, 593).14 Yet unlike the master and servant, whose roles at least in principle might be exchanged and whose contractual arrangement is a temporary one, men and women never share or switch marital roles, and their nuptial agreement in principle lasts in perpetuity. One wonders how much these arrangements compound the effects of the potential conflict between husband and wife. Although Tocqueville passes over these complexities without further comment, he does concede that American marriage is far from perfect: ‘‘Not that equality of conditions could ever make man chaste, but it gives the irregularity of his morals a less dangerous character’’ (d, 598). The woman’s reaction to her husband’s infidelity remains a mystery. By way of explaining women’s choice to submit, Tocqueville points to lingering Puritanical mores regarding marriage that call for the social subordination of women. Although American women escaped the outdated marital traditions of aristocratic Europe and enjoy the teachings of freedom and independence associated with Protestantism, they are nevertheless ensnared by equally restrictive aspects of ‘‘inexorable public opinion,’’ which ‘‘carefully keeps woman within the little sphere of domestic interests and duties and will not let her go beyond them’’ (d, 592). Equally important, for Tocqueville the emergence of industrialization in America dictates a strict sexual division of labor, which inhibits the intimacy of married life. ‘‘All these separate and necessary occupations form as many natural barriers which, by keeping the sexes apart, make the solicitations of the one less frequent and less ardent and the resistance of the other easier’’ (d, 598). Thus the separate spheres dictated by Puritanical religious teachings and necessitated by industrialization erode the sympathetic interaction between men and women—interaction they are

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otherwise raised and educated to enjoy and that is otherwise facilitated by the equality of conditions in democratic society.

A Tale of Two Marriages: The Frontier and Lake Oneida The full effects of this contradictory teaching on women is embodied in Tocqueville’s anecdote about a family he encountered while traveling through northern Michigan and southern Canada and described in ‘‘A Fortnight in the Wilds.’’ In Democracy Tocqueville presents an abbreviated version of the anecdote and generalizes about the young wives of these frontiersmen. ‘‘Fever, solitude, and boredom had not broken the resilience of their courage,’’ he writes. ‘‘Their features were changed and faded, but their looks were firm. They seemed both sad and resolute.’’ Tocqueville concludes: ‘‘I am sure that it was the education of their early years which built up that inner strength on which they were later to draw’’ (d, 594). Left out of the account in Democracy is the description in ‘‘Fortnight’’ of the ‘‘vast egoism’’ of the ‘‘cold, unfeeling’’ frontiersman who, deprived of normal human interaction, likely ‘‘regards his wife and children as . . . a detached part of himself.’’15 Clearly, the combination of Puritanical ideology and the drive to make one’s fortune in the new world has compromised intimacy and necessitated the resignation and resoluteness of the American woman. The account of the frontiersman and his family should be contrasted with a lesser-known tale that was initially published with it in Tocqueville’s Oeuvres but was not included in Democracy, that of a French couple on a remote island in Lake Oneida. That Tocqueville wishes to draw parallels between the two tales is strongly suggested by striking similarities between the two accounts. Just as the lonely cabin on the frontier, ‘‘an ark of civilization lost in the middle of an ocean of leaves, . . . is a sort of oasis in the desert,’’ the homestead on the island is ‘‘placed in the middle of an orchard, surrounded by fruits and flowers’’ (J, 365, 349). On the frontier, Tocqueville and Beaumont passionately searched for ‘‘a place to which the torrent of European civilization had not yet come’’ (J, 359–60). Likewise, Tocqueville and Beaumont were determined to discover whether the idyllic account of the French husband and wife Tocqueville had read in a book several years earlier was true (J, 345).16 Musing about the imagery conjured by the Oneida couple, Tocqueville

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writes, ‘‘How often have I envied them the tranquil joys of their solitude.’’ He continues: ‘‘Domestic happiness, the charms of conjugal union, and even love itself came to be merged in my mind with the picture of the solitary island where my imagination had created a new Eden. [Beaumont and I] often talked about it, and always ended by saying, sometimes laughing, sometimes sadly, ‘the only happiness in the world is on the shores of Lake Oneida’ ’’ (J, 345–46). In this imaginary setting the true nature of democratic marriage becomes fully apparent: ‘‘Only one being has remained attached to him, followed him into solitude, and come to dress the wounds of his soul and to give him, in exchange for the joys of the world, the more pervading emotions of the heart’’ (J, 399). Tocqueville reveals a compelling ideal, in which a man and a woman can live contentedly together—only if they are protected from the corrosive effects of civilization and the savagery of the wilds. There is no mention of separate spheres, voluntary submission, or tragic resignation in Tocqueville’s dreamy image. Instead of the cold detachment of relatively isolated individuals, the loving couple lives together in a state of mutual interdependency. ‘‘There,’’ Tocqueville writes, the couple ‘‘lived for one another, each consoling the other for their unlikely fate’’ (J, 345). And yet Tocqueville’s reverie does not survive the harsh light of reality. Upon finally reaching the shore of the immense lake, Tocqueville and Beaumont find a limping old woman, ‘‘living there alone.’’ She informs the disconsolate visitors that the Frenchwoman died long ago and her grieved husband left the island soon afterward, his destination unknown. Their subsequent visit to the island reveals an interior that had once been ‘‘carefully cultivated,’’ now overrun by vegetation, and a house now ‘‘falling into decay for want of an inhabitant.’’ Tocqueville’s ideal couple is ultimately doomed to destruction in the wilderness of America. He concludes: ‘‘It was not without sadness that I saw this vast rampart of greenery retreating into the distance. It had for long years defended these two exiles from the European’s bullet and the savage’s arrow, but it could not protect their cottage from the invisible blows of death’’ (J, 349). The Oneida story shows that Tocqueville may have had a more egalitarian view of marriage than is apparent in the account of the frontiersman in Democracy in America. But this ideal is simply not achievable in American society, with its lingering Puritanical mores and the drive toward industrialization. The dream of Oneida is replaced by the reality of the frontier. Nevertheless, the tale of Oneida inspires a romantic longing for a model that cannot be realized and thereby reinforces the sense

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of regret and tragic resignation conveyed by the tale of the frontiersman and his wife.

Back to Reality: The Ideology of Women’s Subordination Leaving behind the gender-neutral education of girls and the frontier family in Democracy, Tocqueville expands on and aligns himself with the ideology underlying the Puritanical view of women and marriage.17 He admits that ‘‘the same social impetus which brings nearer to the same level father and son, master and servant . . . does raise the status of women and should make them more and more nearly equal to men’’ (d, 600). But by equality, neither Tocqueville nor Americans mean ‘‘similarity’’ or ‘‘sameness’’ between the sexes in terms of functions, duties, and rights, or the sharing of ‘‘work, pleasure, public affairs.’’ Any hope that women will advocate political reform is dashed by Tocqueville’s prohibition against ‘‘interfering in politics’’ or ‘‘noisily proclaiming the rights of women’’ (d, 601, 602).18 Thus in spite of the fact that American women, according to Tocqueville, have received an education that fully prepares them to enjoy the same functions, duties, and rights as men, to share the same work and pleasure and to participate in public affairs, the Puritanical element of their upbringing pushes them into an utterly separate mode of existence in the home. His suggestion that ‘‘nature, which created such great differences between the physical and moral constitution of men and women, clearly intended to give their diverse faculties a diverse employment’’ obviously does not rest easy with his description of the gender-neutral education girls receive. While girls are tantalizingly close to the democratic ‘‘brotherhood’’ in their own household, they do not share in it. The brotherhood fails to prepare boys and men to sympathize with their female counterparts with a view to treating them as the men would treat themselves and their own kind. The brotherhood cannot and does not understand the ‘‘other.’’ Instead of employing reason to understand those who are unlike themselves, boys and men apply their logical powers to devising arguments based on ‘‘natural’’ differences that justify the social subordination of women. They will likely reiterate the scriptural arguments used to justify the exclusion of women from preaching or speaking in public and to reinforce their subordination to men. Instead of using the democratic

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principle of consent as a way of bridging the gap between ‘‘others’’ in an authentic way, namely, by arriving at true understanding between free and equal individuals, consent is here used to legitimize the perpetual social subordination of women to men and to deprive them of a direct voice with which to protest. In this respect, men’s behavior toward women and the ‘‘other’’ is consistent with the ‘‘coldness’’ they feel toward one another and with their willingness to lend a hand only out of selfinterest. Outside the homogeneous familial ‘‘brotherhood,’’ there is relatively little sympathetic engagement with others. The function of consent in Tocqueville’s theorizing about women and democracy becomes apparent in his own approach. He writes: ‘‘I have never found American women regarding conjugal authority as a blessed usurpation of their rights or feeling that they degraded themselves by submitting to it. On the contrary, they seem to take pride in their relinquishment of their will, and it is their boast to bear the yoke themselves rather than to escape from it. That, at least, is the feeling expressed by the best of them; the others keep quiet’’ (d, 602). Tocqueville here draws from his own experience to explain and justify the Puritanical ideology, implying that he actually spoke with American women to ascertain the extent to which their consent is truly voluntary and not simply inferred. Yet Tocqueville’s travel notebooks, on which Democracy is largely based, include no discussions with women, but only with men, many of which he records in considerable detail. Either Tocqueville chose for whatever reason not to record his conversations with women or much of what he writes about women is gleaned from a male perspective, including his own.19 Given the unlikelihood that a French-speaking aristocrat would have conversed with many women in a foreign country, the latter explanation is ultimately more plausible. But this means that Tocqueville is inferring the consent of women and in his own actions performing the same sort of limited sympathetic engagement with the ‘‘other’’ that he describes in American society. Ironically, another striking example of Tocqueville’s own lack of sympathetic engagement is provided by George W. Pierson, who claims that Tocqueville was made aware of Martineau’s study by Beaumont but refused to read it ‘‘because he was afraid . . . of having his thoughts jolted from the path of strict logic and rigorous deduction.’’ In a letter to Beaumont, Tocqueville explains: ‘‘What you tell me about Miss Martineau’s book makes me uncomfortable. . . . Every time I hear America spoken of, and well spoken of, I experience a veritable uneasiness.’’20 Tocqueville’s

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own reluctance to engage others is itself a reflection of his compromised view of sympathy. And it is precisely this limited sympathetic engagement, reinforced by his own authorial activity, that makes the separate spheres in a democratic society possible.

Sympathy and Democracy in Martineau’s America While Tocqueville is without question the most widely read and influential today, he is not the only European intellectual to visit and write about mid-nineteenth-century America. Like Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau traveled to America in the mid-1830s, and she too wrote extensively about her journey, and to wide acclaim. Tocqueville and Martineau followed virtually identical travel routes (aside from Tocqueville’s lengthy detour through French-speaking Canada), and both spoke with many prominent Americans. But whereas Martineau spent almost two years in America, Tocqueville spent barely nine months there. And whereas Tocqueville’s travel notebooks and Democracy in America include virtually no conversations with women, Martineau’s Society in America and Retrospect on Western Travel display numerous conversations with men and women, rich and poor, northern and southern.21 Martineau claims to have ‘‘read whatever I could lay hold of that had been written about’’ the people and institutions of America as well.22 By the time Martineau landed on America’s shore in August 1834, she had earned a strong reputation in England and Europe for her work Illustrations of Political Economy, published two years earlier. Martineau’s Illustrations shows indebtedness to several prominent political economists of the time, including Adam Smith. Indeed, Martineau again refers specifically to Smith early on in her methodological treatise, How to Observe: Morals and Manners, which was written en route to and from America. After borrowing an example from Wealth of Nations to explain the ways in which economic systems affect the structures of particular societies, Martineau continues her discussion in How to Observe by critiquing the theory of the moral sense and elaborating on the concept of sympathy—themes that are also explored in great detail in Smith’s philosophical treatise Theory of Moral Sentiments. Martineau even cites Smith as a model of the ‘‘philosophic observer’’ whose perspective she adopts, noting that he ‘‘sets out with a more philosophical belief’’ than

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his rivals. Martineau’s reliance on the economic principles espoused by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations has been widely recognized.23 Overlooked, however, is Martineau’s theoretical and methodological reliance on the moral philosophy advanced by Smith in Moral Sentiments. A closer reading of Martineau’s works reveals additional parallels between her moral theory and Smith’s.24 Both Smith and Martineau offer a view of morality that is founded not on metaphysical principles per se, but that rather attains a kind of universality through human beings’ experience, namely, their reactions to the world around them.25 For Smith and Martineau, a fundamental aspect of morality is sympathy, which allows for simultaneous attachment to and detachment from those who are observed. As Martineau explains, sympathy, or ‘‘openness,’’ allows the observer to recognize underlying universal predispositions in others who, because of cultural distinctions, may appear to be vastly different from herself, yet who exhibit ‘‘hearts, generous or selfish, pure or gross, happy or sad.’’ Through sympathy, ‘‘the action of the heart will meet a corresponding action, and . . . the nature of the heart will meet a corresponding nature.’’ Specifically, ‘‘openness and warmth of heart will be greeted with openness and warmth’’ (h, 52). No one can fully know the inner lives of others. But through the use of the imagination people can open themselves to the standpoint of others. Through sympathetic openness people are better able to understand and evaluate behavior that is radically different from their own. Martineau’s method of sympathetic observation allows her to engage in a ‘‘discourse’’ with others that yields vital information about other cultures.26 Martineau insists that the observer interact with people of every class and all walks of life, studying their discourse and behavior in the widest range of social settings (h, 224). Discourse of this kind is impossible without sympathy, a simultaneous connectedness to and detachment from one’s interlocutors. Martineau’s emphasis on discourse also allows her to engage in a dialogue with her readers, which is designed to educate and persuade. In her analysis Martineau often relates her conversations with individual Americans to lend credibility to her own perspective and supplements her appeal to readers with numerous examples, illustrations, and anecdotes as well. Highlighting the sophistication of Martineau’s understanding of sympathy makes it clear that Martineau does not simply reiterate the enervating sentimentality that was used to justify relegating women to the private realm in nineteenth-century America.27 Her work also stands in

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contrast to contemporary studies such as Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), which specifically disavows any indepth theoretical analysis of American political institutions and society and instead offers a series of superficial observations designed to please an aristocratic English audience.28 Martineau signals her reliance on the sympathetic approach to observation when she explains the goal of Society in America: ‘‘to compare the existing state of society in America with the principles on which it is professedly founded; thus testing Institutions, Morals, and Manners by an indisputable, instead of an arbitrary standard’’ (s, 1:viii). The introductory passages also reveal the work’s close relation to Martineau’s method of sympathetic observation and her view of morality outlined in How to Observe. Martineau cites James Madison’s contention that ‘‘the United States had been ‘useful in proving things before held impossible.’ ’’ Adopting this point of departure, Martineau notes that America provides the first example in history of a government ‘‘deduced from the principles of human nature’’ in addition to the ‘‘experience of man in governments’’ (s, 1:2). America is also the first country to have developed ‘‘the capacity of mankind for self-government,’’ which had been hitherto impossible (s, 1:3). The fundamental American principles are, of course, ‘‘the inalienable right of all the human race to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’’ America’s devotion to the pursuit of happiness coincides directly with Martineau’s contention in How to Observe that all human beings desire happiness but pursue it in different ways. And for Martineau (as for Smith) human nature cannot be understood solely in terms of universal principles of morality, such as happiness, but also in terms of human experience, such as those ‘‘of man in governments.’’ America’s ‘‘capacity for self-government’’ reflects an important connection to the concept of sympathy because, Martineau notes, the golden rule, ‘‘Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you,’’ reigns supreme in democratic America (s, 1:4–5). At the core of Martineau’s analysis of American democracy is the principle that ‘‘the majority will be in the right,’’ which is buttressed with the concept of sympathy (s, 1:8). A key weakness of democratization and majority rule Martineau observes among Americans is a kind of social conformism and general ‘‘deficiency of moral independence’’ resulting from an overreliance on public opinion. Because Americans do not think for themselves, they often seek a surrogate for the vigorous moral leadership provided in former ages by the aristocracy or the feudal sovereign.

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Thus majority tyranny for Martineau does not arise within the majority per se, but rather from an aristocratic minority that is steeped in the teachings of ‘‘the remains of feudalism’’ and that dominates public opinion by squelching dissent (h, 49).29 Americans must reject their reliance on these aristocratic minorities and instead tap into their sympathetic virtues: ‘‘mutual respect and deferences’’ and ‘‘mutual helpfulness’’ that are more in keeping with their democratic character. These resources will ultimately lift Americans ‘‘above their personal selfishness and mutual subservience’’ (h, 50).

Engaging the ‘‘Other’’: Women, Equality, and Consent Martineau devotes a significant portion of Society in America to a discussion of the plight of American women. There are striking similarities between Martineau’s account and Mary Wollstonecraft’s description of the denigration of women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.30 Martineau expands on Wollstonecraft’s critique by applying it to women in America, by supplementing it with her own understanding of sympathetic engagement, and by making more extensive use of Smith’s moral theory. In the chapter ‘‘The Political Non-existence of Women,’’ Martineau demands that the reader acknowledge the hypocrisy reflected in the incongruity between the political status of women, on the one hand, and the core principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, on the other. ‘‘Governments in the United States have power to tax women who hold property; to divorce them from their husbands; to fine, imprison, and execute them for certain offenses,’’ she notes. ‘‘Whence do these governments derive their powers? They are not ‘just’ as they are not derived from the consent of the women thus governed’’ (s, 1:199). Just as the punishments against women who break the law are unjust because they were not agreed to by the majority of Americans, so too the laws in certain states that allow women to own property, petition for divorce, and provide other forms of limited protection are insufficient for Martineau because they were made without the consent of women. Women have never been asked what they think, so their acceptance of the rule of law cannot be inferred. Martineau demands at the outset that the ‘‘other’’ must be engaged directly.31

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That these circumstances are unjust according to the basic democratic principle requiring the ‘‘equal political representation of all rational beings’’ is for Martineau a case ‘‘so plain’’ that she might ‘‘close it’’ after these initial remarks. Realizing, though, that logical argument alone is insufficient to make her case, she injects herself directly into the conversation with her readers. Referring to the political exclusion of women in Britain, she announces: I, for one, do not acquiesce. I declare that whatever obedience I yield to the laws of the society in which I live is a matter between, not the community and myself, but my judgment and my will. Any punishment inflicted upon me for the breach of the laws, I should regard as so much gratuitous injury; for to those laws I have never, actually or virtually, assented. I know that there are women in England who agree with me in this—I know that there are women in America who agree with me in this. The plea of acquiescence is invalidated by us. (s, 1:204) Martineau presents herself as an individual before the law, who can choose to consent to them or not, and in an act of sympathetic engagement invites other women to join her. Just as no one will speak for her in the debate over women’s rights, she suggests, the acquiescence of any woman should never be mistaken for consent, for it ‘‘proves nothing but the degradation of the injured party.’’ By emphasizing a woman’s identity as an autonomous individual, Martineau denies the validity of the prevailing arguments akin to Tocqueville’s and Beecher’s that portray women as enjoying ‘‘virtual influence’’ over society (s, 1:205–6). Instead, ‘‘the principle of the equal rights of both halves of the human race is all we have to do with here’’ (s, 1:207). Martineau extends the principle of sympathy that undergirds majority rule in America to the issues of equality and consent for women, and she appeals to her readers through sympathetic engagement. Surely no man would want someone else to speak for him, and women must understand what it means to speak for oneself.32 In similar spirit to Wollstonecraft, Martineau observes the corrosive effects of the condescending nobility with which men purport to elevate women, but which masks their actual degradation (s, 3:105–6). American men believe that they provide a ‘‘paradise’’ for women to inhabit, but in reality they construct a world that systematically denies women

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opportunities to grow and thrive as moral and political individuals. As a result, ‘‘indulgence is given her as a substitute for justice’’ (s, 3:106). Chivalry is an example of sympathetic engagement gone awry. Men develop a kind of false consciousness: they believe they are doing what is best for women, when in reality they simply treat women as ‘‘the other,’’ rather than as individuals like themselves who deserve similar treatment. Likewise, women cannot place themselves in the shoes of men, since they are deprived of opportunities to imagine themselves in positions of equality. Among both sexes, self-reflection of any kind is virtually nonexistent; both blindly embrace habits and traditions instead of listening to their hearts and minds. Singling out Angelina Grimke´ for praise in ‘‘rousing into life and energy many women who . . . carry honest and strong human hearts,’’ Martineau acknowledges that America is blessed with many powerful and intelligent women who desire to become abolitionists because of their moral outrage against slavery.33 But these courageous women are violently denounced and discouraged from following their interests. Rather than serving as moral guarantors of an otherwise corrupt society, declares Martineau, ‘‘the morals of women are crushed’’ in America because women are deprived of any opportunity to exercise independent judgment (s, 3:110). She recalls the women who were persecuted for supporting William Lloyd Garrison’s presence in Boston and mentions a successful female writer who was shunned by society after becoming an abolitionist. Also in the background here is Martineau’s personal experience of being confronted by frightening mobs outside the Boston Female Anti-slavery Society meeting in 1835, where she agreed to speak (s, 3:110–13). Clearly, the inability of women to promote reform through speech and action constitutes a moral crisis in America that must be recognized through sympathetic openness and rectified accordingly. Martineau appeals to her readers by relating a dialogue she had with a woman who refused to act on her moral indignation against slavery because, as a woman, she could have little influence. Drawing from her Christian faith, the woman insists that there is no need to work toward freeing the slaves, since they would be rewarded with freedom in the afterlife (s, 3:113). And yet Martineau leads the woman to concede that her sense of Christian charity did propel her to break up a fight on the street between two boys. Martineau responds: ‘‘ ‘Well: if there are a thousand strong men in the south beating ten thousand weak slaves, and you can possibly help to stop the beating by a declaration of your opinion

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upon it, does not your Christian duty oblige you to make such a declaration, whether you are man or woman?’ ’’ (s, 3:114–15). By relating this conversation, Martineau appeals to Christian women who may have sympathies with the abolitionist movement but do not feel obligated to act on their convictions. She seeks to encourage these women to look inward, to recognize their own hypocrisy, and to become more outspoken. For it is only by acting upon their convictions, Martineau argues, that people become fully moral beings. Martineau’s detailed commentary on the role of women as it emerges from scripture continues her appeal to pious women in a way consistent with her moral principle of sympathy.34 Fully aware of the scriptural arguments used to justify the belief that men and women have distinct virtues arising from their physiological dissimilarities, and that, because of these differences, women are ultimately inferior to men, Martineau laments that ‘‘the morals of woman are crushed’’ because ‘‘of the prevalent persuasion that there are virtues which are peculiarly masculine, and others which are peculiarly feminine.’’ Based on this fallacy, believers create a ‘‘separate gospel for women, and a second company of agents for its diffusion.’’ Not only is scripture itself cheapened by this erroneous assertion, but virtue itself is compromised. ‘‘Men are ungentle, tyrannical. They abuse the right of the strongest, however they may veil the abuse with indulgence.’’ Conversely, women are, ‘‘as might be anticipated, weak, ignorant and subservient.’’ Those who distinguish sharply between male and female virtues, Martineau contends, fail to recognize that ‘‘the character of Christ’’ is ‘‘the meeting point of all virtues’’ and therefore ‘‘all virtues nourish each other, and can not otherwise be nourished.’’ Thus just as the ‘‘manly character’’ must become more ‘‘gentle’’ in order to approach true, Christ-like magnanimity, so too the ‘‘gentle’’ character of women needs to become more brave (s, 3:117). Note that, consistent with her overall approach that acknowledges and preserves heterogeneity, Martineau does not completely rule out the possibility of different virtues so long as they complement one another. It is the exaggerated differences, reinforced by social inequality, that preclude mutual understanding that she deplores. Capitalizing on the sympathetic engagement she has achieved with the reader, Martineau encourages her more devout audience to consider the often neglected scriptural teachings that emphasize egalitarianism. Martineau also realigns the concept of marriage in American society to conform to her understanding of sympathy. Although she concedes

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that marriage in America is ‘‘more nearly universal, more safe, more tranquil, more fortunate than in England,’’ it is nevertheless plagued by problems arising from ‘‘the inequality of the parties in mind and in occupation’’ (s, 3:119). As she describes the fundamentally unequal marriage between a licentious slave owner and his wife: ‘‘Where the generality of men carry secrets which their wives must be the last to know; where the busiest and more engrossing concerns of life must wear one aspect to the one sex, and another to the other, there is an end to all wholesome confidence and sympathy, and woman sinks to be the ornament of her husband’s house, the domestic manager of his establishment, instead of being his all-sufficient friend’’ (s, 2:337–38; emphasis added). The unmarried Martineau makes a plea for marriage based purely on love between equals and emphasizes the importance of sympathy in securing it. Finally, Martineau challenges the strict sexual division of labor by providing examples of successful working women in America. Singled out for particular praise are the factories in Lowell and the mills in Waltham, Massachusetts, which employed large numbers of women. Although Martineau romanticizes the situation at the Lowell factories to some degree, her central point remains valid: the young workers gain economic independence and access to education (s, 2:248); they can freely choose their employment. Martineau’s pragmatic appeal leads to a larger, philosophic message about the importance of labor to human nature. For Martineau, as for Adam Smith, ‘‘It is a law of every man’s physical nature, that he should work with the limbs: of every man’s moral nature, that he should know: and knowledge is to be had only . . . by bringing the ideal and the actual world into contact, and proving each by the other, with one’s own brain and hands for instruments, and not another’s’’ (s, 2:295–96).35 Martineau uses her method of sympathetic engagement to make the case that labor provides women a vital opportunity to gain the sort of independence necessary to become fully flourishing human beings. Despite the depth and originality of Martineau’s analysis of the condition of women in America, her influence on the early women’s rights movement has often been overlooked. This results in part, perhaps, from her criticism of British suffragists and other reformers.36 Yet by demanding the opportunity for women to consent to the rule of law, Martineau makes an important contribution to arguments that would later be used to advocate for women’s suffrage in terms of ‘‘due process and equal protection,’’ themes that did not emerge prominently in the women’s rights movement until the 1850s.37 Although she never specifically mentions

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the term suffrage in Society, Martineau praises a group of New Jersey women who voted because in the original state constitution ‘‘the general term, ‘inhabitants,’ stood unqualified’’ in state voting laws—‘‘as it will again,’’ she writes, ‘‘when the true democratic principle comes to be fully understood (s, 1:203–4).38 And she later signed John Stuart Mill’s 1866 petition to Parliament for women’s suffrage. For Martineau, ‘‘the vote was clearly simply one among many women’s issues,’’ as it was for other women rights advocates of her time, and one that she continued to champion until her death.39

Conclusion Catherine Beecher was quite perceptive in seeing the fundamental tension between Tocqueville’s and Martineau’s views on sympathy, equality, and consent for American women. But Beecher oversimplifies the nature of this debate and mischaracterizes the respective contributions of Tocqueville and Martineau. In this chapter I highlight neglected aspects of Tocqueville’s views on women in order to reconsider his overall democratic theory. Although it is virtually taken for granted that Tocqueville relies on the family, voluntary associations, and religion to compensate for the loss of sympathy and compassion he observes among Americans, a closer look reveals that the erosion of common ties extends to the American marriage as well. Like the relations between male American citizens, the relation between husband and wife is cold, compromised, and distant. Moreover, the marital bond could even mask potential ‘‘intestinal’’ conflict similar to that between the aristocratic master and the resentful servant. That American democracy emerges among a ‘‘brotherhood’’ of fathers, sons, and brothers, whose interaction with ‘‘others’’ unlike them is severely limited, further undermines the effectiveness of marriage, voluntary associations, and religion to teach Americans the virtues of democratic citizenship. The dilution of sympathy and compassion, combined with the emergence of the ‘‘boys club’’ of American democracy, all serve to reinforce the separate and subordinate sphere occupied by women, leaving unchallenged the ways in which women are deprived of equality, freedom, and the ability to consent to law. It is not difficult to imagine the tyranny of the majority perpetuating the subordination of women without providing the means to resist it. The debilitat-

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ing effect of homogenization is compounded by Tocqueville’s heightened sense of tragedy, which is conveyed through the tale of Lake Oneida and his description of the gender-neutral education of girls. Both accounts tantalize the reader with the prospect of true equality for girls and women, only to show that such equality is impossible. The tragic Tocqueville that emerges from this study does not rest easily with common interpretations that emphasize his praise of American democracy over his criticisms. Further examination is needed of the incapacitating effects of Tocqueville’s fatalism, especially its impact on reform movements designed to liberate the oppressed. Perhaps the prolonged reluctance of American society to integrate women, slaves and their descendents, and Native Americans into democratic society can be understood more fully by exploring the lingering effects of Tocquevillian theory. To rectify the compromised role of empathy in Tocqueville’s account, theorists such as William Connolly call for an ‘‘agonistic reciprocity’’ that would allow citizens in a radically pluralistic society to engage the ‘‘other.’’40 For Connolly, the problems of Tocquevillian theory can only be solved in contemporary political thought. Yet Harriet Martineau provides an unexpectedly early account of American democracy that seeks to accommodate the needs of pluralism in securing greater rights for ‘‘others,’’ especially women and slaves. Her deployment of the concept of sympathy on the level of theory and observational method allows the reader to move beyond the enervating effects of tragic resignation and directly encounter the ‘‘other,’’ giving fuller voice to the perspectives of women and other disadvantaged groups. It is difficult to imagine how Tocqueville’s separate spheres could survive the scrutiny of properly exercised sympathetic engagement. Indeed, it is only through sympathetic engagement that injustices committed against oppressed groups through the ‘‘tyranny of the majority’’—in Martineau’s view, the domination of a passive majority by an active minority—can be rectified. That Martineau’s theory of democracy is deeply indebted to Adam Smith’s moral theory is also an example of the ways in which early nineteenth-century women’s rights advocates incorporated and ultimately moved beyond key aspects of Enlightenment political philosophy. In so doing these women eventually succeeded in securing a broader audience for their views and paving the way for future reforms designed to advance women’s causes, especially suffrage. By exploring alternative approaches to the concepts of sympathy, consent, and gender equity, and their implications for American democracy, this chapter points the way for further study of

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the networks of power and influence so central to the American women’s rights movement—networks that, perhaps ironically, encompass both Tocqueville and Martineau.41

Notes 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 601. This work is hereafter cited as d. 2. Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 333. 3. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, 330. 4. Laura Janara criticizes interpretations that overemphasize the role of homogeneity by failing to recognize the ‘‘assertion and entrenchment of radical binary differentiation’’ in Tocqueville’s thought. Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 98. In this chapter I recast this debate by showing that Tocqueville deploys ‘‘radical binary differentiation’’ to advocate a kind of homogenization by limiting conflict and by privileging one side of the pair over the other. Addressed in this study are the binary models master/servant, father/son, elder son/younger son, girl/ woman, husband/wife, and frontier family/Lake Oneida couple. The father/son and elder son/ younger son binary models are products of the lessening conflict in egalitarian society and enforce a homogeneity of domestic experience. The master/servant, husband/wife, and frontier family/Oneida couple binary models privilege the master, husband, and frontier family, respectively, and use contractual agreements to limit conflict. 5. The same arguments were deployed to attack public speakers such as Angelina and Sarah Grimke´ and other early advocates for women’s rights. See Larry Ceplair, ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimke´: Selected Writings, 1835–1839 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). The tradition of employing scriptural arguments to advocate for women’s equality is indeed a long one, especially in Quakerism, beginning with Margaret Fell’s Womens Speaking Justified (1666). 6. Mark Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 81. 7. Ibid., 81, 65. See also William E. Connolly, ‘‘Tocqueville, Territory, and Violence,’’ Theory, Culture and Society 11 (1994): 27. 8. Connolly, ‘‘Tocqueville, Territory, and Violence,’’ 37. 9. Dana Villa finds lacking in Tocqueville’s account ‘‘the kind of pluralism born of deep cultural and religious differences.’’ Although it is not clear that Martineau’s pluralism also ‘‘manifests itself in allegiance to different ‘ultimate values,’ ’’ given her overarching moral theory, her approach nevertheless accommodates gender and racial differences in compelling ways. Dana Villa, ‘‘Hegel, Tocqueville, and ‘Individualism,’ ’’ Review of Politics 67 (Fall 2005): 683. 10. Catharine Esther Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849): 27–28. 11. Ibid., 31–31. 12. The abundant parallels between these analogies challenge Rogers Smith’s ‘‘multiple traditions’’ thesis, which suggests that Tocqueville is capable of holding conflicting accounts of democracy, equality, and freedom almost without realizing it. Tocqueville is all too aware of the contradictory nature of the principles he proceeds to explore, as the regret he expresses further implies. Rogers M. Smith, ‘‘Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,’’ American Political Science Review 87 (September 1993): 549–66.

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13. For Cheryl B. Welch, ‘‘Tocqueville constructs a very different trajectory for the democratic woman’s life’’ than for democratic man, ‘‘a narrative that owes more to a particular cultural disquiet than to observation of American practice or clear-eyed analysis of democratic tendencies.’’ Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 196. Welch explains this contradiction in Tocqueville’s thought not only in terms of the ‘‘classical republican political theory’’ of his time, which insisted on ‘‘the strict confinement of women to the household and the enforcement of female chastity,’’ but also in terms of a visceral reaction on his part against the ‘‘excesses of the Old Regime and those of the Revolution,’’ which propelled him to embrace a reformed aristocratic Catholicism which ‘‘waved domesticity as a flag to symbolize the reformed and purified status of the class as a whole’’ (197, 199, 202). Welch even speculates that Tocqueville projects ‘‘his own existential experience of moral choice in a democracy’’ onto the image of the American woman, in which he ‘‘resolutely turned his back on his ancestral past’’ and gained no ‘‘compensating sense of righteousness, or new fellowship, or any lasting joyfulness’’ (204). The present chapter offers an alternative explanation of Tocqueville’s apparent contradiction in terms of his own problematic theory of sympathy rather than in terms of the cultural context in which he lived. 14. Welch too notes the ‘‘brotherhood’’ created among democratic men at the exclusion of women. Welch, De Tocqueville, 194. By contrast, although Clifford Orwin acknowledges that ‘‘in democracy the natural bond of common humanity has proved to be fleeting and frail,’’ he does not explore the role of the democratic family in fostering or compromising the power of compassion in democratic society. Clifford Orwin, ‘‘Compassion and the Softening of Mores,’’ Journal of Democracy 11, no. 1 (2000): 147, 142. 15. Alexis de Tocqueville, Journey to America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971), 363. This work is hereafter cited as J. 16. The Oneida/frontier binary also fits generally within Janara’s theory of ‘‘symbolic sex-gender which is grounded in hierarchical, dichotomous differentiation.’’ Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 98. For Janara, Tocqueville consistently feminizes nature in the Oneida essay and elsewhere, and presumably contrasts that with the ‘‘masculine’’ advancement of civilization on the frontier. The account of the equal yet doomed French couple, which is not addressed in Janara’s analysis, is also ‘‘feminine’’ in the sense of being subordinated to the ‘‘masculine’’ frontier tale. Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 52–54. 17. The frequent use of the first-person ‘‘I’’ throughout the chapter indicates that Tocqueville’s opinion is virtually the same as those held by Americans. 18. Although Tocqueville adamantly denies having read other accounts of American society while writing Democracy, his references to political interference and noisy disruption hearken to Catherine Beecher’s prohibition against disruptive public speaking in An Essay on Slavery and Abolition with Reference to the Duty of American Females (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1837). Stephen Howard Browne, Angelina Grimke´: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 104–10. 19. Sources for this information include, as they appear in the text of the notebooks, ‘‘Gallatin,’’ ‘‘Mr. Nielson,’’ ‘‘Mr. Lieber,’’ ‘‘Mr. Gray,’’ ‘‘Latrobe,’’ ‘‘Pointsett,’’ ‘‘Mr. Dannery,’’ ‘‘James Kent,’’ and ‘‘Mr. Richards.’’ 20. George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 726; emphasis in original. 21. Although Martineau’s travel notebooks no longer exist, readers can look directly at her published writings to find her sources because they contain the sorts of interviews, anecdotes, and examples that would be found in travel notebooks. 22. Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols. (1837; New York: ams Press, 1966), 1:x. This work is hereafter cited as S. 23. See Valerie Kossew Pichanick, Harriet Martineau: The Woman and Her Work, 1802–76 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 49, 51; Dorothy Lampen Thomson, Adam Smith’s

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Daughters (New York: Exposition Press, 1973), 37; Deborah Anna Logan, ed., Illustrations of Political Economy, 32–34; and Shelagh Hunter, Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism (Hants, U.K.: Scolar Press, 1995), 55–56. 24. This interpretation relies on the four types of evidence used to indicate the ‘‘likelihood’’ of influence of one thinker by another as outlined by Eileen Hunt Botting and Christine Carey: direct references or ‘‘striking parallels in philosophical terms and arguments,’’ autobiographical evidence, biographical evidence, and contextual evidence. Eileen Hunt Botting and Christine Carey, ‘‘Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates,’’ American Journal of Political Science (October 2004): 709–10. 25. Harriet Martineau, How to Observe: Morals and Manners (1838; New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2003), 35–36. This work is hereafter cited as H. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1982), 12. 26. Linda Peterson argues that Martineau employs the dialogue form in two early tracts that contributed to Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) in order to attract a popular audience and thereby ‘‘redirect knowledge from a conservative social and religious framework to a progressive, theory-based economics, politics, and literature.’’ Linda H. Peterson, ‘‘From French Revolution to English Reform: Hannah More, Harriet Martineau, and the ‘Little Book,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 60, no. 4 (2006): 450. In this chapter I expand on Peterson’s analysis by adding another motive to Martineau’s use of dialogue, namely, her adaptation of Smith’s concept of sympathy. 27. Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 97–98. Nor can Martineau’s theory be pigeonholed into the category of ‘‘institutionalized compassion’’ afflicting contemporary ‘‘welfare state’’ democracies that Clifford Orwin deplores. Orwin, ‘‘Compassion and the Softening of Mores,’’ 142. 28. Caroline Roberts, The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 48–51. See also Pichanick, Harriet Martineau, 74–76, and Deborah Anna Logan, The Hour and the Woman: Harriet Martineau’s ‘‘Somewhat Remarkable’’ Life (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 90–91. 29. John Cawelti praises Martineau’s insights on majority rule. Unlike Tocqueville’s more ‘‘aristocratic’’ version, Martineau’s is better able to explain how social reform movements are possible. John G. Cawelti, ‘‘Conformity and Democracy in America: Some Reflections Occasioned by the Republication of Martineau’s Society in America,’’ Ethics 73 (April 1963): 210–11. 30. Both deplore the corrosive effects of social oppression on women’s morality and intellect and insist that the deprivation of rights makes it impossible for women to be productive and morally upright citizens, wives, and mothers. Both call for increased educational and economic opportunities for and greater political representation of women. See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 58–60. Martineau should be counted among early women’s rights advocates who publicly disparaged the scandalous private behavior of Mary Wollstonecraft while surreptitiously appropriating many of Wollstonecraft’s ideas. Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877), 1:301; Botting and Carey, ‘‘Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact,’’ 709–10. It should also be noted, however, that Martineau’s remarks about Wollstonecraft constitute an extension of her criticism of ‘‘literary lionism,’’ which attacks the cult of celebrity—and often scandal—that surrounds powerful literary intellectuals. Rejecting ‘‘literary lionism’’ for herself, Martineau instead seeks to lead a respectable life and write accessible works that appeal to a broad variety of readers, including middleclass women who, like their male counterparts, are entering the labor force in increasing numbers and who are exhibiting greater desire for education and enlightenment. Martineau, Autobiography, 1:205–25. 31. Barbara Allen claims that Tocqueville is drawing from the covenant understanding of marriage, namely, ‘‘unions based on mutual promise and unreserved obligation and loyalty,’’ rather than the contractual understanding of marriage offered by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill. To

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Tocqueville, ‘‘the contract metaphor seemed . . . wholly inappropriate for these circumstances; intimate bonds of family and friendship depended on internal self-control, not the external constraint and enforcement of contracts.’’ Barbara Allen, Tocqueville, Covenant, and the Democratic Revolution: Harmonizing Earth with Heaven (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005), 216–17. Although Martineau’s account of women in America doubtless influenced the Mills, it seems that her account of consent is not simply synonymous with theirs. Instead of relying on the classical liberal logic of pure individualism, as do the Mills, Martineau enriches her understanding of contract and consent with her moral principle of sympathy. In this respect, she serves as a more formidable counterpart to Tocqueville than even Catharine Beecher would realize. 32. Leslie Friedman Goldstein is correct in noting that Tocqueville and Martineau are impressed by the elevated position of women in American society when compared with their subjugated European counterparts. But the analysis of consent presented here renders problematic Goldstein’s subsequent claim that Martineau concurs with Tocqueville that ‘‘familial power in America is, like political power, consensually acknowledged, freely elected, and checked.’’ Leslie Friedman Goldstein, ‘‘Europe Looks at American Women, 1820–1840,’’ Social Research 54 (Autumn 1987): 539; emphasis in original. 33. Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 2 vols. (New York: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 2:128. 34. Not only does Martineau here draw from a long tradition of so-called Radical Christianity, which was skillfully deployed by early abolitionists such as Angelina and Sarah Grimke´ and Lucretia Mott, but she also brings to bear her extensive education and experience in Unitarian theology. 35. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1981), 138. 36. Martineau, Autobiography 1:302. Although the Autobiography was published in 1877, most of it was actually written in the 1850s when Martineau’s health began to fail and death seemed imminent—well before the suffrage campaigns in Britain and America became firmly established. After writing these remarks, Martineau continues to support important women’s causes, including the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, until her death. Gayle Graham Yates, ed., Harriet Martineau on Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 25–26. 37. Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 32–39. Blanche Glassman Hersch describes the same development in terms of the ‘‘rhetoric of the Revolution’’ that ‘‘appeared in feminist-abolitionist protests against taxation without representation’’ in the 1850s. Blanche Glassman Hersch, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 195. Like Isenberg, Hersch does not mention that Martineau made similar arguments much earlier than did Harriet Hunt, Lucy Stone, and others. 38. Ratified in 1786, the New Jersey state constitution allowed inhabitants with some property to vote, regardless of race or sex. Legislation was passed in 1807 that limited suffrage to white men, and the constitution was amended in 1844 specifically to ban women from voting. See also Autobiography, 1:303. 39. Yates, Harriet Martineau on Women, 26. Parallels between Martineau and the Grimke´ sisters further emphasize the progressive nature of her views on women’s rights. Recall Martineau’s praise of Angelina Grimke´’s public speaking (see note 33). Sarah Grimke´ quotes extensively from Martineau’s analysis of women’s treatment under the law and praises Martineau’s account of women in the Scriptures in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, published one year after Society appeared. Ceplair, Public Years, 236, 259. 40. Connolly, ‘‘Tocqueville, Territory, and Violence,’’ 37. 41. For excellent historical analyses of this movement, see Margaret McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship.

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7 Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress’’ Delba Winthrop Thus, then, while they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to continue, they have done everything to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man. In this I think they have wonderfully understood the true conception of democratic progress. For my part, I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman hardly leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And now that I come near the end of this book in which I have recorded so many considerable achievements of the Americans, if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the singular prosperity and growing power of this people, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women. —Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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.1 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

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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 familial 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. The recommendation follows close upon Tocqueville’s revelation of the inevitable artificiality of American public life. It immediately precedes his thematic criticisms of democracy for its failure to give due recognition to the natural human inclination to pride and for its consequent dearth of proper outlets for great passion and laudable ambition. Despite America’s professed foundation on natural rights, its democracy necessarily depends on conventions that obscure and even contravene nature. Even at its best, democratic justice rests on partial misconceptions both of human nature and of the significance of justice. Given the inauthenticity of American society, women have little or nothing to gain from coming out into it. If women have little to gain from staying at home because of the almost invariable pettiness of domestic concerns, American men away from home rarely take advantage of what few opportunities there are for a kind of worldliness that might bring human fulfillment. Only because they take no part in public life are America’s women more likely to embody democracy’s finer aspirations. Tocqueville’s remark that the status of American women reflects the true conception of democratic progress is deeply and disturbingly ironic. Tocqueville’s Americans hold that women are equal, but different.2 They discern natural physical and moral differences in men and women and think that the peculiar faculties of each are best put to different uses. Consequently, they apply the principle of division of labor to ‘‘the great work of society.’’ They do not permit women to take part in business or

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politics; neither do they require them to engage in hard physical labor. Women cannot, but need not, leave their domestic occupations.3 Nor, however, do women reign within the household. To the Americans, democracy means regulation and legitimation of authority, not its destruction. The man, they believe, is the ‘‘natural head of the conjugal association.’’ Women do not dispute this determination; indeed, ‘‘they seem to find a sort of glory in the free relinquishment of their will, and they put their greatness in bearing the yoke themselves rather than in escaping from it.’’ Thus, American men and women have different duties and rights. Precisely what women do besides the dishes and in what their rights consist are not immediately apparent. Nonetheless, each ‘‘show[s] an equal regard for the part played by both and think[s] of them as beings of equal worth, though their fates are different.’’ In particular, men are said to have a high regard for women’s courage and intelligence. They respect their liberty and think nothing more precious than their honor. Tocqueville’s Americans avoid the errors of his Europeans. They hardly think of women as mere sex objects, as do those Europeans who virtually enslave themselves to erotic desires, while condemning women as weak and incomplete beings. Nor do the Americans, as do other, more progressive Europeans, wish to make men and women not only ‘‘equal, but similar.’’ Both attitudes are to be deplored, but the latter is more to be feared because it is more fashionably democratic. Although appearing to concur in the American principle of ‘‘equal, but different,’’ Tocqueville does not explicitly endorse all aspects of it. Nor does he offer all the defenses of it we might expect. He attributes to the Americans a functionalist, economic rationale for their assignment of women’s roles. They are at pains to keep women at home and subordinate there primarily because a thriving commercial society requires a stable family life.4 Businessmen need to be free to worry about things other than the whims and whereabouts of their helpmeets. If domestic harmony is desirable for other reasons, the Americans do not bother to elaborate them. Do they believe the family important in the psychological development or moral education of children? Do they believe that men and women naturally complement one another, as pairs constituting wholes? The Americans are presumably correct that if men and women differ, they should have different functions. But why does Tocqueville not mention, on their behalf, the most obvious and relevant natural difference, namely, that women bear children? He barely suggests that women

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are less suited for hard physical labor. As for the distribution of authority within the household, why assume that the man is the natural chief? Precisely what is left for woman to do for the family, for society, and for herself? Why is she and she alone suited to do these things, whatever they are, and not to do others? Are the most important differences between men and women perhaps less natural than the Americans suppose?5 Tocqueville leaves us wondering whether, if the Americans are right in treating women differently, they are right for the right reasons. The context of Tocqueville’s thematic discussion of women is ‘‘The Influence of Democracy on Mores Properly So Called,’’ in volume 2. Mores properly so-called are, according to a suggestion in the first volume of Democracy, ‘‘habits of the heart.’ ’’6 They are a people’s moral principles come to life in their characteristic unreflective comportment with one another and among others. Women figure so importantly in this context because, as Tocqueville contends, ‘‘it is woman who shapes mores.’’7 In the discussion Tocqueville barely alludes to and never stresses natural differences between men and women. Rather, the important differences appear to be consequences of their respective situations and educations. American women undergo a proper moral education, appropriate to democracy in this context nothing is said of men’s receiving any education, although elsewhere we learn that they receive as much of an education as democratic politics can provide.8 Americans take pains to educate their women in part because their religion recommends it, but especially because their commercial prosperity requires it. What women learn is that reason dictates and courage makes possible moderation of desire and willfulness. This education accomplishes what the Americans intend it to, but also more. Women acquire the self-conscious virtue that brings dignity and equanimity, if not happiness. The possibility of men’s appreciation of this virtue and of its benefits, Tocqueville suggests, exists only insofar as they can appreciate it in their wives. Early on, the American girl is exposed to ‘‘the doings of the world,’’ and especially to its ‘‘vices and dangers.’’9 Instead of being ‘‘cloistered’’ in her parents’ home, she is forced to learn the art of combating desires and to gain confidence in her own forces. Learning of ‘‘the most tyrannical passions’’ in her own heart and becoming aware of their effects on others, ‘‘seeing them clearly, she judges them without illusion and faces them without fear.’’ Without forsaking all pleasures, she remains her own mistress; her reason ‘‘never lets the reins go.’’ Her ‘‘singular skill and happy audacity’’ are most impressively displayed when she directs her words and

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thoughts in ‘‘sprightly conversation; a philosopher would stumble at every step along the narrow path [she treads] with assured facility.’’ Tocqueville’s American girl is street-smart and spunky. As a woman, she abandons the ‘‘freedom and pleasure’’ of her father’s house for the obligations of marriage assumed in her husband’s ‘‘cloister.’’ The street-smart, spunky maiden becomes the demure matron. For a woman to defy public opinion is to endanger ‘‘her peace of mind, her honor, and her very social existence.’’ Has she then struggled to escape the clutches of tyrannical eros only to fall into those of a tyrannical public opinion? The change from a condition of freedom and pleasure to one of obligation and denial dictated by public opinion is said by Tocqueville to be both natural and by choice. To deny that this is natural is to make the most characteristic American error.10 Americans are would-be individuals; they tend to have complete confidence in their own rational powers, but no respect for anyone else’s. When it becomes obvious that this selfconfidence is unwarranted, democrats, in their chagrin, bow to an allpowerful public opinion. The sole consolation to their vanity is that this public opinion has no identifiable source. To deny that this particular submission is by choice is not quite correct, either. A woman, after all, knowingly chooses marriage, not to mention her particular spouse. In making her choice, she accepts its conditions and, having made it, she sticks to it. Someone might object that in most societies we know of, especially in Tocqueville’s day, women have not been perfectly free not to marry. So woman’s choice of marriage does not amount to an exercise of her liberty. To this Tocqueville’s matron might respond that the objection rests on an incorrect view of choice and freedom. And for Tocqueville, a proper understanding of choice is most important. If he is at pains to make anything clear in Democracy, it is that human beings do have significant and real choices to make, but that choices are always circumscribed by chance and necessity.11 All choices are alike in this respect: from deliberation on a constitution for a unified nation composed of preexisting, semiautonomous states (1:112–20, 364–66), to a fundamental affirmation of democratic over aristocratic politics coupled with a choice of liberal over servile egalitarianism (1:245 with 2:705), to the selection of a spouse. In human affairs there are no wholly new, no wholly free, beginnings.12 If in Tocqueville’s universe there is no place for reactionaries (1:236, 245, 314–15, 2:705), neither are revolutionaries altogether wel-

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come (2:700). Democracy in particular offers even less opportunity for revolutionary thoughts and deeds than Tocqueville himself might recommend (2:645). Choices arise in given situations and are among finite possibilities. Moreover, they are made by human beings with passions that naturally incline them to pursue some or other ends,13 with habits that shape their mode of pursuit,14 and with premises and ways of thought that color their judgment of both fact and value.15 However much Tocqueville’s American woman (or anyone else)16 is habituated to subordinate her own passions to rational direction, she cannot effectively choose to remake the world and its inhabitants anew, according to her wishes. If marry she must, marriage she must choose. For his part, the American man may choose what to work at, but not whether to work—however little he needs or desires to (2:623).17 Tocqueville’s matron can freely submit to the seeming tyranny of public opinion as if she alone had dictated its rules insofar as she can appreciate the reasons behind its presuppositions. Tocqueville never suggests that anyone can do without society and its benefits, even when he recommends maintaining one’s distance from the crowd (1:254–59, 2:433–36, 461, 477, 641–45).18 From the outset a necessary, although not sufficient, condition of America’s prosperity was its thriving commerce (1:279–86, 407).19 And commercial nations have necessities of their own (2:621–23 with 617).20 Although the American woman can respect these facts, she might also see that the individual who endeavors at limitless satisfaction of desires does not exercise, but rather surrenders, his or her liberty—to the erotic passions of youth or to the seemingly more sober, but in fact more intoxicating, quest for material well-being through commercial activity. Tocqueville suggests that the sadness of democracy’s women is a consequence of their husbands’ relentless pursuit of wealth (2:593–94 with appendix 1, n. U). The unerotic character of affairs of the heart in America is at least as much a consequence of men’s preoccupation with business as of women’s discipline.21 Finally, a wife may well submit to her husband’s less-than-reasonable demands because she senses what Tocqueville himself asserts: no matter how just a revolutionary’s cause, the men and women who attempt revolutions are rarely honorable or happy (2:597). What makes the transformation of the American girl into a wife natural and by choice is her knowing and willing affirmation of her imperfect lot and her acceptance of democracy’s dubious mores as mores. As Tocqueville would have it, her acquiescence is no less an act of courage and

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wisdom than one of moderation.22 Woman’s is the human condition, properly understood. What the American woman ‘‘does’’ is to acknowledge this in a manner that commands the respect of all. In Tocqueville’s presentation it seems to matter less which sex remains at home than that one sex does remain there. Division of labor in the great work of society is appropriately by sex because mores, as ‘‘habits of the heart,’’ are most affected by what touches the heart. Although Tocqueville portrays American marriages as strikingly, appallingly, unerotic, he insists that men respect their wives. Elsewhere he contends that people living in democracies refuse to acknowledge superiorities in others, resenting and denying them (1:57, 198, 221, 310, 391, 2:505–6, 538, 632, 672–73). When men’s and women’s rights and duties differ, when men do not have to compete with their wives, there is less cause for envy and more opportunity for sexual attraction to engender admiration. What is most surprising—and revealing—in Tocqueville’s discussion is his silence about natural differences. He thereby suggests that woman’s designated place in the home is a matter of convention, not nature. If so, then it is fair to press the issue: why should women rest content with what might be conceived of as an arbitrary designation?23 Today it is commonly thought that women are the worse off for being distinguished from men. In opposing an arbitrary differentiation of the sexes, proponents of women’s liberation promise in its stead justice and self-fulfillment for women as well as for men. Neither can be achieved, it is contended, if women remain the social, economic, and political inferiors of men. The only kind of response that might adequately meet this argument, I believe, is a demonstration that democratic public life is not and cannot be just enough or fulfilling enough to bring meaningful ‘‘liberation’’ to either sex. Men are not better, but worse, off for their being out and about. In our democracy they are necessarily unhappy, and so would women be. This, sad to say, is Tocqueville’s point. If he is correct, women would not do well to complain of their unjust designation. But this also means that informed resignation to democracy’s defects is as much as a woman or a man can reasonably hope to accomplish in (and for) democracy. And, for Tocqueville, there is no realistic alternative to democracy in the foreseeable future.24 To raise our collective consciousness, flout conventions, and overturn or amend our laws and constitution in an attempt either to perfect or to radicalize liberal democracy will only exac-

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erbate its defects. For their efforts women will be neither freer nor happier. Today’s women’s movement anticipates and advocates rectification of the injustices women have long suffered. Practically speaking, this usually means that women shall no longer be denied on arbitrary grounds jobs or (for the upper middle class) ‘‘career opportunities.’’ For most jobs today sex is an irrelevant criterion. The goal of economic and social equality for women is surely just—if it is reasonable to think that a democratic society can indeed do away with arbitrary classifications such as sex. When Tocqueville first observed America, he remarked the ‘‘natural, frank, and open’’ manner of her social intercourse (2:567).25 Americans do not stand on formalities; on the contrary, they despise all formalities.26 In their everyday relations they are gentle and sympathetic, and they come readily to the aid of their fellows who are in need. Even in business matters they regard one another as equals in freedom and dignity, if not in assets. Being wealthy gives no man the right to command another, and being poor creates no duty to obey. Only a contract, voluntarily entered into by all parties, can do this. A contract is, as Tocqueville well knew, a formality, a convention. So democracy does need some formalities, even as it condemns them all. Then perhaps it is necessary to look more closely at the ‘‘natural, frank, and open’’ manner of Tocqueville’s Americans. Americans treat one another gently and with sympathy because they believe that all are similar and equal. ‘‘Each instantaneously can judge the feelings of all the others; he just casts a rapid glance at himself, and that is enough. So there is no misery that he cannot readily understand. It makes no difference if strangers or enemies are in question; his imagination at once puts him in their place’’ (2:564). In principle, the equality Americans recognize is equality of ability: ‘‘Providence,’’ they hold, ‘‘has given each individual the amount of reason necessary for him to look after himself in matters of his own exclusive concern. [This] is the great maxim on which civil and political society in the United States rests’’ (1:397). In fact, however, the perceived or presumed equality that moves democratic citizens is an equality of need. ‘‘Experience is not slow to teach them that although they may not usually need the help of others, a moment will almost always arrive when they cannot do without it. There is a sort of tacit and almost unintentional agreement between them which provides that each owes to the other a temporary assistance which he in turn can claim at need’’ (2:571–72).

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Equality, or rather a perception of equality, makes sympathy possible. The perception of equality is an act of imagination. Sensing one’s own needs, one attributes them to another who, as an equal, must feel them as well. That the perception is or is not correct is somewhat beside the point, for public opinion ‘‘creates a sort of fancied equality’’ (2:577). Thus, underlying democracy’s natural, frank, and open manners is a dogmatic belief in human equality and a preoccupation with need rather than ability. As Tocqueville has made clear, Americans neither know nor care to know much about their fellow citizens. Nor, for that matter, do they know much about themselves. Here at home, where the belief in equality reigns, it is exceedingly difficult to offend Americans, and especially to convince them that their conversation is unwelcome. They are unable to judge the reaction of their listeners because the former themselves have never had ‘‘any interest in eagerly seeking the company of particular fellow citizens’’ (2:568). It does not occur to them that some people distinguish between stimulating and boring conversations because Americans themselves have never been stimulated by any conversation. They have never experienced and reflected on the need for the kind of knowledge that might be acquired in a conversation in which others reveal their peculiar needs and abilities. Lacking knowledge of others, of all that they need from them, and of all that human beings are capable of giving one another, they rely on democratic dogma to inform their mores. When this reliance is impossible, as, for example, when visiting the still inegalitarian Europe of Tocqueville’s day, Americans are quick to take offense. Sensing that rank still matters, they flaunt their wealth and boast of their distinguished ancestry. In their anxiety, they thus reveal both their vanity and the extent to which civility rests on settled conventions, whether aristocratic or democratic. America’s democratic mores are to be admired for engendering ‘‘mutual tolerance’’ and ‘‘virile confidence’’ (2:568) and for effecting a rough justice. But they can hardly be said to promote what we today speak of as self-fulfillment or what Tocqueville calls ‘‘self-interest properly understood’’—because they do not foster self-knowledge. Justice, Tocqueville suggests, is always defined by ‘‘the universal and permanent needs of mankind’’ (2:616 and context). It is realized in democracy’s social and economic relations at times by ‘‘tacit almost unintentional’’ agreements, but more obviously by explicit and deliberate contracts. In principle, all citizens are equal, equal as free individuals. In fact, no society yet has eliminated all distinctions of wealth and poverty

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and their consequences. Nonetheless, a belief in equality does help ensure that relations of command and obedience between individuals, rich or poor, are created only by ‘‘a temporary and freely made agreement’’ establishing superiority and inferiority (2:576). The boss can be supposed to have as great a need to hire help as has the laborer need of the day’s wages. Because the terms of the unequal association are both temporary and willingly accepted by both parties, they can maintain their dignity as equals in moral freedom. The ‘‘fancied equality’’ sustained by the formality of a contract secures a semblance of justice and dignity in democracy’s social and economic intercourse. Yet underlying the contract is a tacit, involuntary recognition of the most universal and permanent need, the desire for self-preservation experienced by every human being. This recognition is sharpest when particular needs and unequal abilities are disregarded. Consequently, the more just democracy’s social and economic relations are, the less humanly satisfying they will be. They are not merely artificial, but superficial democratic sympathy is an abstract sentiment, said by Tocqueville to be felt as keenly in the presence of a stranger or an enemy as in the presence of a friend. Contractual relations are legalistic (2:576), intended to be of short duration (2:576, 582), and cemented only by a mutual regard for money (2:580–81). ‘‘Souls remain apart’’ (2:577). Democracy’s social mores and economic justice depend either on an absence of self-awareness and reflection on the full range of human needs and desires or on knowledge of the political utility of a pretense of equality.27 Surely it is right to doubt that arbitrary advantages such as inherited wealth, inherited race, or inherited sex should be a source of authority over others. But what of seemingly relevant natural or cultivated inequalities, such as intelligence, resourcefulness, dedication, and self-discipline? Neither can these become sources of authority if the tendency of democratic conventions is to obscure these qualities or to deny their significance. Just as for men, a gain of social and economic justice for the female sex as a whole will not mean an unqualified gain for women, all of whom have individual needs and abilities. Democratic conventions are needed to spare us dehumanizing, demoralizing confrontations with the necessities that at times threaten to overwhelm us. But these conventions create arbitrary classifications even while abolishing others. And sex is not the most arbitrary of these. Unfairness of some sort must persist, because equality is only a partial truth. Democratic justice inevitably discourages

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the reflection on the truth of peculiar needs and abilities that is indispensable for both true justice and individual fulfillment.28 Immediately after the chapters on women, Tocqueville predicts that, contrary to the expectations of some, a democratic society will always be composed of ‘‘a large number of little private associations within the great political society’’ (2:605). This, he says, is ‘‘very natural’’ (2:604). ‘‘The personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit’’ (2:605). Earlier, Tocqueville noted that the Americans who boasted so loudly of their egalitarian society when in Europe boasted even more loudly of their private purses and pedigrees. Women were said to be proud in their submission to democracy’s men and mores, even proud of it. The theme of the remaining chapters of the section on mores is precisely ambition, pride, and the opportunities for their expression in a democracy.29 As Tocqueville foresaw, we today are reluctant to laud ambition and pride (especially in white males), because we suspect their undemocratic potential.30 But we do speak often of ‘‘self-fulfillment’’ and ‘‘human dignity,’’ insisting that both are necessary for happiness. Whatever fulfillment and dignity mean, they are surely nothing to be ashamed of. Nor are they matters of indifference, as we do not take them for granted but, rather, earnestly pursue them. Despite our democratic insistence that dignity inheres in all human beings and that, barring injustice, self-fulfillment is within the reach of each, we must concede that fulfillment confers special dignity. For we know that all do not achieve it, even when we define it to suit particular capacities and incapacities. However grudging our acknowledgment, self-fulfillment is a source of pride. Doubtless, our notions of self-fulfillment and dignity differ from what Tocqueville meant by great ambition and the pride of achievement that completes it.31 Differences notwithstanding, their relevance to the concerns of women in a democratic society is as Tocqueville understood it: today it is supposed by virtually all advocates of women’s liberation that active participation in the economic and political life of a democracy is needed for women’s fulfillment. This is the supposition that Tocqueville questions. In modern democracy almost everyone’s ambition is directed partly, if not wholly, at economic success—be it a job, a career, or a commercial empire (1:284–86, 347 with 385, 2:462, 550, 552, 614–15, 621, 647–48). One reason for America’s economic vitality, Tocqueville thought, was

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our fascination with chance, our daring acceptance of nature’s challenge to conquer it (1:404, 413, 2:553). But the conquest takes the specific form of commercial activity in part because democratic Americans take great interest in their material well-being. ‘‘Equality makes the passion for physical pleasures and an exclusive interest in immediate delights predominate in the human heart. These instincts of different origin mingle with ambition, and it takes its color from them’’ (2:631). This democratic proclivity is ultimately destructive of a ‘‘proportionate, moderate, and yet vast’’ ambition that can evoke admiration (2:631). Wealth becomes the universal object of passionate but plodding, allconsuming yet petty, ambition. Each man seeks to taste every pleasure in his allotted time; for the same reason he habitually pursues quickly and easily obtained pleasures. Few are inclined to risk immediate gratification for intense satisfaction (2:532–34, 548, 627–32). Moreover, when everyone has an equal chance at success, all try to advance at once. Consequently, competition slows the pace of each. ‘‘Hatred of privilege and embarrassment in choosing’’ force everyone to proceed by well-defined small steps (2:630). In themselves, modern democratic economic institutions are increasingly centralized, bureaucratized, and subjected to government regulation (2:684–87). All ambitions are whetted, but none is satiated and none enlarged. Even those who appear to have ‘‘made it’’ are uneasy in their comfort (2:535–38) and circumspect in their dreams (2:627–32). Habitual preferences, egalitarian principles, and economic and political expediencies frustrate ambition until it is not so much moderated as unmanned.32 American businessmen are licentious mediocrities, mediocre in their licentiousness. Their successes bring them no sense of fulfillment; their strivings are, on reflection, not much for others to admire. Some advocates of women’s liberation would readily concur with Tocqueville’s conclusion that having a job or a career, devoting oneself solely to economic success for either its material or its psychic rewards, will not bring happiness. What is more difficult to see, from Tocqueville’s perspective as well as our own, is that involvement in democratic politics may be no more fulfilling. Tocqueville applauds the Americans for nothing so much as their attachment to free institutions and their propensity to form voluntary associations, including political associations (2:509– 13, 667–68, 1:189–95, 2:513–24, 697). He praises these institutions and associations not only as bulwarks against tyranny, but also as democracy’s indispensable means of nurturing civilized human beings (2:517). At the

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same time, he voices no objection to the Americans’ denial to women of all political rights but the right to listen to political discourse.33 How, then, might Tocqueville argue that neither society nor women suffer from women’s exclusive occupation with domestic matters, an occupation of which he is obviously contemptuous? (2:508, 639)34 Political participation can mean anything from voting in elections to serving jury duty, from holding a government job by political appointment to winning elective office, from attending a rally to masterminding a coup.35 Women need no longer campaign for the suffrage and never have fought too hard for jury duty; nor have they yet demanded an equal right to stage coups. They have organized special interest groups, become active in party politics, and begun to run for elective office. Why would Tocqueville not have welcomed these developments? After all, he speaks of local political institutions, epitomized by the New England town meeting, as the ‘‘primary schools’’ of liberty (1:63) and of political associations as ‘‘great free schools’’ (1:522). By participating in local government, citizens acquire a taste for freedom and learn its habits. Ambition is aroused, but rather than being frustrated it is tempered by affection and disciplined to respect the formalities of political order. It is in the township, the center of the ordinary business life, that the desire for esteem, the pursuit of substantial interests, and the taste for power and self-advertisement are concentrated; these passions, so often troublesome in society, take on a different character when exercised so close to home and, in a sense, within the family circle. (1:69) The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; he loves it because he has no reason to complain of his lot; he invests has ambition and his future in it; in the restricted sphere within his scope he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights. (1:70)36 Presumably self-interest is refined when enlarged with views both to a common interest and to differing opinions about what self-interest might

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be. Deliberation on how to link individual and common interests is promoted over sympathy—that is, over an unreflective identification of interests. Political, as well as moral and intellectual, associations are particularly important in the articulation of unusual or novel opinions. ‘‘Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.’’37 These associations are a counterpoise to democracy’s morally and intellectually stultifying economic associations. Tocqueville’s praise of political activity is unequivocal, but his expectations for its consequences are guarded. When ambition is turned toward politics it is, for the most part, moderated and disciplined. Great ambition, however, is still more likely to be directed to business than to politics (2:553, 632–33). Should it remain political, it is likely to make of an ambitious politician not so much a public servant as a public lackey (1:257–59, 2:497–500, 512). Or perhaps worse, when democracy fails to provide a respectable public outlet for great ambition and the desire for recognition, it becomes a breeding ground for the desperate ambition that animates military coups d’e´tat (2:648–49, 653–54, 663–64). The moderate, disciplined ambition that finds its outlet in political association has as its purpose ‘‘to make some political opinion triumph, to get some politician into the government, or to snatch power from another’’ (2:523). For Tocqueville, there is one substantive disagreement that lies at the base of all political partisanship, a disagreement expressed in opinions ‘‘as old as the world itself and found under different forms and with various names in all free societies. One party wants[s] to restrict popular power and the other to extend it indefinitely’’ (1:175).38 Since the time of Thomas Jefferson’s election in 1800, Tocqueville contends, proponents of the former opinion have lost their authority in American partisan politics to partisans of the latter, democratic opinion. Many of the principles of these aristocratic partisans were established by the Constitution, some ‘‘were introduced under their adversaries’ slogans,’’ and others continued to be held only by people who eschewed politics altogether (1:176–77, 178–79). Thus, what we see of America’s partisan politics takes place within a fundamentally democratic horizon, under which the greatest political dispute can be aired only indirectly. Although Americans hear everything, they listen to no political argument intended to point up democracy’s defects (1:254–59). Tocqueville does not draw the conclusion from his analysis that one should consequently remain silent, but he surely holds out no promise of political

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success to those who have uncommon opinions about democracy’s defects and their amelioration. The real benefits of political activity accrue to the man whose character is improved by engaging in it, not to others he might hope to benefit. Democracy, Tocqueville believes, naturally gives rise to self-destructive excesses. Equality nourishes individualism and love of material wellbeing, and these combine to establish the empire of a public opinion that prizes egalitarian, hence imperfect, justice and settles for anxious mediocrity. Ordinarily these excesses cannot be moderated much, if at all, even by right-thinking politicians, but only by clergymen and women (1:290–94, 2:448–49).39 And what clergymen and women have in common is precisely their exclusion from politics (1:295–301, 2:448–49). In Tocqueville’s America the clergy, like women, were kept, if not by law then surely by public opinion, from taking part in politics. And they, like women, ‘‘seemed voluntarily to steer clear of power and to take a sort of professional pride in claiming that it was no concern of theirs’’ (1:296). At times Tocqueville suggests that there is a connection between clergy and women, not just a similarity: [In America] religion is often powerless to restrain men in the midst of innumerable temptations which fortune offers. It cannot moderate their eagerness to enrich themselves, which everything contributes to arouse, but it reigns supreme in the souls of the women who shape mores. In Europe almost all the disorders of society are born around the domestic hearth and not far from the conjugal bed. When the American returns from the turmoil of politics to the bosom of the family, he immediately finds an image of order and peace. There all his pleasures are simple and natural and has joys innocent and quiet, and as the regularity of life brings him happiness, he easily forms the habit of regulating his opinions as well as his tastes. Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions, for although it did not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use thereof. (1:291–92)

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This passage should perhaps be read in the light of the deemphasis on woman’s piety in the second volume of Democracy. There Tocqueville insists that ‘‘the Americans . . . have not relied on religion alone to defend feminine chastity; they have tried to give arms to her reasoning powers’’ (2:591). Young women are not reared in cloisters. What the clergy and women share is not so much piety as a recognition that democracy’s passions can no longer be moderated effectively by a democratic politics that lacks ‘‘great parties.’’ The principle of restriction of popular power can best be defended by exemplary abstinence from attempts to capture popular power to further any end. The point is most effectively brought home, so to speak, by assuring democratic citizens that private life remains a viable and attractive alternative to the ‘‘turmoil’’ of politics and business. If this end is accomplished, the consequences of private life will be far from contemptible. But someone has to stay at home to make the point. Tocqueville intends to show that neither business nor political life is truly fulfilling or liberating; neither has an end that is both meaningful and attainable. Therefore, woman’s lack of opportunities is no more a misfortune for her than for the men she benefits in abjuring worldliness. Moreover, the civilizing effect he credits to political activity as a necessary supplement to economic activity he also credits to women’s education for domesticity. From political association citizens ‘‘learn to submit their own will to that of all the rest and to make their own exertions subordinate to the common action’’ (2:522). From their premarital education women learn to submit to the direction of husbands who respect their courage, intelligence, and understanding. Nor is the pride women take in maintaining their place so unjustified as it might first seem. When Tocqueville accuses the Americans of a pusillanimity bred of taking seriously nothing but mundane familial concerns, his criticism applies no less to men, whose concerns are expressed in their public actions, than to women, whose thoughts remain private. Democracy’s politics, like its business, is rarely more than a generalization of self-interest (2:497–500). In his remarks on American and democratic honor Tocqueville contrasts honor, which ‘‘is only effective in full view of the public’’ to ‘‘simple virtue [which] feeds upon itself contented with its own witness’’ (2:626). ‘‘True dignity in manners consists in always taking one’s proper place’’ (2:606). Democracy assigns to no one but woman ‘‘a proper place,’’ and its conventions preclude all but woman

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from making the necessary judgments among men to determine their natural place. The glory Tocqueville’s women find in submitting to the matrimonial yoke points to what is, for Tocqueville, a deeper truth. True worldliness, a truly comprehensive understanding of human beings as individuals and societies as wholes, is rarely given to those who must act in politics as if they possessed this understanding (1:186–87, 2:433–34, 437–41). When they must act they invariably carry their partiality too far and create political orders that rest on either of the partial truths of democratic justice or aristocratic honor (1:16–17, 245, 2:616, 668–69). Politics is thus the most impressive exhibition of human boastfulness (2:469–70, 488–89). Yet the boast expresses the partial truth of human freedom, a partial truth infinitely more salutary than its counterpart (2:493–96, 705). It is an appreciation of this noble, yet somewhat comical, aspect of politics that engenders Tocqueville’s magnanimous moderation. His characterization of America’s superior women who submit to their husband’s authority is a reflection of his own willingness to celebrate politics, inevitable imperfections notwithstanding. He leaves it to the wives of democratic men to share their judgments in private.40 ‘‘Everything that influences the conditions of women, their habits and their opinions, is of great political interest in my eyes,’’ said Tocqueville (2:590). Consequently, it would be unsound scholarship to dismiss or excuse has remarks on women as poorly thought out. Rather, I have suggested that Tocqueville’s discussion of women was intended to provoke reflection on ‘‘the true conception of democratic progress’’—that is, on his prognosis for democracy as a whole. If I am correct, it would be irresponsible for liberal democracy’s proponents and opponents alike not to take up the provocation. To say that the status of women as moral and intellectual equals but social inferiors reflects the true conception of democratic progress is to say that democracy will not further moral and intellectual improvement because it will not give public recognition to moral and intellectual superiority. There may be honorable and thoughtful human beings in a democracy, but they do not have democracy itself to thank for their virtues. They may impart then decency and wisdom to others, but they will not do so through democracy’s most public and popular institutions. If democracy’s excesses—its excessive egalitarianism and materialism—can be moderated, it will be by wives whose husbands can love them for their feminine manners and manly intelligence and energy (2:601). Standing

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behind such women to remind them of this possibility and its importance are writers such as the author of Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s remarks on women are meant, to repeat, to shed light on what we may reasonably hope and fear from democracy (1:702). Rather than undertaking a halfhearted self-defense against the accusation of hypocrisy, I shall suggest what I understand to be Tocqueville’s relevance for us. To urge on his authority that today’s women’s movement slow or reverse its course would be foolish because impossible. It would also be unjust, even if one argued, with Tocqueville, that justice is not always the most important consideration.41 Both history and justice are on the side of women’s liberation. Moreover, it is pointless to offer practical objections to the social, political, and economic equality of men and women. The fact that women bear children can easily enough be accommodated by existing economic and political institutions, as can assumption of homemaking and child-rearing responsibilities by either women or men. What is to the point is Tocqueville’s doubt that democratic life will be improved by making the sexes not only ‘‘equal, but similar.’’ He fears that ‘‘the simple and natural’’ pleasures experienced at home will be lost to both men and women.42 With these natural, private pleasures the inclination and opportunity to appreciate virtue for what it is and to see the limitations of democratic justice and of public life as such may also be lost. No one has yet shown Tocqueville’s fears in this regard to be unfounded or irrelevant. Having entered into democracy’s political and economic life, women will rectify past injustices done them. They will benefit materially and receive public recognition for public achievements. These are not insignificant gains. But do they amount to liberation or fulfillment? Granted that many feminists now contend that a radical transformation of society is required to liberate both women and men. But precisely what is the shape of this new society that can dispense with all conventions, including democratic, that ensure a semblance of justice while society promotes individual excellence and happiness? These are the essential questions that women and men ought to be pondering today. I know no better way of learning to ask them than by a dispassionate and open-minded reading of Tocqueville’s reflections on American women and democratic mores.

Notes 1. All quotations and page references cited in this chapter are from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, 1969). The translation has

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been corrected where necessary. The epigraph is from Alexis de Tocqueville, De la de´mocratie en Ame´rique, ed. J. P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 2:603. 2. The following five paragraphs are based on Democracy, 2:600–603. 3. Tocqueville’s discussion of women is essentially one of the middle-class family (2:594, 598). He excludes from consideration the very wealthy (e.g., southern aristocrats), the very poor, and blacks because it is the northern commercial family that ‘‘appears destined to be the norm to which all the rest must one day conform’’ (1:385). Frontier women are included (2:594) because neither frontier men nor women went out into society when they worked (1:376). 4. The reason is sometimes said to be religion as well as commerce (1:291, 2:592), but also commerce alone (2:621–22). 5. My interpretation differs from, but is not inconsistent with, that of Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la de´mocratie (Paris: Julliard, 1982), 117–120. Manent correctly stresses that Tocqueville is pleased to see American democrats’ deference to what first comes to sight as a natural distinction. Manent’s brief but inclusive discussion of women is the only substantial one in the secondary literature of which I am aware. Perhaps most disappointing is the silence of John Stuart Mill in his review of the English translation of Democracy, published in the Edinburgh Review (October 1840): ‘‘Tocqueville’s remarks on domestic society in America do not appear to us to be of any considerable value.’’ John Stuart Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 181–82. 6. ‘‘I here mean the term ‘mores’ (moeurs) to have its original Latin meaning; I mean it to apply not only to moeurs properly so-called, which might be called habits of the heart, but also to the different notions possessed by men, the various opinions current among them, and the sum of ideas that shape mental habits’’ (1:287). 7. 2:590; 1:291; but compare 1:305: ‘‘The Americans almost always carry the habits of public life over into their private lives.’’ 8. See below, 19–23. 9. The next six paragraphs are based primarily on 2:590–94. 10. See 2:429–36. 11. That this issue is thematic is suggested by the author’s introduction to Democracy (11–19), and by the remarks about Providence at the conclusion of the book (2:705). For democratic historians, see also 2:493–96. 12. If the New World and its inhabitants were ‘‘only waiting’’ for American civilization (1:30), the colonists themselves had a Puritan and English aristocratic heritage that served as the point of departure for the Anglo-Americans (1:31–49; see especially 31–32, 48–49). 13. The subject of the second part of volume 2 is ‘‘The Influence of Democracy on the Sentiments of the Americans’’ (503–58). See also 2:671–74. 14. Part 3 is on mores (561–664). 15. Part 1 is titled ‘‘The Influence of Democracy on Intellectual Movement in the United States’’ (429–500). See also 2:668–70. 16. American girls, recall, are compared to philosophers (2:591). 17. In the South men were constrained to choose not work, but leisure, for slavery made all southern whites an aristocratic class (1:347–48). 18. It should be remarked that for Tocqueville, as distinguished from notable predecessors, there is nothing like a state of nature. Even America’s noble savages seem to have descended from a higher civilization (1:29). 19. Even the Puritans sought material wealth as eagerly as ‘‘moral delights’’ (1:47). 20. America’s principles of honor are all intelligible with reference to the peculiar needs of a commercial nation. 21. Although the education of American girls makes them ‘‘chaste and cold rather than tender and loving companions of men’’ (2:592), ‘‘all men living in democratic times contract, more or less, the mental habits of the industrial and trading classes; their thoughts take a serious turn, calculating and realistic. No men are less dreamers than the citizens of democracy; one hardly finds any who

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care to let themselves indulge in such leisurely and solitary moods of contemplation as generally precede and produce the great agitations of the heart’’ (2:598). Tocqueville does not suggest that commercial ambition is a form of frustrated or sublimated sexual desire. Rather, Americans have chaste marriages because their egalitarianism and preoccupation with business truncate eros and stifle romantic idealism. This is the point of chapter 11, ‘‘How Equality Helps Maintain Good Morals in America,’’ in volume 2. 22. The American woman ‘‘judges [vices and dangers] without illusion and faces them without fear, for she is full of confidence in her own powers’’; she has ‘‘singular skill and happy audacity’’; ‘‘her reason never lets the reins go’’; she is given ‘‘precocious knowledge of everything,’’ taught to control passions, to defend herself, and to have confidence in her own powers; her reasoning powers have been armed (2:590–91). ‘‘She is soon convinced that she cannot for a moment depart from the usages accepted by her contemporaries without putting in danger her peace of mind, her honor, and her very social existence, and she finds the strength required for such an act of submission in the firmness of her understanding and the manly habits inculcated by her education.’’ Her freedom has given her the courage to sacrifice it; ‘‘she suffers her new state bravely, for she has chosen it.’’ In marrying, she exercises ‘‘her cold and austere powers of reasoning’’ and ‘‘strength of will’’ (2:593). Although feminine in appearance and manner, American women ‘‘sometimes show the minds and hearts of men,’’ and their courage, understanding, and clarity of mind are never doubted by men (2:601–3). Nothing at all is said of women’s being moderate out of natural inclination or piety (1:291). 23. I say ‘‘might’’ because at a certain point it would be necessary to raise the question from which Tocqueville here abstracts, namely, whether there are any relevant natural (biological and/or moral) differences between men and women. 24. For Tocqueville, the essential characteristic of democracy is ‘‘equality of condition,’’ by which is meant primarily social condition. It may or may not be accompanied by rigorous political equality and will invariably be sustained by an opinion of human equality. Given this understanding, there is no fundamental difference between the kind of democracy anticipated in America and the various forms of socialism advocated by Europeans even in his lifetime. For the impracticality, if not impossibility, of an aristocratic restoration, see 1:312–15, 399–400; 2:695, 705. 25. This following section is based on the first seven chapters of vol. 2, 561–84. 26. Their dislike of forms and formalities is both philosophical (2:430) and practical or political (2:698). 27. At 2:579 Tocqueville suggests that there are only two opinions around which society can beneficially be organized. Should the truth lie between the two or elsewhere, asserting it would have dire political and moral consequences: ‘‘In aristocratic societies it often happens that a man’s soul is not degraded by the fact that he is a domestic servant, because he neither knows nor thinks of any other status, and the immense inequality between him and his master seems the necessary and inevitable effect of some hidden law of Providence. In a democracy there is nothing degrading about the status of a domestic servant, because it is freely adopted and temporary and because it is not stigmatized by public opinion and creates no permanent inequality between master and servant. But in the journey from one social condition to the other, there is almost always a moment of hesitation between the aristocratic conception of subjection and the democratic conception of obedience. Obedience, then, loses its moral basis in the eyes of him who obeys; he no longer considers it as some sort of divinely appointed duty, and he does not yet see its purely human aspect; in his eyes it is neither sacred nor just, and he submits to it as a degrading though useful fact.’’ 28. God, whose justice Tocqueville will not doubt (1:18), ‘‘sees every human being separately and sees in each the resemblances that make him like his fellows and the differences which isolate him from them’’ (2:437). Compare 2:704. 29. Vol. 2, chaps. 13–26. Chapter 16 is on the national vanity of the Americans, chapter 18 is titled ‘‘Honor In the United States and Democratic Societies,’’ chapter 19 is on ambition, and

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chapter 21 is on revolutions (which might be instigated by the ‘‘enterprising and ambitious’’ [638]). For other mentions of ambition, see chap. 20, 633, 634; chap. 22, 646, 647, 648, 649, 650; chap. 23, 653, 654; chap. 24, 655, 656, 657; chap. 26, 660. For pride and dignity, see chap. 13, 605; chap. 14, 606; chap. 15, 609, 610; chap. 22, 648. For honor or honors, see chap. 22, 647, 648; chap. 23, 653; chap. 24, 655. 30. For Tocqueville’s gentle criticism of this view, see especially 2:603. 31. Surely the greatest difference is that we today tend to deny that there is a fixed human nature, whose perfection would constitute ‘‘fulfillment.’’ See 2:434. 32. Consider one of Tocqueville’s most charming observations: ‘‘In China, where equality has for a very long time been carried to great lengths, no man graduates from one public office to another without passing an examination. The idea is now so deeply rooted in the manners of the people that I remember reading a Chinese novel in which the hero, after many ups and downs, succeeds at last in touching his mistress’s heart by passing an examination well. Lofty ambition can hardly breathe in such an atmosphere’’ (2:630). 33. Apparently, women were permitted to attend public meetings and to ‘‘forget household cares while they listened to political speeches’’ (1:243). 34. Tocqueville does not extend his contempt to the aristocratic family because it is often a focus of the vast, far from petty, longing for immortality (1:52–53). 35. For Tocqueville’s high praises of the benefits of jury duty, see 1:270–76; for his criticism of proliferating political appointments, see 2:623–24. 36. Local government, or decentralized administration, is an ‘‘association permanently established by law’’ (2:518). See also 1:189. 37. For the importance of associations to the few who have new and therefore presumably undemocratic or antidemocratic ideas, see 1:132 (Tocqueville’s report of a newspaper attack on the demagogic Jackson), 1:192, 2:516, 518. 38. This marks the division between what Tocqueville refers to as ‘‘great parties’’: ‘‘What I call great political parties are those more attached to principles than to consequences, to generalities rather than to particular cases, to ideas rather than to personalities. Such parties generally have nobler features, more generous passions, more real convictions, and a bolder and more open look than others. Private interest is there more skillfully concealed beneath the veil of public interest. . . . Great parties convulse society; small ones agitate it; the former rend and the latter corrupt it; the first may sometimes save it by overthrowing it, but the second always create unprofitable trouble. America has had great parties; now they no longer exist. This has been a great gain in happiness but not in morality.’’ 39. Manent argues impressively that American religion, although apparently separated from politics, is ultimately rooted in public opinion as ‘‘the sigh of the democratic citizen oppressed by the excess of his liberty’’ (Tocqueville et la nature de la de´mocratie, 135). 40. ‘‘Americans constantly display complete confidence in their spouses’ judgment and deep respect for their freedom. They hold that woman’s mind is just as capable as man’s of discovering the naked truth, and her heart as firm to face it’’ (2:602). 41. See, for example, Tocqueville’s treatment of the jury as an institution (1:270–72). It must be considered not a mere judicial institution, but ‘‘above all a political institution.’’ By this Tocqueville means to consider not whether litigants are treated as justly as possible by juries, but whether jurors are educated by their experience. Having been educated, jurors can be expected to dispense justice. 42. Tocqueville’s most flattering portrait of democratic life is found in his description of the democratic family (2:584–89). Democracy gives freer rein to ‘‘filial love and fraternal affection [and] all the spontaneous feelings rooted in nature itself’’ (589). Matrimonial ties are not mentioned in this chapter, however.

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8 Toward a Generative Theory of Equality Kathleen S. Sullivan

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831–32, he was struck by the inevitability and ubiquity of the idea of equality. For Tocqueville, American zeal for equality potentially came at the expense of the pursuit of liberty. Additionally, he was unsettled by the form that the idea of equality took in the United States, emerging as a general idea that was easily grasped but difficult to realize.1 Surprisingly, Tocqueville’s ambivalence about equality comports with contemporary feminist concerns about the limits of formal equality. The U.S. Supreme Court finally recognized that the equal protection clause applied to women in the 1970s. The form of equality that emerged in subsequent sex discrimina-

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tion doctrine raised the concerns of those feminist legal theorists who doubt the effectiveness of a formal doctrine to strike at women’s lived conditions. Tocqueville’s concern for liberty is shared by those feminist theorists who have become worried about the costs to liberty incurred when women seek political and juridical gains. In pursuing women’s emancipation through rights and recognition, women’s movements have rested their political and legal claims on injury to women, thereby constructing a political identity that serves to reinstate forms of power and subjugation rather than transforming those terms of domination and finding new institutions and new forms of living.2 Just as the Americans Tocqueville observed sacrificed freedom for the pursuit of equality, so, too, can women’s movements be observed preferring social advances over utterly new imagined possibilities. With a convergence of Tocqueville’s concerns and those of feminist theorists, it is a good time for feminists to revisit Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840). In what follows, I offer an institutional analysis of Democracy in America that makes use of Tocqueville’s stereotypical portraits of men and women to identify the purposes they serve and the possibilities they offer. Tocqueville’s representation of women is rather striking. He observes the patriarchal household as ordered under the domestic relations of the common law and women enjoying the privilege and fate of their race.3 A feminism that rests on the subject would seek to liberate women from sex- and race-based classifications and oppression, but this impulse leads to the problem of the subject: a feminism that places the subject central to its theory and politics will come to see the subject in terms of those internal and external influences upon subject formation, thereby interpreting the subject ‘‘in terms of radical subjection to agencies outside the self.’’4 Feminist politics then rests on liberating the subject from those forces, which will, in turn, ‘‘inscribe in the law and in other political registers its historical and present pain rather than conjure an imagined future of power to make itself.’’5 Hence a feminism based on the subject can both divert from the pursuit of freedom and recycle existing forms and dynamics of power. The alternative feminist project is to engage in that subject position and find opportunities for freedom within that identity. Tocqueville offers the site of such politics with a portrait of a democracy that cannot be understood outside its context; nor can its subjects. Tocqueville saw prejudices, habits, passions, and mores as all contributing to national character.6 The social roles of individuals are crucial to sustaining these features. Particularly taken with New England mores in the United States, Toc-

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queville observed of the Pilgrims that ‘‘they faced the sufferings of exile in hope of the triumph of an idea.’’7 The attainment of the goal, however, would take work, which rested on mores of sacrifice and persistence and the habits of a people who were willing to work. Such habits themselves rested on individuals who filled roles, sex based and, in America, race based, in service to larger ideas. Those stereotypical men and women who emerge in Tocqueville’s account are shaped by laws and mores, but they, in turn, contribute to the maintenance and redefinition of those mores that produce national character. Tocqueville’s American democracy is populated with situated subjects whose social construction and participation are central to the political project. This is not to say that Tocqueville provided a feminist account of these roles, but he does present these roles as ripe for a feminist practice of freedom. At the same time, insights from feminist theories can rectify some of problems of democracy that Tocqueville identified. The gentle democratic tyranny of public opinion that arises from the sameness of democracy is undermined by the recognition of difference invited by feminism. Feminist theorists also offer a means to thwart the trade-off between liberty and equality through a practice born out of a politics of freedom. This chapter recovers the feminist opportunities in Democracy in America, first with Tocqueville’s doubt that equality could be realized, one shared by some late twentieth-century feminist legal theorists. Tocqueville locates the limits to equality in differences between individuals, including those sex differences that play roles in maintaining American democracy. The sex- and race-based stereotypes appear in Tocqueville as a recognition that subject formation results from historical circumstances and institutional needs. Tocqueville’s own analysis offers the means to expand freedom within these subjectivities. His generative production of democratic concepts serves as a mechanism for plural participation in the construction of democratic concepts. A feminist perspective on this generative theory can attend to the pursuit of freedom for women within context and, as such, this essay imagines a generative theory of equality that seeks to preserve a feminist concern for material welfare with an attention to freedom shared by third-wave feminists and Tocqueville.

Abstract Equality and the Subject Problem One of the earliest divisions in the American feminist movement of the twentieth century displays the concerns that would reappear in later fem-

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inist theory. With the concerted movement for suffrage accomplished after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the feminist movement revealed its disagreements between labor feminists and equality feminists. Equality feminists sought equality under the law, without regard to gender, by pursuing an equal rights amendment.8 Labor feminists, by contrast, sought to maintain women’s identity under the law to draw attention to women’s needs in the workplace.9 Protective labor legislation for women could provide the entering wedge for broader labor legislation.10 While labor feminists are known for their reliance on an explicitly gendered female identity, theories of abstract equality presented their own identity of women in the formulation of the historical subject derived from a recollection of women’s historic oppression. In 1946, Mary Ritter Beard struck at the equality feminism of her own generation by criticizing the strategies of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other nineteenthcentury woman suffragists. She took them to task both for their account of history and for their reliance on equality to rectify the injustices they brought to light in their telling of history. She accused equality feminists of presenting women as passive victims to larger patriarchal forces by telling a story of women’s subjugation. They then promised to rescue women from their condition by invoking the principle of equality. Had they focused instead on the agency and achievements of women in history, Beard determined, they would not have had to turn to equality to rectify the past. Beard’s position against equality feminism can be seen through both her alliance with labor feminists as well as the ‘‘revolt against formalism’’ of her generation. Suspicious of deductive and abstract approaches to social research, she chose instead those approaches that captured ‘‘the moving and the vital in social life.’’11 She was critical not of equality as a goal but of the way that woman suffragists relied on it abstractly. Nevertheless, she acknowledged that reference to equality made sense strategically: ‘‘Unquestionably there was dynamism in the slogan: Equality! Here was a formula of perfection, hoary with age and ringing with revolutionary associations. The women of ’48 did not invent the word or the idea behind it. They adopted a conception older than Christianity, an ideal pagan in origin. The utter simplification of historic processes, the propagandistic convenience, and the flavor of utopian grandeur represented by equality furnished fuel for a fiery crusade.’’12 Despite its allure, Beard doubted that this ‘‘shadowy guide to practical

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applications’’ could be rendered concrete.13 She feared for the problems that arose when it was attempted, particularly when equality doctrine reached the relations of the home. Asking, ‘‘When is equality attained?’’ she demonstrated that applications of equality left too much unaccounted for: ‘‘Is the wife’s separate property liable for payment of domestic servants engaged in doing the household work of the family?’’ ‘‘May the husband require the wife to earn all she can to help support the family?’’ ‘‘Is the failure of a husband to support his wife, save in case of sickness or of extremely extenuating circumstances, to be regarded as a punishable crime after the enactment of the married women’s property law?’’14 With these questions, Beard pointed out that the marital relations had traditionally sustained married women’s civil disabilities, but they had also sustained statuses for husbands and wives. These statuses elicited certain behaviors from each of them—husbands were expected to support wives, who, in turn, were expected to maintain the home. The obligations incurred from statuses upheld a social structure. The idea of equality was ill suited to contend with the purpose and impact of these roles. Having achieved labor legislation with the New Deal in the 1930s, labor feminists no longer had to work for protective labor legislation for women, and equality feminists were able to persuade them to endorse formal equality. As Mary Becker recounts, by the 1970s, ‘‘everyone was on the formal equality bandwagon.’’15 As equal protection of women became constitutionally recognized in the 1970s, formal equality became the legal mechanism to address demonstrable inequalities. The dispute between the labor and equality feminists was resolved in the 1960s, but Beard’s concerns were not. Just as Beard feared that the idea of equality would prove unsuited for addressing questions of roles and personal relations, so, too, has equal protection doctrine and discourse centered on curious preoccupations with differences between men and women. Political controversies have focused on such issues as sex-segregated bathrooms yet not where difference would seem to matter, exemplified in Supreme Court reference to ‘‘pregnant persons’’ when it should have recognized women’s significant differences from men.16 Feminist legal theorists have made it clear that such peculiarities are the result of a decontextualized doctrine that was out of sync with women’s experiences. Reva Siegel sees such tendencies arising out of a failure to take history into account. Because sex discrimination draws upon the equal protection clause only for discrimination effected by state action, sex discrimination doctrine is attentive to classifications based on group membership, which results in

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treatment of issues of same-sex bathrooms and gender differences in sales of watered-down beer.17 Because sex discrimination does not incorporate the historical experience of facially gender-neutral state practices and gender subordination in personal relations, equal protection doctrine does not engage more critical issues, such as marital rape and domestic violence.18 While equal protection can give rise to a search for the appropriate standard of equality to employ, Beard’s worry that formal equality was merely a ‘‘shadowy guide to practical applications’’ remains on point. Becker points out that equal protection doctrine has presented a false dichotomy, with formal equality treating similarly situated people similarly, while discrimination entails treating similarly situated people differently. By positing discrimination against equality, legal doctrine strikes at differences that are the product of state action, but it is less suited for striking at socially constructed difference. To operate upon such differences, equality doctrine must take context and experience into account.19 Sociolegal approaches, already attentive to the presence of society as the recipient of law and as the source of legal meaning, privilege context. Using the common law doctrine of coverture as an example, Martha Minow recognizes that a formal legal strategy alone will not bring about change. While legal narratives spin a narrative of a transition from women’s civil disabilities under coverture to individual rights under the law, the recognition of women’s rights has not liberated them from structures of subjugation. Like Beard, Minow recognizes that women exercised agency even under the hierarchical doctrine of coverture. Like Becker, she recognizes that recognition of women’s rights will not liberate women if those rights do not reach the source of women’s subjection.20 The gap between legal doctrine and its reach is acute when legal concepts are constructed in the abstract. In a political order in which masculine freedom has rested on women’s subjugation, Minow explains, an abstract form of equality can unwittingly preserve patriarchy.21 As Wendy Brown has pointed out, when women have attempted to achieve formal equality, they have not equalized the concept of freedom, which has remained imbued with its masculine privilege even as some women enjoy its promises.22 The general principle of equality may benefit women as a class, but it serves only some women—those women who were lucky enough to take advantage of them. The woman who is liberated from her household duties, for example, has not liberated the feminization of domestic work; she has only escaped from it herself, most likely passing

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off the task to a housekeeper or child-care worker, likely another woman who is underpaid for her domestic labor.23 Addressing those class inequities poses additional problems. Minow acknowledges the paradox encountered by equality doctrine—legal constructions of discrimination can hide the relationships and experiences that account for meaningful difference, and yet recursion to that difference can ‘‘cede power to social definitions that we no longer individually control.’’24 Hence the attempt to rectify the problems produced by abstract equality runs into the problem of the subject. These criticisms of formal equality call out for a conception of equality understood in context, and context taken into account under the proper circumstances. As Minow explains, context is critical in making sense of difference. A ‘‘Men Only’’ sign issues different connotations on a bathroom door and a courthouse door. ‘‘It is not just a difference in context that matters here; what matters is the relative power represented by the two contexts. The meanings of inclusion and inclusion vary, depending on the significance of those contexts within the particular society.’’25 The appeal to context, however, threatens to trap the subject in her political identity if it rests on reference to injury. While feminist legal theorists have drawn out the limits of formal equality, they have not resolved the problem of the subject. Tocqueville offers some insights with his own engagement in alternatives to abstract concepts. Tocqueville, too, was wary of concepts abstracted from experience, calling them ‘‘general ideas.’’ Because Tocqueville’s own family was implicated in the revolutions of his day, it is tempting to read his thoughts on the matter as Burkean disdain for the abstract ideas of the French Revolution. The aristocratic Tocqueville provides a model for the gentleman’s cool in response to disorder. In his Recollections, commenting on the Revolution of 1848, Tocqueville expressed his distaste for organized political agitation, and he retained tradition in the midst of anarchy.26 Tocqueville’s aristocratic posture provides a model for tradition and a rarefied masculinity in a world in which women have made gains in their self-determination, entered the public sphere, and upset the heteronormative rules of the household and sexual relations.27 To be of use to feminist theory, his distrust of general ideas is more productively understand in institutional terms. For Tocqueville, a revolution is about change in the constitutive features of the regime, not simply recourse to abstract ideas.28 A revolution takes hold in mores; in social institutions; in family life; and, finally, in political laws and institutions.

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This is the very terrain of feminist action in the second-wave feminist movement, which recognized that significant social change cannot come until change occurs in relations, in perceptions, in language, and elsewhere. Tocqueville was not unequivocally hostile to general ideas. He appreciated the type of generalization that was the product of ‘‘slow, detailed, and conscientious labor of the mind, and that kind widens the sphere of human knowledge’’ (440). Another kind of generalization, however, ‘‘springs up at once from the quick exercise of the wits and begets only very superficial and uncertain notions’’ (440). Americans exercised the latter. As democratic citizens they were busy, and they did not have time for the kind of philosophical speculation that rested on slow, detailed, conscientious thought. Furthermore, democratic conditions and the loss of aristocratic classes encouraged a form of individualism in which individuals were responsible for their own caretaking. The practical attitude that Americans adopted in taking care of themselves extended to their philosophy. They ventured into philosophical enterprises with the same can-do attitude that they applied to their daily life. ‘‘So the Americans have needed no books to teach them philosophic method, having found it in themselves’’ (430). Tocqueville was, therefore, skeptical of the deployment of general ideas in the context of American democratic conditions. Americans were so busy working and striving for their own advancement that they reached for the easy explanation (431–33, 440). They did not engage in sustained study of particular phenomenon but were quick to generalize and to understand their world through abstract ideas. Tocqueville feared that this tendency toward sloppy speculation, when brought to bear on political matters, would bring quick judgments where deliberation was required and preclude study of those particular cases that have been obscured by the righteous and passionate certainty of general ideas. Equality was particularly prone to such hasty generalization. The promises of equality as a general idea could be felt by everyone: wealthy employers or menial laborers could grasp its elements and include themselves within its promises. Because of its appeal, Tocqueville saw equality as an enticing but elusive lure, noting that ‘‘the human mind imagines the possibility of an ideal but always fugitive perfection’’ (453). There was a high psychological cost for the disjuncture between equality’s promises and its unattainable results; Tocqueville perceived that Americans were envious of one another because all knew that they had not achieved

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the position of others, even though the ideal told them that they were entitled: ‘‘Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. This complete equality is always slipping through people’s fingers at the moment when they think to grasp it, fleeing, as Pascal says, in an eternal flight; the people grow heated in search of this blessing, all the more precious because it is near enough to be seen but too far off to be tasted’’ (198). Although his concerns about equality were not feminist and scarcely took gender into account, Tocqueville acknowledged structural limits to equality. Along with today’s feminist theorists he was aware that the ideal of equality does not take into account the institutional needs and experiences of the democratic order.

Generative Theory in Place of General Ideas Equality could be constructed through other means, which Tocqueville provides. In place of general ideas, he offered a generative production of democratic concepts, in which status and situated positions figure largely. Pierre Manent observes that Tocqueville saw equality not as a single principle, but, rather, as a ‘‘generative fact’’ that informs the development of mores and laws.29 Rather than invoking equality to trump mores, laws, and institutions, those mores and laws are infused with the principle of equality as they grow out of the American experience. Those mores send the egalitarian sentiment upward through the social experience and levels of government. In short, the polity builds up a concept of equality through its practices. Manent illustrates this process with the construction of the notion of popular sovereignty, a concept that can be susceptible to the dogmatic appeal of a general idea.30 While popular sovereignty can take on the meaning that ‘‘the people rule,’’ a meaning so nebulous as to mean not much at all, Tocqueville saw the enactment of this principle beginning at the most personal levels of experience. He devotes a short chapter to popular sovereignty, but in ‘‘Concerning Their Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of Anglo-Americans,’’ in volume 1, part 1, chapter 2 of Democracy in America, he cautions against study of a man in his maturity, advising, ‘‘Go back; look at the baby in his mother’s arms; see how the outside world is first reflected in the still hazy mirror of his

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mind; consider the first examples that strike his attention; listen to the first words which awaken his dormant powers of thought; and finally take notice of the first struggles he has to endure. Only then will you understand the origins of the prejudices, habits, and passions which are to dominate his life. The whole man is there, if one may put it so, in the cradle’’ (31). Manent interprets this passage in terms of the birth of the idea. The doctrine of popular sovereignty that is so readily proclaimed in political discourse is not produced at the national level, but, rather, is the production of a series of engagements in democratic life. The infancy stage of the doctrine of popular sovereignty can be found in the experience of the individual citizen, starting with the most personal understanding of selfrule—citizens know that they rule themselves. From this they recognize self-rule at the community level, local government, until the concept of self-rule, accruing at various levels of engagement, aggregates into the notion of a nation that rules itself. It is striking to consider just how democratic this process is. The polity need not wait for a legal or political authority to claim interpretive authority of democratic concepts. Interpretive meaning is claimed by any single citizen. The construction is practiced repeatedly by citizens so that they can connect their personal experience to the larger national experience. The concept of a national popular sovereignty is the ‘‘last link in a chain of opinions’’ (397). The polity’s conception of self-rule is the shared product of this generation, with each citizen forming an attachment to the nation. Under this rational patriotism, ‘‘a man understands the influence which his country’s well-being has on his own; he knows the law allows him to contribute to the production of his well-being, and he takes an interest in his country’s prosperity, first as a thing useful to him and then as something he has created’’ (235–36). It is also striking to note how gendered this generative theory is. Tocqueville’s generative theory provides a process by which a concept can be built from the ground up, open to multiple interpretations and a common meaning shaped by democratic interpretive processes. The very discussion of the sites of generation of popular sovereignty reveals that those sites rest on their own hierarchies. The concept of sovereignty allows for the multiple experiences of ruling oneself and being ruled in turn. A man might work for another, but, in his own home, be the head of household. The man rules himself, the father of a family applies it to his children, the master to his servants, the township to its residents, and so on until

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the Union applies its rules to the states (397). No matter what role the citizen assumed—voting citizen, husband, master, servant—a woman was likely to emerge in the subservient role as the nonvoting wife or servant. The rule of self rests upon the rule of others, and it is women who inevitably bear the brunt of men’s quest for freedom.31 Laura Janara reveals the extent of gender in these situated selves. While Tocqueville’s text presents the role of women in a democracy, his metaphors and imagery of gender and family convey the depth to which the unconscious internalizes the patriarchy. Hierarchical gender ordering is not only pervasive in personal relations, but also in Tocqueville’s effort to contend with and explain the conditions of a democracy. Janara’s psychoanalytic approach makes sense of this imagery as a tool wielded unconsciously by Tocqueville to help him cope with the anxiety wrought by both the disruption of the old order and the ongoing flux of democracy. When Tocqueville describes the development of American democracy, the imagery of the mother-child relation offers the means to explore the origin of a nation, and object-relations theory offers the means to grasp the separation anxiety suffered by the maturing democracy in its separation from its mother, the aristocracy.32 Janara’s insights bring the extent of Tocqueville’s gendered metaphors and imagery to the foreground. Her analysis exposes the depth of gender inequality, which is institutional in America and, furthermore, metaphorical in Tocqueville’s description of it. It indicates that the barriers to women’s equality come not only in the remaining institutions and relations of subjugation but also in the gendered hierarchy of the unconscious as well. Revealing the extent to which gender pervades democratic institutions and thought, Janara can conclude that the ideas of gender and family relations ‘‘simultaneously flow throughout the culture in question to define, discipline, and direct circulating power and passion everywhere.’’33 While Janara’s analysis demonstrates that the democratic order relies on gender hierarchy even more than we might have thought, it does not provide many tools for dealing with it. This analysis offers less help in avoiding reproduction of the gendered subject when contending with this power.34 Because Janara limits reading of the passage of going back to birth in terms of birth of the nation rather than the birth of an idea, she presents a story of national development that is somewhat removed from the processes that contribute to national development. A psychoanalytic approach likewise underplays the institutional arrangements that serve as

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the sites of status and, when taken advantage of, sites of feminist practice. An institutional analysis of Democracy in America is productive in locating the sites of engagement and in rendering a feminist version of Tocqueville’s generative theory.

Tocqueville’s Institutional Analysis While Tocqueville pointed to the limits of equality to explain why some American men would never be rich despite the possibility of social mobility, the limits to equality are particularly evident in his treatment of women throughout Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s portraits of women are stereotypical, but in another sense they are realist, a stark reminder of the inequalities that persist in a democratic society.35 Democracy can promise too much, and this is particularly evident in the case of gender relations. Tocqueville observed that Americans were in no rush to democratize the domestic sphere, remarking that Americans ‘‘think that in the little society composed of man and wife, just as in the great society of politics, the aim of democracy is to regulate and legitimate necessary powers and not to destroy all power’’ (601). Tocqueville recognized that the American legal system wrought hardships for American women, even as vestiges of the aristocracy and status regimes were dissolving in the United States. Relations between master and servant were breaking down as servants tasted the promises of equality. With no fixed status, servants knew that they could become masters tomorrow (572–76). The relation between husband and wife, however, remained immune from the democratic force. Americans treated men and women as naturally different and continued to keep their roles separate and hierarchical (601). The confident American girl who grew into a timid wife when she entered the hierarchical marital relation illustrated the cost that individual women bore (590–91). Identifying the role of women’s status can help to make sense of the limits of equality in a culture with equality as its animating principle. Examination of men’s as well as women’s status and roles in the household and polity can highlight the relational aspects of status. An anecdote in an appendix of Democracy in America, supplementing the chapter ‘‘The Young Woman as Wife,’’ in volume 2, part 3, offers an insight into the domestic sphere with the obligations of both sexes made apparent.

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Tocqueville recounts that his traveling party sought to spend the night in a pioneer family’s small, ramshackle cabin, which was overrun with unruly children and half-wild dogs. The house occupied an isolated space tenuously cleared out of the forest. Trees were felled, but their trunks were never removed and remained around the house. Saplings had sprung up and threatened to reintroduce the wilderness. The house itself was a small cabin that showed signs of having been hastily built of roughly hewn lumber, with gaps stuffed with moss and dirt. It was a settlement barely keeping the wilderness at bay. The wife of the family was evidently exhausted. Her face revealed ‘‘both melancholy and joy,’’ reflecting both the trials and rewards of her tasks in the frontier (733). The husband exhibited trials of his own as well. Although he formally enjoyed the status of head of the household, Tocqueville does not present him as a particularly privileged figure. Tocqueville suggests he was socially inept; when the travelers initially approached the house the husband did not come forward to greet them. Once they came inside his house he extended his hand in a formal gesture of greeting, asked them the requisite questions, and answered their questions politely but perfunctorily. He was not gracious, and Tocqueville notes that he was ill at ease: ‘‘Why was it that, while he was thus kindly bent on aiding us, in spite of ourselves we felt our sense of gratitude frozen? It was because he himself, in showing his hospitality, seemed to be submitting to a tiresome necessity of his lot and saw in it a duty imposed by his position, and not a pleasure’’ (701). In this glimpse of frontier life it is clear that conditions were hard for women, but they were not much better for their husbands. Both men and women, in their legal statuses as husbands and wives, had duties to fulfill for a greater good, to eke out an existence in the encroaching wilderness, to raise the unruly children who would become the future settlers who would claim this land for the United States. The puzzling end of the sprightly American girl’s descent into passive wife can be explained not by the hierarchy of the marital relation but by this account of the frontier experience of new settlers. The master of the house may have authority over others in the household, but he does not seem to enjoy any great privilege for this status. He is fixed with a status just as his wife is. Tocqueville’s recording of the encounter indicates that this frontiersman, who enjoyed the privileges the status of head of household, also bore its obligations. At the same time that Tocqueville conveys the husband’s role as a series of chores, he shows the husband living up

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to those obligations, as burdensome as they may be. The source of that fortitude is found in ‘‘the key to almost the whole work’’ (32). Both husband and wife have given up their East Coast comforts for the thankless job of settling the frontier, with the fruits of their labors to be enjoyed by others, either of future generations or elsewhere in the more comfortable East, but it was their East Coast pedigree that fortified them for the frontier. In ‘‘Concerning the Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of Anglo-Americans,’’ Tocqueville comments that in the American West, new inhabitants were arriving without the law and social system of the New Englanders, noting, ‘‘There are inhabitants already in the new states of the West, but not as yet a society’’ (55). The lack of law and order was not devastating to the project of westward expansion, however, because the settlers that Tocqueville illustrates in the appendix are originally from New England (732). In this chapter, which contained ‘‘the germ of all that is to follow and the key to almost the whole work,’’ Tocqueville made it plain that Anglo-American New Englanders were the key to American success (32). He admired their work ethic, their laws, and their mores (34–35, 43, 47). For the national project of Western settlement to succeed, some Americans would have to live up to the legal status and the character formation offered by New England mores. Tocqueville expounded on the resources of New Englanders with his discussion of the diversity of Anglo immigrants who settled in different regions. Those English immigrants who settled in the South became susceptible to their own erosion of character under the system of slavery, illustrated in his description of a trip down the banks of the Ohio River. Relying once again on starkly drawn characterizations, he recalls seeing, to the left, uncultivated land that was ready to be swallowed up by returning forests, indicative of the idleness of its (Anglo) citizens in the slave state of Kentucky. To the right is the free state of Ohio, from which he hears a ‘‘confused hum’’ and sees all the signs of a robust economy (345–48). Tocqueville attributed this vibrant activity to the legacy of the Puritans, whom he admired for fostering greater levels of education and enlightenment in the areas they settled. Their strong moral codes were internalized by citizens. In New England, the laws reflected the great ideas of the time by the process of generation, beginning with local government and only then moving upward to larger national levels. New England mores could serve the American democratic project, and, individually, men and women would serve by fulfilling their roles. He anticipated that the Anglo New England set-

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tlers, as opposed to the Anglo southerners, whose work ethic had atrophied under the conditions and mores of a slaveholding economy, would instill the fortitude to withstand the difficult conditions of settling. Those New Englanders would raise children who would be ‘‘full of health, high spirits, and energy; they are the true children of the wilds’’ (732). The respective roles and obligations of the husband and wife in the frontier cabin impelled them to stay and persevere, raising children who would be even better suited for the conquest to come. During the transition period in western settlement, in the absence of a situated sociolegal system, the character that was the product of the New England sociolegal system would suffice as long as the New Englanders continued to practice their well-worn mores, even if it felt like a chore. The husband in the cabin, so ill at ease with his guests, exercised mores even if he did not enjoy them. The task of the parents in the cabin was to uphold such mores and their roles until their even heartier children conquered the West. Tocqueville’s account of the frontier revealed the public purposes of the household. Every family member worked to fill his or her respective role, to maintain certain character traits in order to sustain the family, which in turn would contribute to the success of the nation. In his attention to the social institutions and mores that characterize and sustain American democracy, he recognized and recovered women’s experiences and roles in the democratic order. His attention to women’s roles provides for a more contextualized understanding of women’s experience as subjugated political subjects and a broader acknowledgment of their place in democratic processes. Although formally excluded from many political rights at the time, women were not excluded from Tocqueville’s democratic theory. He locates the source of women’s subjugation in the common law legal traditions that provided the rules and authority for status relations. These rules effected obligations that, in turn, served national purposes. The nation depended on women’s roles and men’s roles as well. A feminist appropriation of the dynamic that Tocqueville identifies can acknowledge women’s roles in a democracy and place them in context so as to make institutions of oppression part of political concerns.

Perils of Essentialism Bringing women’s various roles to the foreground can detract from the political project when the articulation of the subject position itself be-

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comes the focus of feminist politics. Late twentieth-century feminist theories sought a number of ways to acknowledge the experiences of women in order to draw attention to the social institutions that oppressed them. Feminist standpoint theory offers an account of women’s experience, rendering transparent women’s ‘‘particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy.’’36 As Nancy Hartsock has explained, the initial purpose of the enterprise was to develop a theory that would recognize situated perspectives and use them to strike at relations of power.37 The subsequent critical charges of feminist standpoint theory’s essentialism, privileging of women’s accounts, and truth claims invited internal epistemological debates.38 Justice, not truth, was the goal, but standpoint theory nevertheless became susceptible to charges of essentialism in presenting a homogenous woman’s experience. Linda Zerilli points out that the ‘‘craving for generality’’ in feminist theories of the 1980s and early 1990s produced inquiries into what was meant by the ‘‘woman’’ of feminist standpoint theory in order to articulate shared concerns of women as a group. The assumption of shared experience was devastated as feminist politics contended with differences among women.39 Third-wave feminist theories have offered a means to recognize context and roles without becoming trapped in claims of essentialism or seeing difference as a problem. Critically, these feminists seek the conditions and posture that promote a politics of emancipation. When the subject sees her subject formation as determined by agencies outside herself and seeks to break free of those agents, she unwittingly stifles her own emancipation.40 Wendy Brown captures this dynamic in her identification of ressentiment in identity politics, in which the subject defines her political identity on the basis of a group-based injury.41 In urging an emancipatory politics, Brown reconsiders familiar feminist projects such as legislative protection and identity politics. The desire for recognition and relief of injury reflects an ‘‘impulse to inscribe in the law and in other political registers its historical and present pain rather than conjure an imagined future of power to make itself.’’42 Sharing a concern for emancipation, Zerilli points to the practice of expressing freedom within the very norms of gender that constitute the subject. Gender roles and norms provide the context within which the quest for freedom takes place. Rather than attempt to break free of those roles, the subject finds freedom within them, through their disruption, resistance, and appropriation, and, in the process, employs creative acts of imagination.43 With a feminist understanding of creative engagement

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in status, we can return to Tocqueville, taking advantage of his attention to and reliance on gender for feminist purposes. An example presents itself in the familiar account of a white girl accompanied by a Native American and black woman in the chapter ‘‘The Three Races That Occupy the United States,’’ at the end of volume 1.44 The descriptions are emblematic, with the child enjoying the privileges of her race and not yet the civil disabilities of her gender, the black woman compliant, and the Native American woman independent. In presenting such stereotypical portraits, Tocqueville places race as central to the story of national development. Indeed, the chapter ends with his speculations on economic development and prospects for the Union. Race and gender were institutional constructs with national purposes. By paying attention to the roles that different democratic subjects play, the feminist can demand recognition of these roles and make them the site of democratic engagement and reimagining. Caricatures are susceptible to their own fracture if they get carried away with their own stereotypes. As such, caricatures can invite critical reflection, which is useful, considering that Tocqueville’s caricatured depiction of the perils of extreme equality in America continue to be salient in an anti-American feminism.45 Some French feminists in the Psych et Po movement in the 1970s, and others in the 1980s, decried the excessive ideology of American feminism that resulted in the phenomena of political correctness and desexualization of social relations between men and women. In contrast, French critics have referenced a distinctly French feminism that avoids the category of gender, a distinctly American phenomenon. In explaining the harmonious relations between the sexes in France, Mona Ozouf cites the remnants of the Old Regime, which redeem the excesses of democracy. To avoid any reproduction of patriarchal domination by the retention of this aristocratic legacy, she draws upon the revolutionary principle of change, albeit tempered by patience.46 French feminism, then, is cast as a temperate ideology in keeping with French mores, rather than the imposition that American feminism appears to be from the newspaper stories of political correctness and sexual harassment that cross the Atlantic. Eric Fassin notes the apparent contradiction of a feminism that claims both the ancien re´gime and the Revolution. He explains that this is no paradox, but, rather, an expression of the inevitable tension in feminism. Fassin sees Ozouf’s juxtaposition of American to French feminism as resting on available national scripts. In describing American feminism, Ozouf has generated a caricature based

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on one strand of American feminism. The juxtapositions of universal versus particular and equality versus difference that she erects between French and American feminisms are more accurately understood as resting in tension within each nation’s feminist movements. While such cross-national comparisons can redraw national stereotypes and impede the recognition of complexity, Fassin sees such caricatures themselves as amenable to politicization. This distinction between France and America invites further inquiry into the construction of gender. Starting from polemics, no matter how overdrawn, Fassin explains, can lead to the unsettling of complacencies about gender within each country.47 Attending to racial and gender differences offers the additional benefit of serving as a corrective to the tendencies of democracy that so worried Tocqueville. The political inclusion of women and the multiplicity of their experiences guards against the tendency for democratic citizens to think of themselves as alike. Aurelian Craiutu attends to the ‘‘empire of general ideas’’ that Tocqueville identified as a result of the loss of aristocratic order and a fixed class system. Living under fairly similar conditions, democratic citizens come to think the same way, leading to a democratic tyranny.48 Under such conditions, diversity and pluralism emerge as the corrective force, preventing any single idea from dominating, thereby serving as the ‘‘essential ingredient of liberty.’’49 Feminist readings point out that plenty of differences persist in a democracy, with race and gender standing out as the obvious markers of status. Women’s assertion of differences, and of multiple differences, obviates the tyranny of democratic sameness, serving as a substitute for the intractable difference of aristocratic classes. Feminist readings can, additionally, make productive use of those differences for political purposes. Pluralism offers a weak diversity, presenting difference as superficial or, where taken seriously, as destructive of common ground. Zerilli’s account of plurality in the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective offers a model of irreconcilable differences that foster democratic practices and a path toward freedom. Rather than assert their differences of group identity, members of the collective expressed their individual differences of taste. Unlike the crisis wrought by difference in American feminism, the Italian experience made political use of unresolvable difference. The introduction of intractable difference and judgment led to a ‘‘practice of disparity,’’ with the community drawing upon norms that constituted a community that rested on difference.50 Such a community is in keeping with Tocqueville’s participatory genera-

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tion of concepts, which relies on a common concept that itself rests on admitted difference. As such, a generative theory of equality can be produced out of the multiplicity of men’s and women’s experience that are irreconcilably different and yet come together through practice rather than a forced notion of community.

A Generative Theory of Equality To begin a generative theory of equality, one should follow Tocqueville’s instructions to go back and look at the baby in his mother’s arms. This is the metaphor that Janara references to point to Tocqueville’s psychological grappling with the maturing of the child (the American democracy) separating from its mother (aristocracy). In keeping with a politics of emancipation, however, the depth of gendered imagery need not stand in the way of freedom. The feminist can contend with the reality of this gendered metaphor by appropriating it. Tocqueville looked back at the infant that would become the man to identify the birth of the idea, but the feminist could acknowledge that a mother holds that baby, extending the metaphor to point out that the subject cannot be conceived in isolation. The feminist approach can see the birth of the idea of equality in the network of relations in which individuals do find themselves in their most intimate experiences. In doing so, a feminist analysis can reinterpret the conception of an idea. Minow offers one such illustration with her identification of social feminists’ privileging of connection as an alternative to autonomy in conceptions of American rights.51 In seeing how the outside world is first reflected in the still-hazy mirror of the child’s mind, the feminist can, once again, exploit the psychoanalytic account by being creative with the imagery. The outside world is reflected in the child’s most intimate relations, and in the same vein, equality begins at the level of relations. Certainly the dynamics of the household are influenced by the external norms, but families may organize their members, their labor, and their relations in myriad ways. Family arrangements might consist of a man and woman, a woman and woman, adult sisters, a grandmother and grandchildren, a single woman and her children, and so on. The relations have grown out of their life experience and not out of any imposed standard. Generation of equality can be iden-

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tified by recognizing how the household negotiates its relations with the outside world. Families might construct their own work schedules, disbursement of health benefits, and wages that affect the labor within the family and the power dynamics within it. External influences may permeate the family, but their reception might be filtered through the family’s experience. Families can benefit, cope, resist, and manipulate the external influences that enter their household. Considering the first examples that strike the child’s attention and listening to the first words that awaken his dormant powers of thought, the feminist can ask questions that Beard knew must be asked eventually: How is equality enacted within these relations at even the most intimate and mundane levels of experience? Do family members treat one another with respect? Is labor divided fairly? Is work valued? Is work recognized as the labor that it is? Is work compensated? Finally, taking notice of the first struggles the child has to endure, the questioning can continue: How is power negotiated within these relations? Are the external privileges mirrored in the household? Or do different privileges and seats of power emerge within the family? The course of this process can bring contradictions and inequities to the foreground. Tocqueville’s frontier family was fulfilling its collective obligations in service to national development, which was itself an imperialist project of conquest. The frontier family’s progeny would displace indigenous families and tribes. Through reflection on one’s immediate role and its relation to larger national purposes, rather than through receipt of a mythic narrative of national purposes, the costs and the wielding of power become more apparent. ‘‘Only then,’’ Tocqueville advises, ‘‘will you understand the origins of the prejudices, habits, and passions which are to dominate his life. The whole man is there, if one may put it so, in the cradle.’’52 Bringing household labor into play may seem to reproduce stereotypes. Drawing attention to them, however, acknowledges their presence and purposes in an egalitarian society. The generative process confronts the ongoing gendered division of labor and presents the opportunity to challenge and resist its connotations. The denigration of dependency and household labor is a product of historical development in which connotation has been constructed and can be reconstructed.53 Although such features may well be disparaged, democratic processes can bring any prejudices forward as a product of experience and culture and lay bare the constructed feature of such prejudices. A generative construction of equality can also displace the attachment of gendered status to the roles and functions of

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private life. There is no single meaning of mother or caretaker if there is a multiplicity of meaning. There is no fixed meaning of woman and there is no fixed meaning of equality. The meaning of equality emerges from the shared value that individuals have constructed and to which they have formed attachment. Rather than relegate those caretaking and relations to the private sphere, these features can be normalized as roles and relations that are deserving of the equality of conditions. Someone has to wash the floors and change the baby’s diaper. Someone has to tend to elderly parents and to disabled children. These need not be tasks that are denigrated, unremunerated, and detrimental to one’s political identity. By acknowledging these roles and building a definition of equality from engagement in the roles and relations, the definition of equality sheds its abstraction and becomes constructed through engagement with these roles and relations, reflecting the experiences of the polity and fostering an attachment by its presence in mores and in laws. Multiple meanings can converge, as the felt experience of equality comes to be one that all people share, even in their discrete experiences. The concept is valued because each person has come to value it through his or her own lens and needs.

Emancipating the Subject While the generation of the concept of equality as a feminist project can be rendered in keeping with Tocqueville’s democratic theory, there remains the fact that Tocqueville preferred liberty to equality or, at least, feared the abandonment of liberty when the zeal for equality overwhelmed it. Tocqueville was concerned that when equality competed against liberty for the affections of the people, equality would easily win, because it was the easier sell. Liberty requires more sacrifice than does equality; freedom’s benefits are only apparent over the passage of time, but ‘‘the advantages of equality are felt immediately.’’54 Feminist theorists have made strides in carving out a path for the pursuit of freedom under conditions of likely failure. While an engagement in status can be a transformative act, Vicki Schultz points out that engagement in status could merely reproduce that status unless political actors take advantage of opportunities. Their contribution to democratic generation of concepts is merely an exercise if institutions of authority

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do not listen to or act on those contributions. For Schultz, engagement in status becomes emancipatory when women tell ‘‘powerful stories: stories of power and pain, of passion and possibility; stories of need and neglect, of creativity and connection.’’55 Telling stories strongly can render power inequities transparent. Linda Zerilli locates the opportunity for emancipation in the newly thinkable. She cautions, however, that even the newly thinkable can invite its own closure when it becomes doctrinaire.56 Zerilli’s anticipation of an ongoing discovery of the newly thinkable reflects the importance of ongoing practice in an emancipatory politics. The pursuit of freedom lies in practice, not in a discernible goal. It involves taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves in context, rather than seeking to alter the context for an ideal goal. Likewise, Kirstie McClure suggests reconsidering theory as a verb rather than as a noun. Eschewing relying upon theories, or selecting from among theories, or awaiting an authority to hand down theories, McClure suggests a consideration of theorizing itself as an activity, ‘‘a contingent and located social practice without the security of foundations, as well as a political practice always implicated with power.’’57 In this sense, a generative theory of equality is not an instrumental tool to be wielded but a site of feminist practice, foregrounding the norms and rules that subjugate women and, simultaneously, offering the dynamics of a feminist engagement. In this framework, the doubts that equality can be realized, which so worried Mary Ritter Beard, feminist legal theorists, and Tocqueville, become less of a problem. The lure of equality, always promising but never attained, invites ongoing engagement and a politics of possibility. Its very unattainability provides the promise of the ongoing practice that a politics of emancipation relies upon. Such a statement, however, cannot escape the charge that a politics of emancipation detracts from lived experience and fails to address the harm suffered by women in the here and now. For every flight of emancipatory imagination there is a living, breathing woman who would benefit from the material gains of feminist politics, even if she sacrifices her freedom in the process. Catharine MacKinnon invokes embodied women with bodies that are violated and abused. Patricia Williams chooses not to give up on the purchase of rights, even as she accepts the skeptical findings of critical legal studies.58 Such reminders caution that the pursuit of freedom comes at a cost to the immediate and material reform that a less emancipatory feminist politics can bring. The pursuit of freedom and the struggle for redress and protection

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need not be mutually exclusive. Third-wave feminist theories have urged an engagement in context, encouraging political subjects to locate the possibilities for freedom within the structures of power that subjugate them. This notion of the creative possibilities of context can be extended to include those political practices, namely, the pursuit of equality, that present their own restrictions on women’s freedom in the form of political subjectivity. Women can engage in both gender status and equality doctrine, exercising their creative imagination and asserting their own stories within those constraints. By constructing concepts of equality out of practices and roles, feminists can simultaneously reimagine roles while bringing their material experiences to bear on politics. They can respond to the material concern for women’s condition while exploring the imaginative possibilities of a politics of freedom. Tocqueville expected that Americans would engage in a relentless and hopeless quest for an ultimately unattainable equality. When feminists encountered the limits of formal equality, they interrogated their theories, and their discourse today is leading in the direction that Tocqueville found more fruitful, toward the pursuit of freedom. Feminist thought is demonstrating that the option is not a choice between liberty or equality. Instead, feminist theorists suggest that the pursuit of freedom can take place within the pursuit of equality, so long as feminist practice takes advantage, time and time again, of the opportunities for freedom.

Notes 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper Perennial Library, 1988), 439–40. 2. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 7; Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 16. 3. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 592–54, 316–20. 4. Zerilli, Abyss of Freedom, 11. 5. Brown, States of Injury, 66. 6. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 31. 7. Ibid., 26. 8. Joan G. Zimmerman, ‘‘The Jurisprudence of Equality: The Women’s Minimum Wage, the First Equal Rights Amendment, and Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 1905–1923,’’ Journal of American History 78 (June 1991): 188–225. 9. Susan Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism Between the Wars (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981). 10. See Gretchen Ritter, ‘‘Gender and Citizenship after the Nineteenth Amendment,’’ Polity 32

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(Spring 2000): 345–75; Landon Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 11. Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (Boston: Viking Press, 1949; Beacon Press, 1957), 6. 12. Mary R. Beard, Woman as Force in History: A Study in Traditions and Realities (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 147. 13. Ibid., 152. 14. Ibid., 166–69. 15. Mary Becker, ‘‘The Sixties Shift to Formal Equality and the Courts: An Argument for Pragmatism and Politics,’’ William and Mary Law Review 40 (October 1998): 210. 16. See Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484 (1974). 17. See Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 18. Reva Siegel, ‘‘She the People: The Nineteenth Amendment, Sex Equality, Federalism, and the Family,’’ Harvard Law Review 115 (February 2002): 947–1046. 19. Mary Becker, ‘‘Prince Charming: Abstract Equality,’’ Supreme Court Review 1987 (1987): 201–47. 20. Martha Minow, ‘‘Forming Underneath Everything That Grows: Toward a History of Family Law,’’ Wisconsin Law Review 1985 (1985): 830. 21. Ibid., 836. 22. Brown, States of Injury, 139. 23. Ibid., 156. 24. Minow, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 22. 25. Ibid., 118. 26. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr, trans. George Lawrence (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995), 18, 47. 27. Harvey Mansfield, ‘‘Gentlemen’s Gentleman,’’ Times Literary Supplement, July 11, 1997, 15; William Kristol, ‘‘Women’s Liberation: The Relevance of Tocqueville,’’ in Interpreting Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, ed. Ken Masugi (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), 480–94. 28. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 460, 432. Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in the text. 29. Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. John Waggoner (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 1. 30. See Stephen Griffin, American Constitutionalism: From Theory to Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 31. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988). 32. Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 22. 33. Ibid., 187. 34. See ibid., 190–93. 35. See Linda Kerber, ‘‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,’’ Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 10. 36. Nancy Hartsock, ‘‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,’’ in Discovering Reality, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 284. 37. Nancy Hartsock, ‘‘Comment on Hekman’s ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’: Truth or Justice?’’ Signs 22 (Winter 1997): 367–74. 38. See Susan Hekman, ‘‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited,’’ Signs 22 (Winter 1997): 341–65 and comments from Nancy Hartsock, Patricia Hill Collins, Sandra Harding, and Dorothy Smith in that issue.

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39. Zerilli, Abyss of Freedom, 35–36. 40. Ibid., 10. 41. Brown, States of Injury, 27. 42. Ibid., 66. 43. Zerilli, Abyss of Freedom, 61. 44. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 320. 45. Judith Ezekial, ‘‘Le Women’s Lib: Made in France,’’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 9 (2002): 345–61. 46. Eric Fassin, ‘‘The Purloined Gender: American Feminism in a French Mirror,’’ French Historical Studies 22 (Winter 1999) 119–21. 47. Fassin, ‘‘The Purloined Gender,’’ 138. 48. Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003), 108. 49. Ibid., 110. 50. Zerilli, Abyss of Freedom, 98. 51. Minow, ‘‘Forming Underneath,’’ 891. 52. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 31. 53. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, ‘‘A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (Winter 1994): 309–36. 54. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 505. 55. Vicki Schultz, ‘‘Room to Maneuver (f)or a Room of One’s Own? Practice Theory and Feminist Practice,’’ Law and Social Inquiry 14 (Winter 1989): 145. 56. Zerilli, Abyss of Freedom, 63. 57. Kirstie McClure, ‘‘The Issue of Foundations: Scientized Politics, Politicized Science, and Feminist Critical Practice,’’ in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 365. 58. Catharine MacKinnon, ‘‘Points Against Postmodernism,’’ Chicago-Kent Law Review 75 (2000): 687–712; Only Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

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9 Imperial Fathers and Favorite Sons J. S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Nineteenth-Century Visions of Empire

Richard Boyd

Upon the publication of its first volume in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America instantly cemented his reputation as one of liberal democracy’s most discerning theorists. Interpreters have long debated the ‘‘strange,’’ even ‘‘aristocratic’’ tenor of his liberalism, and there is still disagreement about whether Tocqueville should be understood as a nostalgic aristocrat, a conservative critic of democracy, a strong participatory democrat, or a wary species of elitist liberal.1 But only in the past few An earlier version of this chapter was presented to the 2006 Western Political Science Association meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Thanks to Ewa Atanassow, Eileen Hunt Botting, Jill Locke, Cheryl Welch, and an anonymous referee for their insightful criticisms and suggestions.

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years have Tocqueville scholars begun to reckon widely with Tocqueville’s enthusiasm for empire.2 How could someone who defends so vociferously the cause of liberty in France, Britain, and America rationalize France’s colonial domination of North Africa? How could the author of Democracy in America’s most poignant chapter on the degradation of the Native Americans by their proximity to European civilization recommend a similar fate for the Arabs and Berbers of Algeria? Although the debate continues about whether Tocqueville’s colonialism contradicts his otherwise estimable liberal pedigree, the morally disturbing and intellectually paradoxical linkage between liberalism and colonialism in the minds of nineteenth-century thinkers in France and Britain has lately become a hot topic. Some postcolonial critics such as Uday S. Mehta, Bhikhu Parekh, and Tzvetan Todorov have gone so far as to claim that liberalism and imperialism are really just two sides of the same coin. Others have responded that Tocqueville’s colonialism represents an unfortunate and hypocritical departure from his liberal values.3 Despite these intellectual affinities between liberalism and empire, however, there are significant differences among nineteenth-century defenders of empire, and these differences are not unrelated to categories of interest to feminist scholars. In what follows I seek to complicate the generalizations of postcolonial scholars by contrasting the writings of John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, paying close attention to the ways in which issues of gender and masculinity play into their respective species of colonialism. Whereas Mill’s justification of the British Empire is consistent with his broader feminist misgivings about overbearing patriarchal authority, as expressed most notably in his Subjection of Women, Tocqueville’s imperialism entails the reassertion of masculinity over and against an excessively feminine domestic life. It is already well known that these two thinkers supported empire for very different reasons. For Mill, British rule in India is premised on the notion that some races are sufficiently ‘‘backward’’ that entire nations or peoples ‘‘may be considered as in [their] nonage.’’ Civilized nations such as Britain have a moral responsibility to govern them until they have reached an age of civilizational maturity. Despite Tocqueville’s flirtations with similar Enlightenment notions of a ‘‘mission civilizatrice’’ in his early letters on colonialism in Algeria, his defense of empire ultimately hinges on the national interests of France rather than the disinterested obligation to improve its Algerian subjects.4 While these two imperatives

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are not necessarily incompatible, Tocqueville unabashedly defends the Algerian colonies as the single ‘‘greatest affair of France,’’ both domestically and internationally.5 Nationalistic conquest and imperial grandeur are calculated to restore France’s status as the leading nation in European affairs. Scholars have documented these differences—and the eventual personal rift they opened between Mill and Tocqueville on the question of nationalism—but relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which their respective views of empire are permeated by gendered categories of masculine and feminine.6 Expanding on the work of postcolonial critics such as Mehta and Parekh, I concur that Mill’s justification of colonialism rests on historicotemporal distinctions between civilized peoples and those other backward, immature, and infantile peoples who need to be ruled over for their own good. Just as parents have a moral obligation to educate their own children for self-government, and the state a corresponding prerogative to involve itself in this tutelage in cases of orphans, runaways, and juvenile prostitutes, these parental responsibilities are incumbent upon nation-states. However, upon closer examination, one of the most striking features of Mill’s colonialism is the way he eschews any appeal to traditional understandings of patriarchal or paternal authority. His defense of colonialism rests on an understanding of parental responsibility—potentially shared equally by mothers and fathers alike. By way of contrast, I argue here, Tocqueville’s infatuation with empire is irremediably gendered in two respects. First, the causes of domestic malaise are rooted in a disorderly and feminizing breakdown of the rigid boundaries he seeks to maintain between public and private. Second and maybe most important, this breakdown can only be remedied by privileging international relations over domestic interests. ‘‘International’’ militarism, martial glory, and imperial conquest on the world stage may compensate for the ‘‘domestic’’ dangers of privatism, softness, and effeminacy. Like those bourgeois individuals whom Tocqueville condemns in Democracy for their apathy and isolation, France as a nation needs to put aside her domestic concerns and play a role on the stage of international politics. In this chapter I develop three distinct but interrelated claims. First, I argue, contra many interpreters of Mill, that his writings on empire are part of a broader and concerted effort to displace masculine notions of patriarchal authority.7 Although his appeal to parental authority does function as a way of generating invidious hierarchies between colonial

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and subject peoples, as Mill’s critics have correctly alleged, these writings simultaneously work to bridge or undermine differences between masculine and feminine. By way of contrast, as we will see, Tocqueville’s justification of empire is inescapably gendered as masculine on two separate axes. Tocqueville’s criticism of the bourgeois society of his own day is laden with assumptions about the disordering and transgressive nature of the feminine.8 Alternatively, empire demands the cultivation of manly, courageous, and heroic virtues that reaffirm masculinity. Last, and somewhat ironically, my third claim in this chapter is that despite Tocqueville’s appeal to empire as a remedy for the effeminacy, self-involvement, and bourgeois other-directedness of nineteenth-century French society, his own appeal to the performative dimensions of empire falls prey to these very same shortcomings.

Beyond the Imperial Father John Stuart Mill’s apology for the British Empire has been linked, especially by postcolonial scholars, to notions of progress, civilization, and rationality that are central tenets of his liberalism.9 In this view there is little or no contradiction between Mill’s liberalism and his colonialism. Indeed, liberalism and colonialism are ‘‘mutually constitutive.’’10 Colonialism is a morally justifiable way of dealing with other ‘‘backward states of society’’ that are not yet in a position to benefit from liberty and free discussion. Just as children are not entitled to the full range of freedoms enjoyed by adults who have attained ‘‘the maturity of their faculties,’’ so too entire nations or peoples may be treated as veritable children, as if ‘‘the race itself may be considered as in its nonage.’’11 Given these civilizational disparities, it is the prerogative of adult, civilized nations such as Britain or France to govern them by force. ‘‘Despotism,’’ Mill famously notes, ‘‘is a legitimate form of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end.’’12 This reading assumes that there is continuity between Mill’s patently liberal writings on British politics and his more controversial advocacy of empire.13 We should recall Mill’s thoughts about the necessity of the state’s stepping in and forcibly exercising authority over children in Britain.14 In cases in which parental authority is nonexistent—orphans, run-

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aways, child prostitutes—the state must act in loco parentis and exercise an almost despotic parental power.15 So, too, for cases in which parents neglect their obligations to tend to their children’s education. In cases like these, Mill complains, one cannot appeal to a spurious liberty to neglect one’s children.16 The responsibilities of rearing a child are momentous, and the state must ensure that parents—fathers and mothers alike—take these responsibilities seriously. Analogously, so-called barbarous nations are like orphan children who have grown up wild in the streets without sufficient parental oversight. Because it is so rare to find an indigenous despot properly equipped to undertake the dual tasks of governance and civilization—a would-be ‘‘Akbar or a Charlemagne’’— nations so situated may need tutelage from abroad.17 These and other elements of his political theory have given rise to the idea that Mill endorses colonialism as a mission civilizatrice. Colonialism, in this view, is justified out of disinterested and cosmopolitan commitments to barbarous nations. With respect to the continuing British involvement in India, however, Mill’s justification echoes his account of political responsibility in On Liberty, which hinges on our self-appointed responsibilities to particular persons. One cannot be held to enforceable obligations to society or mankind as a whole, but we are undeniably responsible for those, like our own children, whom we have brought into the world as well as those to whom we have made some concrete commitment.18 Strictly speaking, the British are not the ‘‘parents’’ of Indians or Africans. However, especially in the former case, Britain’s responsibility to govern arises from her own actions, which have generated these particular obligations. Having involved herself in the lives of her Indian subjects—effectively orphaning them by displacing their indigenous government, traditions and institutions—Britain is now morally bound to carry through. Anything less than this would be to shirk what Mill calls a ‘‘distinct and assignable obligation.’’19 Just as in domestic child rearing, the parent nation must apply strict and potentially illiberal governance to subject peoples for their shortterm benefit. Like children, colonized peoples need to be scolded and sometimes treated harshly for their own good. Appeals to reason or exhortation are precluded by their backwardness.20 The second and trickier measure is to outfit them eventually for their own self-government. By introducing a ‘‘spring of spontaneous improvement in the people themselves,’’ colonial government ideally ‘‘facilitates their transition to a higher stage of improvement.’’21 Mill is clear about the parameters of the

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tutelage. It must be undertaken on behalf of the backward or immature people, who presumably benefit from proximity to and even assimilation into the dominant culture of the more enlightened nation: ‘‘Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and the feelings of a highly civilized and cultivated people,’’ particularly when the alternative is being left ‘‘to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world.’’22 But unlike those orphans, runaways, or castoff children of British society who each day grow closer to the age of legal majority, civilizational growth is uncertain and immeasurable. To brand an entire race as in its ‘‘nonage’’ may effectively condemn it to perpetual tutelage. Patience, Mehta has noted, is the main idiom of colonial time.23 Mill readily concedes the practical difficulty of this kind of imperial parenting for foreign powers with no knowledge of subject nations. Instead of these powers behaving as utter strangers who govern their wards like ignorant and insensitive foster parents, the relationship will ideally be one of parental familiarity. Good parenting requires one to know one’s children as one knows oneself, to ‘‘feel with the people’’ as if one has been ‘‘familiar to them from childhood.’’24 Anything less than this sense of trust born of familiarity will appear in the eyes of the subject people to be the rule of a harsh stepmother. Good colonial governance, like good parenting, demands the ability and willingness to ‘‘hear,’’ ‘‘see,’’ and ‘‘know’’ their dependents.25 By way of contrast, bad colonial powers, like bad parents, ‘‘have the feelings inspired by absolute power, without its sense of responsibility.’’26 Critics have emphasized how Mill’s theory of civilizational progress infantilizes indigenous peoples as backward and civilizationally immature. Much less has been said about how his metaphor constructs the role of parents. And yet Mill is explicit that one must behave like a responsible adult when undertaking such a momentous responsibility. Because failure amounts to being ‘‘guilty of a dereliction of the highest moral trust which can devolve upon a nation,’’ only ‘‘fit persons’’ and not the ‘‘stupidest son,’’ nor mere ‘‘youths of family,’’ are suited to govern India.27 Mill is well aware, however, that this has not always been the case. Speaking of the power assumed over their wives by ignorant and domineering husbands, Mill confirms the sad reality that ‘‘the less fit a man is for the possession of power . . . the more does he hug himself in the consciousness

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of the power the law gives him.’’28 As in Mill’s recommendation to strengthen a domestic bill to punish those guilty of violence against women and children by public flogging, such is the ‘‘moral medicine needed for the domineering evidence of brute power.’’29 This hatred of arbitrary patriarchal power is equally conspicuous in Mill’s suit against colonial governor Eyre of Jamaica for ‘‘butchery’’ and ‘‘torture’’ committed against British subjects, ‘‘without distinction of sex,’’ as well as in his serial complaints about parliamentary bills that sought to replace the authority of the British East India Company with the ‘‘despotic,’’ ‘‘indifferent, ‘‘inattentive,’’ and ‘‘unchecked power of a Minister.’’30 Rather than acting in a way reminiscent of mature parents exercising benevolent authority over childlike peoples, England has often behaved like ‘‘an ill brought-up elder brother’’ tyrannizing over its younger siblings.31 This rebuke is significant in two respects. First, it explicitly conjures up the familial metaphor for empire, implying the necessarily hierarchical relationship between ‘‘parent country’’ and ‘‘her colonies.’’ And yet what is striking about this passage is that it can also be read as a criticism of the paternal authority mistakenly invested in the patriarchal family. Not only is he not yet entitled to play the head of household, but the older brother whose misbehavior Mill indicts is guilty of mimicking the false and pernicious authority he observes in his father and prematurely claims for himself. ‘‘Think what it is to a boy,’’ Mill admonishes, ‘‘to grow up to manhood in the belief that without any merit or exertion of his own, though he may be the most frivolous and empty or the most ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact of being born a male he is by right the superior of all and everyone of an entire half of the human race.’’32 Mill’s complaint in this context is with the transmission of domestic patriarchy in England. However, his point seems to hold for the colonial context as well. Who are these Englishmen of the lowest and meanest sort who believe that their position as eldest brother entitles them to govern over well more than half the human race, men and women alike? By way of contrast, Mill argues, ‘‘among right-feeling and well-bred people’’ conventional inequalities between men and women are kept as much as possible out of the sight of children and ‘‘as much obedience is required from boys to their mother as to their father.’’33 Mill’s point again has to do with the rearing of children in the domestic context, but it has implications for his views on colonialism. Rather than as a patriarchal justification of empire—in which colonial powers act as fathers and are

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gendered as masculine—Mill theorizes colonialism in terms of a parental responsibility that is consistent with his objections to the patriarchal authority of husbands over wives and (uniquely) fathers over their children. Instead, in Mill’s view, this responsibility for leadership and tutelage is to be shared equally by husbands and wives. Repeatedly moving back and forth between a discussion of states and families, he insists that ‘‘the family, justly constituted . . . will always be a school of obedience to the children, of command for the parents.’’ And yet despite the natural hierarchy this relationship generates between parents and children, both in the domestic and colonial context, the family ought to be ‘‘a school in sympathy in equality . . . between the parents.’’34 Indeed, such equality between the sexes and the displacement of physical superiority by intellectual superiority are the most tangible markers of civilizational progress.35 Here and throughout, Mill’s (domestic) stance of liberal feminism gets cast onto the project of empire as a way of potentially critiquing and tempering the exercise of colonial authority.36 Once this temporary period of tutelage has been completed, Mill’s long-term vision is of a continuing ‘‘bond of connexion’’ between fully matured members of the colonial family. Empires are like extended families of grown children, whose only residual inequality is that the ‘‘mother country decides, both for the colonies and for herself, on questions of war and peace.’’37 Maternal compassion is ostensibly preferable to masculine bellicosity. The case of India proves a model for Britain on this point, as those ‘‘Hindoo’’ provinces ruled over by women are invariably better governed and more prosperous than those ruled over by men.38 Alongside the material advances the British have made in India, Mill singles out the special progress made in the rights of women, including the suppression of female infanticide and the practice of suttee, provisions for the remarriage of widows, and the establishment of schools for women—the last at the initiative of ‘‘some native ladies of wealth and influence.’’39 On Liberty links together notions of patriarchalism and civilization in other ways that are as puzzling as they are suggestive. In particular, Mill’s treatment of the case of the polygamous Mormons has generated much confusion. Here Mill rails against the idea of what he calls a ‘‘civilizade’’ against the polygamous Mormons ‘‘to put an end to what [some perceive as] a retrograde step in civilization.’’40 While agreeing that polygamy is indeed a rebirth of barbarism in the midst of the civilized world, Mill professes to be unaware that ‘‘any community has a right to force another to be civilized.’’41 This argument seems to contradict much of what Mill

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says on behalf of colonialism elsewhere in his writings. Why is the Mormon case any different from that of India or Africa? One explanation is that the Mormons are otherwise civilized persons who voluntarily, with full use of their faculties, choose to adopt barbarous practices. So long as they inflict no harm on others and individuals are free to exit as they please, Mill avers that those outside the community can raise no legitimate objections beyond proselytizing to them.42 Understood in this way, polygamous Mormons may be closer to those drunkards or spendthrifts in On Liberty who choose to engage in self-destructive behaviors than they are to barbarous nations such as India that have no indigenous recourse to improvement. A second explanation is that, as I have suggested above, Mill’s justification of the British Empire does not rest on an abstract idea of a mission civilizatrice so much as on concrete and particular obligations engendered by the British themselves because of their previous involvement in India. No such proximate obligations to uphold civilization exist in the case of the Mormons. Last, Mill’s position on parental authority may also help to reconcile this paradox. On the one hand, polygamy represents one of the most pernicious forms of barbarism because it symbolizes the rebirth of a patriarchal authority that Mill finds abominable. Polygamy is the absolute worst case of patriarchal gender relations. Nonetheless, outside powers have no justification for forcibly interfering because some kind of parental authority is being maintained. By and large, polygamous communities are not lawless and in need of despotic interference from outside. There is no need for external powers to act in loco parentis. Like those nations so fortunate as to be governed over by an indigenous Charlemagne or Akbar, polygamous communities are already in possession of some form of parental authority, even if, as Mill makes clear, it is a lamentably barbarous patriarchal form. In this respect the cases of India and the polygamous Mormons are polar extremes. For India, indigenous parental authority is ostensibly absent, requiring tutelage from abroad. For the polygamous Mormons, however, parental authority (albeit of the wrong kind) extends everywhere and is potentially all-encompassing, thereby warranting only admonition, exhortation, and enlightenment. In conclusion, then, Mill’s justification for empire metaphorically projects parental authority and childlike obedience, respectively, onto colonial powers and subject peoples. Because of their civilizational maturity (as a necessary condition) and past actions (as sufficient) the parent nation has an obligation to exercise temporary governance over the latter

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as well as to instill the foundations for their permanent and ongoing improvement. But rather than viewing them as being premised on inherently patriarchal or masculine prerogatives of fathers over wives and children, Mill theorizes colonialism as a parental responsibility potentially shared equally by men and women. Thus there is a clear connection between his domestic concerns to temper the patriarchal rule of fathers and his peculiar understanding of empire. A feminized empire is a way of overcoming the domestic dominance of masculinity. As we will see, although Tocqueville also assumes a connection between the domestic and imperial, the problem is reversed: the masculinity of empire becomes a surrogate for a triumphant domestic femininity.

Bourgeois Domestication Tocqueville’s views on gender and empire may seem to be wholly unrelated.43 However, I want to suggest that Tocqueville’s critique of the breakdown of the public/private distinction in France is the key to understanding his justification of colonialism. Establishing this claim requires two separate discussions. The first is to highlight Tocqueville’s complaints about the destabilizing influence of feminine domesticity in French public life. The second is to point out how the masculine exertion of empire resolves these pathologies. Tocqueville’s defense of empire is inseparable from his criticism of the bourgeois society for which he sought it as a remedy. I will take up each of these arguments in turn. Tocqueville is hardly the first to criticize bourgeois society as excessively feminine and depoliticized. From Molie`re’s seventeenth-century satires of the impotence and oafishness of the bourgeoisie to Rousseau’s eighteenth-century republican complaints about bourgeois effeminacy and the destabilizing role of women in the polity to the antibourgeois novels of Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola in the nineteenth century, the bourgeois lifestyle has been portrayed as a lamentable deterioration from the dignified manliness of the aristocracy, on the one hand, or the heroic political life of the republican citizen, on the other.44 Obsessions with money, vanity, and creature comforts make the bourgeois reluctant to undertake the sacrifices incumbent upon citizens. For Stendhal and other nineteenth-century critics of the languor of bourgeois society under the Restoration, the influence of public opinion and amour-propre, vanity

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and self-love, have resulted in a paralyzing effeminacy. ‘‘The young Parisians I know,’’ Stendhal complains, ‘‘appear rather effeminate to me, concerned only with the cut of their clothes, the elegance of their hats, or the question of how to tie their cravats.’’ Like his character Mathilde de la Moˆle in Le rouge et le noir, Stendhal himself cannot ‘‘conceive of a man without a little manly energy, without some depth and constancy in his ideas.’’45 Tocqueville gives poignant expression to this vision of bourgeois society in his Souvenirs, describing the years between 1830 and 1848 as a ‘‘labyrinth of petty incidents, petty ideas, petty passions, personal viewpoints and contradictory projects in which the life of public men in that period was frittered away.’’46 The capture of all political power by the bourgeoisie tainted ‘‘foreign policy as well as home affairs,’’ resulting in a ‘‘sort of universal shrinkage’’ and ‘‘marked lull in every political passion.’’47 Tocqueville’s reading of France in decline feeds into a widespread trope about the sickness, malaise, and degeneration of masculinity in the nineteenth century.48 Eighteenth-century dreams of moral progress give way to lapsarian nightmares of temporal decline.49 As Daniel Pick has suggested, ‘‘The course of political events in 1848, and then from 1848 to 1851, bewildered those liberals who had envisioned modern history as inexorable advance.’’50 Complaints about degeneracy or malaise within civilized nations are domestic analogues of the assertions of backwardness, imbecility, and feebleness attributed by those very same nations to rude or uncivilized peoples.51 In addition to the gendered critique of the bourgeois, there is also a long tradition of hypothesizing the political community in terms of a well-ordered family, and conversely, political turmoil in terms of matrimonial discord. As Lynn Hunt has suggested, the French revolutionaries painted Louis XVI as a bad father, denigrating him for his alleged impotence and his susceptibility to the corrupting wiles of Marie Antoinette.52 One of the most interesting aspects of Tocqueville’s reading of the July Monarchy is the way he draws upon this antimonarchical rhetoric even while recasting those same inadequacies as quintessentially bourgeois. Like the safe and methodical bourgeois classes whose influence brought him to power, Louis-Philippe had no ‘‘raging passions, or ruinous weaknesses, or striking vices.’’ He is most fundamentally ‘‘soft.’’ So sated by congress with his ‘‘mistress,’’ the middle classes, Louis-Philippe typifies the ‘‘languour, impotence, immobility, and boredom’’ that sapped ‘‘the entire political life of the nation.’’53

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Cheryl Welch argues that Tocqueville’s appeals to ‘‘manliness’’ and ‘‘virility’’ are not constructed over and against femininity so much as against the ‘‘servility’’ and ‘‘slavishness’’ he finds contemptible.54 L. E. Shiner has similarly observed that the aristocratic polarities of ‘‘grandeur’’ and ‘‘pettiness’’ set the parameters of ‘‘moral and psychological judgment’’ in Tocqueville’s Souvenirs.55 Nonetheless, it is hard to overlook the extended metaphors of matrimonial discord, infertility, and sexual impotence running throughout Tocqueville’s criticism of the July Monarchy. Louis-Philippe’s dalliance with the middle classes is described as a ‘‘marriage of vices,’’ or an infertile ‘‘union’’ that ends only in destruction.56 In contrast to other ages when passionate struggle among the different orders of French society gave birth to great and terrible things, Louis-Philippe’s doomed reign is impotent, feckless. Tocqueville twice invokes the metaphor of the self-absorbed paterfamilias who is shocked to awaken and find his household conquered by the sole element in French society, the lower classes, which retains any modicum of virility. Louis-Philippe ‘‘was like a man refusing to believe that his house had been on fire because he had the key in his pocket.’’57 Worse still, Louis-Philippe’s inability to order his own household bespeaks similar inadequacies in his public persona. When called upon to speak on formal occasions his speech is effeminate: a ‘‘rehash of the sentimental jargon of the late eighteenth century . . . Jean Jacques refurbished by a nineteenth-century kitchenmaid,’’ provoking only laughter and scorn from the real men of the assembly.58 He caves without a whimper in the face of the first stirrings of the February Revolution. Ignoring the passionate longings of the lower classes, he and other political men of the era succeed in sowing nothing other than the seeds of their own destruction. One can hardly miss the contrast between the languor, boredom, and impotence of the middle classes and the tremendous and disorderly, almost sexual, energy Tocqueville attributes to the lower classes that will culminate in the Revolution of 1848. Louis-Philippe’s failures as real and figurative head of household mirror those of his age. The languor and effeminacy of the July Monarchy are consequences of the transgression of essentially private elements—family, economy, sentimentality, salon philosophy—into public affairs. Evidence of this feminization can be found closer to home in Tocqueville’s own extended family. Andre´ Jardin has noted that relations between Tocqueville, his wife, and their in-laws had always been strained.59 However, Tocqueville’s complaints about his brother Edouard’s wife, Alexandrine,

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demonstrate how feminine sentimentality undermines the more refined sensibilities necessary for a dignified public life. ‘‘Characteristically,’’ Tocqueville complains in the midst of his recollection of the uncertain events of February 1848, ‘‘my sister-in-law had lost her head. She already saw her husband dead and her daughters raped.’’ For all Tocqueville’s rhetoric about the salutary and softening influence of women on mores in the United States, in revolutionary times a feminine sympathy and partiality for one’s kindred frustrates the ‘‘depth of feeling’’ necessary for more heroic public commitments. Bravery on the part of women is a great help and solace for their men in public life, but ‘‘a craven’’ woman, ‘‘even if she has the heart of a dove,’’ can be ‘‘a cruel embarrassment.’’ Even ‘‘the most respectable woman’’ must be regarded as ‘‘the worst citizen one could find.’’60 The paralyzing sentimentality of ‘‘respectable’’ women such as Alexandrine de Tocqueville is problematic, but the real danger comes from those shameless and disorderly women of the lower classes who threaten even the hardiest of men. As Neil Hertz has suggested, Tocqueville’s portrayal of the June Days is haunted by Medusa-like images of women who challenge male courage and virility. The entire physiognomy of political crisis is written in the ‘‘frightful and hideous’’ face of ‘‘an old woman with a vegetable cart’’ who ‘‘stubbornly barred’’ Tocqueville’s way before rushing at him with such ‘‘sudden frenzy that [he] had trouble defending himself.’’61 Pistol in pocket, Tocqueville easily stares down the drunken doorkeeper who had mumbled threats on his life, but his friend Blanqui hardly dares to remove from his own household a ‘‘vainglorious’’ little servant girl who shamelessly announces that soon she will be one of those ‘‘ ‘who will wear the lovely silk dresses.’ ’’62 Abominable lower-class women challenge masculinity directly and shamelessly, while more ‘‘respectable’’ women like Tocqueville’s sister-in-law Alexandrine undermine the potency of their husbands from within the household. Most alarming is the dawning recognition that ‘‘even the places where we thought we were the masters were creeping with domestic enemies.’’63 The paterfamilias is besieged even in his own domicile.

Mother Nations and Favorite Sons The Souvenirs abounds with complaints about masculinity being undermined by the blurring of boundaries between public and private, mascu-

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line and feminine, but Tocqueville’s writings on empire are themselves rife with similar metaphors of family and gender.64 His earliest writings on nationhood and colonization are littered with what Anne McClintock has described as the ‘‘family trope’’ of nationalism, which simultaneously configures the French nation as a feminine ‘‘motherland’’ even while suggesting that its feminine attributes are limiting conditions on colonial expansion.65 In his 1833 essay ‘‘Some Ideas on the Reasons Preventing the French from Having Good Colonies,’’ he alleges that French family life and love of creature comforts are barriers to colonial aspirations. The ‘‘domestic tendencies’’ of the French lead the average citizen to cling to the ‘‘tranquil pleasures’’ of the ‘‘domestic hearth,’’ ‘‘familial bliss,’’ and the familiar sights and scenes of his ‘‘motherland.’’ ‘‘The land [la terre] is the natural theater of his power and glory.’’ Such sentiments are part of the ‘‘nation’s genius that seem invariably opposed’’ to the passions required for imperial grandeur. The ‘‘motherland’’ has to overcome her separation anxieties whenever ‘‘she sends some of her children to seek their fortune in another hemisphere.’’ After the apron strings are severed, however, this very same colonist is ‘‘suddenly possessed by an insatiable need for action, violent emotions, vicissitudes and dangers.’’ Paradoxically, these heroic longings for adventure are opposed to the regular and methodical lifestyle needed to develop the colonies after they have been conquered.66 So on the one hand, then, the coddled son is beguiled by the charms of domestic life and filial affections for his motherland. Once liberated from these domesticating influences, however, France’s favorite sons quickly pass over to the other extreme of savagery and adventure. Speaking fourteen years later of the case of Algerian colonists transported to Africa to begin the process of cultivation and establishing villages, Tocqueville brags that ‘‘nowhere has he carried a soul more virile and, so to speak, warlike into the adversities and the dangers of civilian life.’’67 The word motherland (la patrie) signifies this ambiguity. Tocqueville’s metaphor in the passage above draws attention to the linguistic coincidence that la France, the land of one’s birth, is gendered feminine. La patrie is the mother who has given birth to and nourished her native citizens. This primordial relationship of nativity means that citizens will most assuredly give their lives to fight and die for her protection if she is challenged or their private homes and land are violated. And yet while empire conjures up these same patriotic sentiments of a nation united by kinship and familial loyalties, the project of colonization demands a

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separation from the land of one’s birth that would-be colonists may be reluctant to accept. Colonization along the lines that Tocqueville originally envisions for France’s North American colonies and later for Algeria—emulating the example of the Anglo-Americans in North America—requires a painful exile from the land of one’s birth. Mothers must say good-bye to their children, and sons must leave behind the maternal comforts of the domestic sphere. At the same time, the metaphorical suggestion that colonialism mirrors this inevitable rite of passage from childhood to manhood—both for individuals as well as for nations— lends a powerful naturalistic underpinning to the colonial project. Colonialism beckons as an alternate path toward what Laura Janara has described as ‘‘democracy growing up.’’68 Conversely, failure to become imperial precludes one’s becoming a true man. Despite its feminine gender, la patrie is etymologically related to the idea of both patriarchy and patrimony, the land as a gift of our fathers— from the Latin pater, for ‘‘fathers’’ or ‘‘senators.’’ Its masculine permutation is perhaps a more appropriate model for encouraging intrepid soldiers and settlers to put aside the feminine and domesticating influences of the motherland and make great sacrifices to advance her honor and glory. There is something not only masculine but also chivalric about Tocqueville’s understanding of empire. The emasculating and feminizing sway of la patrie and her susceptibility to la dećadence must be countered by the masculinity of le courage and le pouvoir. L’honneur de la France must be upheld by courageous young men prepared to fight and die for her reputation as well as her safety. This is not to say that Tocqueville condones any and all colonial exertions as exercises of masculine power and virility. His thoughts on empire are uneasily suspended between these very same masculine and feminine imperatives. Just as he is critical of how the domestic and feminine elements have overshadowed the masculine and international dimensions of French political life, there are analogous dangers of masculinity untempered by any domesticating and civilizing elements. The savage military rule imposed on the French colonies by Generals Lamoricie`re and Bugeaud is a case in point. Tocqueville condones the kind of Realpolitik colonialism demands. Burning villages, crops, and attacking civilian populations are the ‘‘lamentable necessities . . . to which any people who wish to wage war against the Arabs will be obliged to submit.’’69 Those who lack sufficient will or oppose these policies as inhumane are guilty of an excessive sentimentality that makes them unfit for the realities of

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political life. However, Tocqueville also warns that the savagery of military conquest needs to be tempered by the dictates of civilization and that strictly military imperatives must presently be subordinated to civilian government.70 Something like a domestic politics needs to be created in Algeria for the colonial project to be successful. Families, women, and children must be transplanted into the colonies before France can bask in the refracted glory of her colonial establishment.71 Absent the securities of the rule of law and something like a domestic politics this is unlikely to happen; France’s military victories will be squandered. There is little glory in the simple act of conquering militarily a pack of miserable ‘‘little barbarous tribes.’’ In terms of its military accomplishments France can only suffer humiliation if it fails or loses its resolve.72 The true glory and grandeur of the colonies will be visible only when France is celebrated in the eyes of the world for its success in transplanting civilization, wealth, enlightenment, and power to a continent where these elements were previously lacking.

Empire and Masculine Virility In light of these diagnoses of how France has been enfeebled by the domestic concerns of the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe, Tocqueville’s advocacy of empire comes into clearer focus. Undoubtedly Tocqueville has ideas about how French public life can be reinvigorated from within the nation’s borders. His domestic efforts on behalf of modest suffrage reform stand out as one way of incorporating the passion and energy of the lower classes into public life in ways that are moderating and educative.73 However, as we learn via his lionization of the American example, France lacks the traditions of local government and civic associations that allow American democracy to thrive. French politics are plagued by the lone constant of centralization, condemning the nation to oscillate between ‘‘alternate swings to license and to oppression.’’74 Like many other readings of nineteenth-century France as suffering from illness or degeneration, Tocqueville’s critique of bourgeois France is characterized by a sense of humiliation, malaise, and sexual inadequacy that can only be compensated for by grandiose public undertakings and sacrifices.75 As in his complaints about the deleterious effects of individualism in America, where the pleasures of domestic life become all-con-

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suming, Tocqueville calls for France to put aside its preoccupation with merely domestic concerns and to involve itself in larger, public actions. Ewa Atanassow has made the important suggestion that Tocqueville’s argument on behalf of empire parallels his argument in Democracy for public involvement as a way of combating the effects of individualism.76 In both cases, public involvement and the sacrifices it demands are ways of overcoming the isolation that threatens a bourgeois society. What may be less obvious is how this argument is undergirded by Tocqueville’s assumptions about gender, domesticity, and the separation of spheres. When Tocqueville alleges in Democracy that women become unseemly and masculine when they leave the household and enter into politics, the flip side of his claim is that men will become effeminate and ‘‘feeble’’ if they content themselves with the petty diversions of domesticity. Certain passages in Democracy could just as easily describe the predicament of France in the 1830s and 1840s as they could Tocqueville’s premonitions about America: ‘‘If the citizens continue to shut themselves up more and more narrowly in the little circle of petty domestic interests and keep themselves constantly busy therein, there is a danger that they may in the end become practically out of reach of those great and public emotions which do indeed perturb peoples but which also make them grow and refresh them.’’ A ‘‘cowardly love of immediate pleasures’’ may stifle those ‘‘sudden and immediate effort[s]’’ required to right the ship of state.77 If for women the domestic ‘‘circle of family and friends’’ represents a harbor or safe haven, for men it is an enervating trap or prison. One thinks of Tocqueville’s brief sojourn at his chateau in the Souvenirs. Although he fondly remembers this domicile as the site of his ‘‘tenderest and gayest memories,’’ he is so overcome by impatience to get back to Paris and the whirlwind of political events unfolding there by the moment that this otherwise comfortable retreat feels like a ‘‘deserted wilderness,’’ if not ‘‘the bottom of a tomb.’’78 Tocqueville’s affirmation of public life is deeply connected with his understanding of manliness. Masculinity simultaneously operates as both an essential characteristic that ostensibly signifies politics (ideas of ‘‘maleness’’ function to mark off and constitute the sphere of the ‘‘public’’) even while being a quality that is generated by engagement in public activities. Conversely, for a man to be purely domestic is for him to be rendered ‘‘feeble,’’ both because he performs a function that nature has ordained for women and because within the orbit of the domestic family there is the danger that men may fall too heavily under the sway of moth-

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ers and wives. Even outside the domestic sphere, as Laura Janara has pointed out, one’s masculine authority can be threatened by that ‘‘mistress of the world’’ public opinion as well by the despotism of bureaucratic ‘‘schoolmasters’’ who infantilize adult men by treating them like children.79 By way of contrast, civic engagement in America, like imperial conquest in France, gets cast as manly and aristocratic.80 Given the domestic debilities of which Tocqueville complains, his attention turns to international affairs. Here, too, he sees analogous difficulties to those he finds in French domestic life.81 Reflecting on his diplomatic endeavors after the February Revolution, Tocqueville laments that their ‘‘embarrassed and weak’’ standing made it impossible for the French to ‘‘play the main role as restorers of order throughout Europe.’’ ‘‘The French nation, which had once cut such a figure in the world,’’ seemed unable to rise to any position of authority or leadership out of a mingled sense of pride and timidity.82 After France’s defeat in the Napoleonic Wars and the indignities imposed upon her by the Congress of Vienna, the sphere of international relations seems an unlikely means of resuscitating French public life. Nonetheless, for Tocqueville, moving beyond the domestic scene and its tribulations opens up a larger arena in which the French nation might regain its vigor and potency. The grandeur of empire beckons as a powerful means for reordering French political life—emphasizing public duties over private and domestic interests—and resuscitating something of its political energy and grandeur. In contrast to many other nineteenth-century liberals who defended the colonial project out of a disinterested sense of responsibility, Tocqueville places the interests of France at the front and center. For a time he opines that the interests of colonizer and colonized are not mutually exclusive and that the colonization of Algeria might be accomplished by peaceful means such as assimilation and trade.83 After dismissing these early hopes as ‘‘chimerical,’’ however, he is explicit that when push comes to shove French national interests must predominate.84 These interests are twofold and intertwined at several levels with his assumptions about gender and the public/private distinction. First and most important, France’s interest in remaining a colonial power relates to its domestic rejuvenation. Because private concerns and domestic interests have adulterated French public life, the only way to restore grandeur and publicspiritedness is to undertake noble military conquests in North Africa and throughout the world. Empire represents a reassertion of the proper hierarchy of international over domestic politics, of public over private

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interests. Tocqueville concedes that in the short term the costs of dominating and colonizing Algeria may be expensive and may involve sacrifices on the part of industries and commerce in the metropole. Regardless of the economic costs of colonization or the objections of domestic interests, ‘‘it is not from a [merely] commercial, industrial, or colonial point of view that one must consider Algeria.’’ One must adopt ‘‘an even higher perspective in order to consider this great question.’’ In the face of this ‘‘great political interest that dominates all the others’’ it makes little or no difference whether France ‘‘must temporarily harm our various producers.’’85 Empire rests on a scalar that is fundamentally political rather than moral, domestic, or economic: ‘‘the principal merit of our colonies is not in their markets, but in the position they occupy on the globe.’’86 The position of France’s colonies, particularly in the Americas, may allow the French in better times to ‘‘take a principal part in the approaching events,’’ to achieve her ‘‘great destiny,’’ and to ‘‘play the role that her interest or greatness indicate’’ just as soon as ‘‘circumstances become favorable.’’87 Despite the allusions to new geopolitical dynamics, these changing ‘‘circumstances’’ seem to have as much to do with internal or domestic changes in French policy and attitudes. According to some, at least, because the ‘‘current epoch’’ is ‘‘consecrated to the necessary acquisition of wealth,’’ the present age is ‘‘ill-suited to remote enterprises’’ and ‘‘resists the execution of vast plans.’’88 But even if it is the case that ‘‘the nation’s fatigue, or rather the interests and pusillanimity of those who govern it, condemn us to remain outside the great theater of human affairs,’’ France ought nonetheless to ‘‘preserve the means of rising to it again.’’ Currently lacking the political will to go further in their colonial ambitions, France must at least manage to hold on to what it has ‘‘prudently acquired.’’89 Indeed, rather than being a legitimate reason for France to postpone its colonial ambitions and the possibility of acting on the stage of world history, the pusillanimous and bourgeois nature of the present age is all the more reason for pushing forward aggressively. Maybe the latter—the colonial avocation—can serve as a cure for the former— bourgeois malaise and the blind pursuit of wealth. Two elements of this 1843 discussion over the role of slavery in France’s colonies merit further comment. The first is the way in which France’s principled commitment to the abolition of slavery might serve as a proxy for military greatness. That is to say that there may be principled as well as strictly political reasons for France to take her colonial

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responsibilities seriously. The act of military conquest can encourage virtues such as courage, self-sacrifice, and public-spiritedness, but France’s true glory and grandeur will be determined by the uses to which the French put their colonies. Other colonial powers, including England, have taken up the mantle of the revolutionary ideals of the universal equality and rights of all people by abolishing slavery in their colonies. In addition to the prudential and strategic reasons for following suit, France may earn glory by rising to the moral challenge of abolition and, conversely, moral opprobrium if it fails to do so. The suggestion is that grandeur, honor, and greatness demand a principled commitment to the revolutionary ideals that are France’s major contribution to the world. Failing to live up to them, however, means that ‘‘she must resign herself to letting that standard of civilization that our fathers first raised fifty years ago pass into other hands, and she must finally renounce the great role that she had the pride to take up, but that she does not have the courage to fulfill.’’90

Empire, Performance, and Other-Directedness Here and elsewhere Tocqueville’s rhetoric of empire conjures up aristocratic notions of duty, honor, and magnanimity. Indeed, Tocqueville’s colonialism might even be cast as quasi-Nietzschean, representing a healthy affirmation of the will to power and human greatness in the face of the craven and other-directed nature of bourgeois society. However, one of the most striking—and ironic—elements of Tocqueville’s case for empire is the way in which he describes the imperial project in terms of a performance intended as much for the edification of the rest of the world as for the transformation it might bring about in France’s domestic life. France is repeatedly enjoined to step forward and ‘‘play a role’’ on the stage or ‘‘theater’’ of world history. In this light the call to empire looks less like a Nietzschean enactment of manly, aristocratic, and creative greatness than a reflection of bourgeois vanities, insecurities, and resentments. The language of performance and other-directedness is everywhere in Tocqueville’s writings on empire. For example, Tocqueville opens his 1841 ‘‘Essay on Algeria’’ by repeatedly emphasizing the fact that the ‘‘eyes of the world’’ are on France. Abandoning Algeria at the time when its

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influence on the European continent is waning would amount to a ‘‘clear indication of our decline.’’ Whether this is true or not, France would ‘‘seem in the eyes of the world to be yielding to her own impotence and succumbing to her own lack of courage.’’ ‘‘Any people,’’ Tocqueville notes, ‘‘that easily gives up what it has taken and chooses to retire peacefully to its original borders proclaims that its age of greatness is over. It visibly enters the period of its decline.’’91 The language of visibility and appearances is conspicuous in this and surrounding passages. France could only think about surrendering her colonies in Africa if she is elsewhere ‘‘seen to be undertaking great things in Europe,’’ rather than at ‘‘at time such as our own when she appears to be falling to the second rank and seems resigned to let the control of European affairs pass into other hands.’’92 In another context, Tocqueville warns that with the rise of democracy, public opinion becomes more and more the mistress of the world. Increasingly individuals have no sense of their own opinions or their own selfworth because they are only capable of deriving such judgments from other people. While an obsession with publicity and the pursuit of fame might very well serve as a spur to great endeavors, the sociological dynamic is most likely to be just the opposite. As the novelist Stendhal complains in Le rouge et le noir, fear of public ridicule saps any initiative, energy, authenticity, or courage. One would prefer to refrain from acting altogether, lest one embarrass oneself, than to act nobly or honorably.93 Something like this same obsession with public opinion haunts Tocqueville’s discussion of empire. On the one hand, these writings are deeply inflected with the aristocratic rhetoric of honor, courage, and responsibility. And yet on the other hand, there is a Stendhalian preoccupation with France as a nation ‘‘playing a role,’’ acting on the ‘‘stage’’ of world history ‘‘in the eyes of the world.’’ To invoke Rousseau’s categories, bourgeois existence is more about ‘‘seeming’’ in the eyes of others than authentically ‘‘being.’’ Tocqueville seems to share this criticism of the emptiness of bourgeois society and the niceties of the salon and so-called polite society.94 Undoubtedly he fears that France will behave in ways that are regarded as inherently dishonorable from the standpoint of traditional aristocratic values of courage, honor, and dignity. Instances of betraying cowardice, irresolution, and a lack of political will represent inherently dishonorable actions regardless of France’s status vis-a`-vis her European rivals. Even so, there is something disappointingly other-directed about Tocqueville’s under-

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standing of empire. As Mill grasps in his response to one of Tocqueville’s nationalistic outbursts, even ‘‘the most stupid & ignorant person knows perfectly well that the real importance of a country in the eyes of foreigners does not depend on the loud & boisterous assertion of importance, the effect of which is an impression of angry weakness, not strength.’’95 Scholars have attributed the origins of modern nationalism to a ressentiment that leads to belligerence and conquest.96 Tocqueville’s own nationalism seems tainted by this same sense of national insecurity and inadequacy. His nationalistic defense of empire appeals to elements that are undeniably relational, other-directed, and even bourgeois. His concern is less that France should avoid dishonoring herself than that she should fail to ‘‘cut . . . a figure in the world.’’97 He seems at least as preoccupied with what other nations will think of France—what her actions, or inaction, will signify to the world—than with what she thinks of herself.98 Empire is framed as a nationalistic and relational competition between nations for glory and power. France’s failure is another nation’s gain, and vice versa. The loss of Algeria means that Africa will pass into the hands of another European nation: ‘‘If they are not for us, they will be against us, whether they fall directly under the power of our enemies or enter the circle of their influence.’’99 Worse even than the strategic loss itself is the fact that such a misstep in the eyes of public opinion will result in France’s being ridiculed as impotent and doting.

Empire and Nineteenth-Century Understandings of Masculinity We have seen that there is a remarkable amount of conceptual and linguistic work being done by extended metaphors of family, domesticity, public and private, and masculine and feminine in these nineteenthcentury justifications of empire. This discussion yields several more general lessons for feminist scholars of international relations and those interested in gender in canonical political thinkers. First and foremost, this treatment of Mill and Tocqueville draws attention to the intimate linkage between domestic and foreign policy. A nation’s conduct in the sphere of international relations can be and often is regarded as therapeutic for domestic politics—whether this means tempering overbearing patriar-

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chal authority, in Mill’s case, or compensating for a lack of masculine grandeur, in Tocqueville’s. Second, this contrast between Mill and Tocqueville brings to light two different and mutually incompatible nineteenth-century visions of masculinity. For the erstwhile liberal feminist Mill, the omnipotence of the father figure needs to be challenged. Commenting on the British Empire is another chance for Mill to interrogate patriarchal authority in all its permutations and to assert the foundations of gender equality. Metaphorically stressing how empire is rooted in a parental authority that ought ideally to be shared by men and women equally, Mill both continues his domestic emphasis on liberal feminism and invokes ideas of femininity as potentially softening the nature of colonial rule. Despite this admirable critique of patriarchy, his metaphorical invocation of (an egalitarian) parental authority may also be tied to invidious distinctions between civilized nation-parents and their childlike dependents. The problem for Mill is that men and women are established as equals in and through their superiority to children. One might go so far as to say that Mill’s attempted subversion of the patriarchal family comes at the expense of reifying differences between parents and children, between colonial powers and their infantilized subjects. Whatever his difficulties, Mill does at least take seriously the illiberal and oppressive nature of the patriarchal Victorian family. Tocqueville effectively denies this reality by his almost histrionic complaints about masculinity in crisis in nineteenth-century France. Whereas Mill is vexed by overbearing and despotic father figures, Tocqueville is wary of disorderly and manipulative women. For the latter, then, empire becomes not so much a way of displacing a masculinity that is already present and dominant domestically (as Mill fears) but of reconstructing and cultivating the values of courage, virility, and disinterestedness that constitute an essentially male understanding of citizenship. This sense of masculinity besieged helps to explain the reactive elements of ressentiment, otherdirectedness, and insecurity that color Tocqueville’s writings on empire. Finally, and maybe most important, the preceding discussion complicates the ordinary view of nationalism and imperialism as nothing more than testosterone-driven sword rattling. Although it is tempting to dismiss nationalism and empire as monolithically masculine, the modalities of gender and empire defy easy classification. As we have seen, Mill’s theorization of imperial conquest is intended to be antipatriarchal and even pro-maternal. And even when empire is explicitly linked with man-

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liness and virility, as it is for Tocqueville, this may only be compensation for a masculinity besieged by transgressive femininity, rather than a reflection of an overconfident masculinity in search of convenient external outlets for glory and conquest.

Notes 1. Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Alan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhart, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Bruce James Smith, Politics and Remembrance: Republican Themes in Machiavelli, Burke, and Tocqueville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). For a thoughtful survey of the disparate political uses to which Tocqueville’s thought has been put, see Chad Goldberg, ‘‘Social Citizenship and a Reconstructed Tocqueville,’’ American Sociological Review 66 (April 2001): 289–315. 2. Those who have previously dealt with this question in Tocqueville’s writings include Mary Lawlor, Alexis de Tocqueville in the Chamber of Deputies: His Views on Foreign and Colonial Policy (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1959); Henri Baudet, ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville et la pensee´ coloniale du XIXe sie`cle,’’ in Alexis de Tocqueville: Livre du Centenaire, 1859–1959 (Paris: Editions du cnrs, 1960); Andre´ Jardin, ‘‘Tocqueville et l’Alge´rie,’’ Revue des Travaux de l’Acade´mie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 4th ser. (1962): 61–74; Melvin Richter, ‘‘Tocqueville on Algeria,’’ Review of Politics 25 (July 1963): 362–98; Michael Hereth, Alexis de Tocqueville: Threats to Freedom in a Democracy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), chaps. 2 and 3; Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism and in French Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jennifer Pitts, ‘‘Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question,’’ Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (Fall 2000): 295–318; Richard Boyd, ‘‘Tocqueville’s Algeria,’’ Society 38 (September/October 2001): 65–70; Cheryl Welch, ‘‘Colonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Evasion: Tocqueville on Algeria,’’ Political Theory 31 (April 2003): 235–264; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 3. On the consistency of liberalism and exclusion, see especially James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 63–68, 71–88; Uday S. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 77–114; Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity, especially chap. 3; Bhikhu Parekh, ‘‘Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill,’’ in The Decolonization of the Imagination, ed. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (London: Zed Books, 1995), 81–98. Those who contend, in the case of Tocqueville, for his hypocrisy and selfcontradiction include Richter, ‘‘Tocqueville on Algeria,’’ 363, 396–98; cf. Pitts, ‘‘Empire and Democracy,’’ 301, 313–16; Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968). 4. ‘‘Two Letters on Algeria’’ (1837), in Oeuvres comple`tes, ed. Andre´ Jardin, 18 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 3.1, 132, 146–53. Hereafter this work is cited as oc, 3.1. 5. ‘‘Contribution to the Debate over the Special Appropriations of 1846,’’ oc, 3.1, 298–300. 6. On the pointed exchange between Mill and Tocqueville on nationalism, see ‘‘Letter to John

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Stuart Mill, March 18, 1841,’’ in Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 149–52. 7. Among feminist interpreters it has become commonplace to discount the depth and success of Mill’s commitment to liberal feminism. Mill’s critics include Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 197–230; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 132–46; Zillah Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longmans, 1981), 113–44; Christine Di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). I cannot hope to tackle here the larger question of whether Mill’s liberal feminism is entirely coherent or satisfactory from a contemporary vantage. My point is the more circumscribed claim that within the context of his writings on colonialism, his appeal to parental authority simultaneously works to bridge differences between men and women even as it simultaneously functions to generate distance between colonial powers and subject peoples. 8. Here and throughout my discussion of Tocqueville is indebted to Linda Zerilli’s insights into the way the category of ‘‘woman’’ is regarded as politically transgressive and disorderly in the writings of Rousseau, Burke, and Mill. See especially Linda M. G. Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Much, though not all, of what she says of these other figures would seem to be true of the figure of woman in Tocqueville. 9. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Parekh, ‘‘Liberalism and Colonialism.’’ 10. David Armitage, ‘‘John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,’’ Political Theory 32 (2004): 602–27. 11. Mill, ‘‘On Liberty,’’ in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 14. 12. Ibid., 14–15; cf. ‘‘On Representative Government,’’ in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 453–54. 13. For a fascinatingly counterintuitive reading of Mill as much less liberal and inclusionary in his domestic politics, see Joseph Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Social Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Many of these complaints are presaged, albeit from a very different methodological perspective, by Zerilli, Signifying Woman, chap. 4. 14. Mill, ‘‘On Liberty,’’ 115–20. 15. Mill, ‘‘Contagious Diseases Act,’’ in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 21:368–69. 16. Mill, ‘‘On Liberty,’’ 116, 119–20. 17. Ibid., 15; ‘‘On Representative Government,’’ 454. 18. Mill, ‘‘On Liberty,’’ 90, 115–20. 19. Ibid., 90. For a more sympathetic appraisal of Mill on the imperial question, see Margaret Kohn and Dan O’Neill, ‘‘A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America,’’ Political Theory 34 (April 2006): 192–228. 20. Mill, ‘‘The East India Company’s Charter,’’ in Collected Works, 30:49, 51. 21. Mill, ‘‘On Representative Government,’’ 453–54. 22. Ibid., 431. 23. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 29–30, 106. 24. Mill, ‘‘On Representative Government,’’ 455. 25. Ibid., 455. In light of Mill’s clear and consistent admonitions, it is ironic that Mehta and others have condemned the inability of liberal thinkers like Mill to think and feel across difference. To be clear: I do not want to claim that Mill (or the British) actually succeeded in doing so. However, Mill’s complaints about the way the British have conducted their colonial policies and his opposition to parliamentary efforts to replace the British East India Company with a cabinet minister are sensitive to the importance of local knowledge. 26. Mill, ‘‘On Representative Government,’’ 458.

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27. Ibid., 454, 463–65. 28. Mill, ‘‘Subjection of Women,’’ in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 520. 29. Mill, ‘‘Remarks on Mr. Fitzroy’s Bill for the More Effectual Prevention of Assaults on Women and Children,’’ in Collected Works, 21:103–6. 30. Mill, ‘‘Statement of the Jamaica Committee,’’ in Collected Works, 21:424, 430; ‘‘Report to the General Court of Proprietors,’’ in Collected Works, 30:164–65. 31. Mill, ‘‘On Representative Government,’’ 448. 32. Mill, ‘‘Subjection of Women,’’ 558. 33. Ibid., 559. 34. Ibid., 518–19. 35. Mill, ‘‘On Marriage,’’ in Collected Works, 21:42. 36. The less sympathetic way of stating this, of course, is that Mill’s nascent liberal feminism comes at the cost of reifying hierarchies between both colonial and colonized peoples as well as (in the above-cited passage) between upper- and lower-class families. On this latter point as a challenge and entailment of Mill’s liberal feminism, see Zerilli, Signifying Woman, chap. 4. 37. Mill, ‘‘On Representative Government,’’ 451–52. 38. Mill, ‘‘Subjection of Women,’’ 529. 39. Mill, ‘‘Memorandum of the Improvements in Administration of India During the Last Thirty Years,’’ in Collected Works, 30:122–25, 148. 40. Mill, ‘‘On Liberty,’’ 102. 41. Ibid., 102. 42. Ibid., 102–3. 43. Indeed, the extant feminist scholarship on Tocqueville has focused almost exclusively on his views of women and the democratic family in America. The classic statement is Delba Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress,’ ’’ Political Theory 14 (May 1986): 239–61. Here and throughout I also refer to Laura Janara’s excellent work, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s ‘‘Democracy in America’’ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 44. Molie`re’s Bourgeois gentilhomme is the classic comedic presentation in the seventeenth century; the secondary literature on Rousseau’s views of the destabilizing force of women and the alleged effeminacy of the bourgeois is widely known, including Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of JeanJacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Zerilli, Signifying Woman, chap. 2; Penny Weiss, ‘‘Rousseau, Antifeminism, and Woman’s Nature’’ Political Theory 15 (February 1987): 81–98. Likewise, for Zola, Balzac, and Flaubert the archetypical bourgeois husband is a cuckold, and the safe, comfortable, bourgeois lifestyle leads to moral, physical, and sexual atrophy, particularly for men. Balzac’s Black Sheep features both an overbearing mother whose coddling of her son leads to the family’s ruin in Paris and an impotent bourgeois father and son in the provinces for whom economic accumulation becomes a surrogate for sexual gratification; Pe`re Goriot shows upper-class respectability ruined by adulterous women; Zola’s Pot Luck exposes the hypocrisy and degeneration that lurk beneath the veneer of bourgeois respectability; Nana is perhaps the clearest literary statement about the disordering and all-consuming nature of female sexuality; La beˆte humaine allows bourgeois sexuality to be eclipsed by the sadistic pleasures of adultery and murder; and The Lady’s Delight documents the cancerous nature of the bourgeois fetish of mass-produced goods. 45. Stendhal, Memoirs of Egotism, ed. Mathew Josephson (New York: Lear, 1949), 93; emphasis in the original. 46. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997), 4. 47. Ibid., 5. 48. Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford Uni-

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versity Press, 1993). On the emerging medical fascination with impotence in the nineteenth century, see Nye, ‘‘Honor, Impotence, and Male Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Medicine,’’ French Historical Studies 16 (Spring 1989): 48–71. 49. On the role of temporal decline in Tocqueville’s social and political thought, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 191–230. 50. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, ca. 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 57. 51. Ibid., 37–44. 52. Lynn Hunt, Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 48–52, 92–93. 53. Tocqueville, Recollections, 5, 10–11. 54. Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 190–91. 55. L. E. Shiner, The Secret Mirror: Literary Form and History in Tocqueville’s ‘‘Recollections’’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 20–28, 88–92. 56. Tocqueville, Recollections, 7. 57. Ibid., 11; cf. 64. 58. Ibid., 9. 59. Andre´ Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1988), 46–53. 60. Tocqueville, Recollections, 39–40. This criticism of the excessive timidity of women in the Recollections is both qualified and confirmed in Tocqueville’s praise of the unusual courage and dignity of the duchess of Orleans. Nor is Tocqueville himself unconcerned with the safety of his own family. 61. Neil Hertz, ‘‘Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria Under Political Pressure,’’ Representations 4 (Autumn 1983): 36–37. The passage cited from Tocqueville is Recollections, 145. 62. Tocqueville, Recollections, 142, 155–56. I am indebted for these examples to Shiner, Secret Mirror, 30. 63. Tocqueville, Recollections, 142. 64. The following discussion both parallels and departs in significant respects from Laura Janara’s fascinating suggestion that Tocqueville describes aristocracies as mothers who give birth to fledgling democracies that must be nurtured into maturity. See Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 10–27. Although Tocqueville does describe the aristocratic societies of Britain and France as the ‘‘mother’’ countries of American democracy and of the French colonies in North Africa, respectively, the metaphor seems to have as much to do with the historical fact that these ‘‘mother’’ countries both sent off colonies as with any consistent assumption that aristocracy is inherently gendered as feminine. In his more affirmative statements about aristocratic values, Tocqueville consistently stresses the masculine aspects of traditional aristocratic virtues such as duty, honor, glory, grandeur, and military valor. 65. On the work that can be done by metaphors of the nation as ‘‘family,’’ see especially Ann McClintock, ‘‘ ‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race, and Nationalism,’’ in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 90–93. On the broader contention that nationalism is gendered as masculine, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). 66. Tocqueville, ‘‘What Prevents the French from Having Good Colonies’’ (1833), oc, 3.1, 36–37. 67. Tocqueville, ‘‘Second Report on Algeria’’ (1847), oc, 3.1, 387. 68. Although a remarkable number of Janara’s descriptions of democracy in America seem to hold true for the French case, there is a cost of reading, as she does, the predicament of the French nation and its fledgling democracy through the lens of the development and maturity of American

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democracy. Unlike the (relatively) smooth transition of American democracy from adolescence to maturity, French democracy is the true metaphorical ‘‘wild child,’’ simultaneously coddled and neglected. As such, its maturity and passage into manhood is agonistic and troubled, demanding extraordinary measures and compensations. 69. Tocqueville, ‘‘Essay on Algeria’’ (1841), oc, 3.1, 226–27. 70. Ibid., 226, 228, 232; ‘‘Contribution to the Debate over Special Appropriations’’ (1846), oc, 3.1, 299–300. 71. Tocqueville, ‘‘Essay on Algeria’’ (1841), 251. 72. Ibid., 214. 73. On these efforts, see especially Edward T. Gargan, Alexis de Tocqueville: The Critical Years, 1848–1851 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1955), 79, 100–103, 106–7, 114–15. 74. Tocqueville, Recollections, 65, 170, 177. 75. On these readings of decadence as a medical problem, see especially Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, chap. 5; cf. Pick, Faces of Degeneration. 76. Ewa Atanassow, ‘‘La Plus Grande Affaire de la France: Tocqueville and the Colonization of Algeria,’’ paper presented at the Modern France Workshop, University of Chicago, February 24, 2006, 7–9. Atanassow treats this as an inherent tendency of democracy, rather than assuming, as I do here, that the more particular problem is with the bourgeois nature of French and (potentially) American society. 77. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper, 1988), vol. 2, pt. 3, chap. 21, 645. Cf. Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 2, chap. 2, 506–8. 78. Tocqueville, Recollections, 94. 79. Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 126–28, 133–37, 140–53. 80. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 4, chap. 7, 697. 81. Tocqueville, Recollections, 232. 82. Ibid., 239–40. 83. Tocqueville, ‘‘Second Letter on Algeria’’ (1837), oc, 3.1, 151–53. 84. Tocqueville, ‘‘Contribution to the Debate over Special Appropriations’’ (1846), oc, 3.1, 293. 85. Tocqueville, ‘‘Essay on Algeria’’ (1841), 254. 86. Tocqueville, ‘‘The Emancipation of Slaves’’ (1843), in Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 204. 87. Ibid., 206. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., 207. 91. Tocqueville, ‘‘Essay on Algeria’’ (1841), 213–14. 92. Ibid., 214. 93. For an extended treatment of this dynamic in both Stendhal and Tocqueville, see Richard Boyd, ‘‘Politesse and Public Opinion in Stendhal’s Red and Black,’’ European Journal of Political Theory 4 (October 2005): 367–92. 94. He describes in the Souvenirs his own awkwardness acting in public. Recollections, 81–83. 95. ‘‘Letter from Mill to Tocqueville, August 9, 1842,’’ oc, 6.1, 337–38. 96. See, for example, Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 177–88. 97. Tocqueville, Recollections, 240. 98. Here I am indebted to the arguments of Ewa Atanassow, even if my emphasis differs. For Atanassow, Tocqueville’s advocacy of empire has twofold significance: its therapeutic effects are both inner- and other-directed. However, while Tocqueville does envision empire as a way of bolstering the morale of French citizens by changing the way they think of themselves, this transformation is the consequences of where they see themselves relative to other nations. For an excellent account of this dynamic, see Atanassow, ‘‘La Plus Grande Affaire de la France,’’ 13, 24–25. 99. Tocqueville, ‘‘Essay on Algeria’’ (1841), 216.

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10 Tocqueville, Black Writers, and American Ethnology Rethinking the Foundations of Whiteness Studies

Alvin B. Tillery Jr. When they have abolished slavery, the moderns still have to eradicate . . . the prejudice of the white. —Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835 The Discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter indeed. —W. E. B. Du Bois, 1921

The whiteness studies movement is an interdisciplinary campaign in the academy focused on interrogating both the nature of whiteness as a social identity and its functions in American society.1 The intellectuals associated with the whiteness studies movement tend to place a few basic premises at the center of their research agendas. First, ‘‘race,’’ as Peter Kolchin writes in summation of the recent whiteness studies works in the field of social history, ‘‘is a social construct and not a biological fact.’’2 Second, The author thanks Eileen Hunt Botting, Cathy Kaveny, Vince Rougeau, Jay Tidmarsh, and Michael Zuckert (and his graduate seminar on Tocqueville) for thoughtful criticisms of previous versions of this chapter.

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the dynamics that gave rise to the race concept in America are rooted in its history as a slave society.3 Third, the structure of race relations under slavery and throughout most of American history since its demise has endowed whiteness with a distinct set of privileges that are generally foreclosed to members of other racial groups.4 Finally, most whiteness studies scholars argue that American history is best understood as a narrative of conflict between those seeking to reify ‘‘white privilege’’ in America’s economic, social and political institutions and those seeking to undermine this culture of white supremacy.5 The success of the whiteness studies movement over the past two decades has prompted scholars to establish an intellectual provenance for the movement’s core ideas. Most whiteness studies scholars rightly see the long tradition of commentary on the nature of race produced by black American intellectuals engaged in the field of ethnology between 1800 and 1935 as the precursor to their movement.6 Ethnology emerged as a distinct intellectual enterprise in America out of the racial and sectional politics of the Federal period. Indeed, white southerners intent on defending their prerogatives as slaveholders against the rising tide of abolitionism in the young republic generated the first boom in ethnological studies. The a priori goal of demonstrating blacks to be a separate and inferior human species that was incapable of democratic citizenship animated the first ethnologies.7 Black writers (and a few white allies) were quick to defend the humanity of their race against these charges with their own ethnologies. These studies often anticipated many of the elements of the constructionist approach to the race concept. Accordingly, this dimension of black ethnological writings is the only part of this chapter in American intellectual history that the contemporary academy does not completely dismiss as racist polemic. In this chapter I make the case that Alexis de Tocqueville’s exegesis on racial difference and race relations in Democracy in America (1835), like the work of the early black ethnologists, prefigures many of the ideas that animate the whiteness studies movement. Intellectual historians have already documented Tocqueville’s commitment to the view that racial identities are socially constructed.8 Conventional wisdom within the discipline of political science, however, holds that Tocqueville did not think systematically about the stark racial inequalities he observed in Jacksonian America.9 Against this dominant view, I argue that Tocqueville was among the first democratic theorists to identify white privilege

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as a social reality in American life. Moreover, Tocqueville’s notorious pessimism about the possibility of racial equality in Jacksonian America was not, as some have suggested, evidence of a thoroughly racist mindset.10 Rather Tocqueville’s pessimism was rooted in an understanding of the ways that America’s putatively democratic institutions reify white privilege—an insight at the core of the whiteness studies movement. The case for this interpretation emerges through a comparison of Tocqueville’s treatment of race relations in Jacksonian America to the writings of the leading black intellectuals who worked in the field of American ethnology during its highpoint between 1800 and 1935. This comparison will illustrate several similarities between Tocqueville’s arguments and these black writers. It also points to some of the ways in which there is greater affinity between Tocqueville’s arguments and those advanced by the scholars associated with the whiteness studies movement than there is between the latter and these black ethnologists. This is so because there is also an essentialist strain in the ‘‘black on white’’ tradition in American ethnology.11 Although Tocqueville’s analysis of racial difference is far from perfect, his status as an outsider in Jacksonian America seems to have allowed him to achieve an objectivity that few of his American contemporaries working in the field of ethnology were able to attain.12 The chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section, ‘‘From Black Ethnology to Whiteness Studies,’’ I provide context for the comparative analysis by tracing the evolution of some of the whiteness studies movement’s core ideas through black intellectual history. In ‘‘Tocqueville’s Modernist Theory of Racial Difference’’ I flesh out the parallels between Tocqueville’s commentary on racial difference, the black ethnological tradition, and the whiteness studies movement. In the closing section, I elucidate the chapter’s contributions to fields of whiteness studies and American political thought.

From Black Ethnology to Whiteness Studies There is a broad consensus among scholars associated with the whiteness studies movement that the writings on ethnology produced by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black writers are the foundation of their intellectual project.13 It is easy to see why this is the case. After all,

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black ethnologists developed two of the core ideas—that race is socially constructed and that the ‘‘white skin privilege’’ that results from racial formations in America undercuts democracy—that now serve as the foundation of the whiteness studies movement. These core precepts emerged very gradually over more than a century of black ethnology. Moreover, recent intellectual histories also make it clear that many black intellectuals working in the field of ethnology often maintained essentialist ideas about white people alongside their distinctly modern views about the sources of racial difference in American society. These findings provide important context for the discussion of Tocqueville’s commentary on racial difference in the following section. This is so because the comparison between the ‘‘black on white’’ tradition in American ethnology and the text of Democracy in America suggests that Tocqueville developed an account of the role that white skin privilege played in American society that was more systematic than that developed by most of his contemporaries. The earliest black writings on ethnology arose out of the necessity to respond to the white supremacist tracts that sought to justify both slavery and the disfranchisement of free blacks in the early republic. Consider, for example, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s 1793 broadside Narrative of the Proceedings of Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia.14 Although the pamphlet was primarily a defense of Philadelphia’s free black community against charges that it was responsible for a yellow fever epidemic that had swept the city earlier in the year, it also initiated an important strand in black ethnology by explicitly stating that the distinctions between whites and blacks in Philadelphia were socially constructed.15 In short, this was one of the first documents written by black Americans to argue that racial differences were a product of America’s social environment. Despite the fact that the tract did not ease racial tensions in Philadelphia, their constructionist approach to racial differences emerged as a mainstay in black ethnology in the nineteenth century.16 This notion that racial differences were socially constructed certainly took center stage in America’s first black newspaper. Samuel Cornish, pastor of New York’s First Colored Presbyterian Church, founded Freedom’s Journal in 1827 to defend the ‘‘500,000 free people of colour’’ against the ‘‘calumnies of [their] enemies.’’17 The fact that the correspondents to the new periodical spent so much of their intellectual energy defending the humanity of black Americans testifies to the hegemonic

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power that pseudoscientific accounts of racial difference had gained in American culture since Thomas Jefferson published his (now infamous) account of the subject in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781.18 The most common defenses to appear in Freedom’s Journal during its two-year run were historical in nature. In other words, black writers often filled the periodical’s pages with narratives that chronicled the glorious past of the black race in Africa. ‘‘Our now despised race,’’ Cornish wrote in defense of his people in the first issue of the paper, ‘‘were the inventors of different arts and sciences, while the rest of the now civilized world were sunk in darkness and ignorance.’’19 For Cornish, this fact alone stood as incontrovertible evidence that ‘‘all men are equal in nature.’’20 His ironic coupling of claims of black excellence with statements that pointed to the natural equality of races foreshadowed the development of the central paradox that would emerge in the black-on-white tradition in American ethnology in the middle of the nineteenth century. Freedom’s Journal also carried many essays that provided biblical antiphons to the Jacksonian era’s scientific racists. John Russwurm’s serial ‘‘The Mutability of Human Affairs’’ is perhaps the most important example of this vein of black ethnology. Russwurm, who was the first black person to receive a BA from an American institution of higher education, made two innovations in these essays.21 First, he ingeniously turned the narrative that black Americans were descended from Ham in the Genesis story about Noah’s Ark, which had long been a rhetorical cudgel that slavers used to justify their ‘‘peculiar institution,’’ into an argument against polygenesis.22 Second, he merged the social environmentalism that had become a tradition in black ethnology with the philosopher Samuel Stanhope Smith’s thesis that differences in human phenotypes resulted from exposure to different climates.23 The innovations that Russwurm brought to early nineteenth-century black ethnology went completely unnoticed by white America. The intellectual historian George Fredrickson argues that this was so because Smith’s variant of the climatist theory of racial difference had already fallen out of favor in mainstream intellectual circles more than a decade before Russwurm’s essay appeared in print.24 In other words, by the time that Russwurm published ‘‘Mutability,’’ white attitudes toward racial differences had already crystallized around the theory of polygenesis. Indeed, polygenesis had achieved such a hegemonic position in American culture by the 1830s that Samuel Cornish was forced to admit that even

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many of his white allies in the abolitionist movement were reticent about viewing blacks as ‘‘brethren in the same [human] family.’’25 Some intellectual historians have argued that this hardening of white attitudes against blacks is what led David Walker in 1829 to publish his landmark pamphlet An Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble to the Colored Citizens of the World, But in Particular and very Expressly to those of the United States of America.26 Many scholars of the black experience count Walker’s Appeal among a handful of charter documents in the black freedom struggle for two reasons.27 Walker, a free black born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1785, was the first black American to publish a broadside that urged free blacks throughout the United States to work together for their freedom.28 Moreover, Walker urged black Americans to view violence as a legitimate instrument for achieving this end.29 Walker’s Appeal, one of the first sites of black ethnology on whiteness, also presents a rich exposition on the construction of racial difference in America. Like Cornish and Russwurm, Walker challenged the Jacksonian era’s burgeoning currents of scientific racism by invoking black America’s ties to the glorious kingdoms of African antiquity.30 He also clearly articulates the belief that oppression was the root cause of the black race’s degraded state in America. ‘‘They [whites] beat us inhumanely, sometimes to the point of death,’’ Walker wrote of the slavers, ‘‘for attempting to inform ourselves, by reading the word of our Maker, and at the same time tell us that we are beings void of intellect!!!’’31 Thus, it is easy to see why Mia Bay, author of the widely feted history of nineteenth-century black ethnology The White Image in the Black Mind, describes Walker’s Appeal as the first pamphlet published by a black writer to interrogate directly the ‘‘character of the white race.’’32 Walker minced few words when delivering the results of his ruminations on this issue. ‘‘The whites,’’ Walker wrote in the first article of the Appeal, ‘‘have always been an unjust, unmerciful, avaricious, and blood thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.’’33 He also admitted that this long history of their ‘‘acting more like devils than accountable men’’ had led him to suspect that whites were morally deficient ‘‘by nature.’’34 In light of the fact that Walker argued against a scientific conception of racial differences when defending black Americans against the charges of white ethnologists, it is ironic that he argued that ‘‘nature’’ was responsible for the poverty of white America’s collective character.

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Perhaps Walker would have come to recognize this irony at some point had he not died under highly suspicious circumstances shortly after the Appeal appeared in print.35 Unfortunately, we will never know the answer to this question. What we do know, however, is that the tension between Walker’s desire to simultaneously use constructionist arguments to defend black humanity and essentialist claims to condemn white people would emerge as a paradoxical mainstay in black ethnology in the 1840s. Politics played an important role in leading black intellectuals to push the line that whites were naturally predisposed toward evil in the 1840s. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1842 case Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the first application of the fugitive slave clause in the U.S. Constitution to a northern state, exposed the fundamental limits of ‘‘moral suasion’’ as a strategy for eradicating slavery.36 In the wake of the disinterest with which most white northerners greeted the decision, black intellectuals began to seriously reevaluate their fundamental assumptions about the souls of most white Americans. Moreover, the fact that so many white Americans embraced the new scientific theories of racial differentiation popularized by Dr. Samuel Morton in his Crania Americana (1839) further convinced black intellectuals that the field of ethnology was again an important site of struggle.37 Martin Delany emerged as the most forceful proponent of this view during the years of intersectional strife leading up to the Civil War. A free black who was one of the first blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School, he was particularly well prepared to take part in the discourse of American ethnology in the middle of the nineteenth century.38 This was so because the publication of Morton’s work, which argued that blacks were inferior because their skulls were on average smaller than those of subjects belonging to other racial groups, established the scientific method as the basis for generating knowledge in the field.39 We now know that Morton’s data, in the words of the esteemed biologist Stephen Jay Gould, ‘‘was a patchwork of fudging and finagling in clear interest of controlling a priori [racist] convictions.’’40 Moreover, James McCune Smith, who was the first black American to earn a medical degree upon his graduation from Scotland’s Glasgow University in 1837, challenged Morton’s findings in their own time on the basis that there was no evidence that skull size dovetailed with intellectual capacity.41 For Smith’s colleague Delany, however, Morton’s general claim that whites and blacks were distinct species of humankind was in no way objectionable.

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To be sure, Delany joined Smith in taking umbrage at Morton’s finding that whites were intellectually superior to blacks. At the same time, Delany saw the evidence that Morton marshaled in support of polygenesis as fuel for his own long-standing suspicion that blacks were actually the superior race. Ironically, it was a study that James McCune Smith conducted in hopes of demonstrating the validity of monogenesis that ultimately convinced Delany that he and Morton were correct about racial differentiation. In 1846, Smith conducted a study of black and white morbidity rates in various climates. His aim was to debunk the long-standing myth that black Americans were only suited for the warm climates of the southern states. Using census data, Smith was able to demonstrate that northern blacks fared no worse above the Mason-Dixon Line than did whites. Smith also found that, despite their ‘‘more favorable circumstances,’’ southern whites died slightly earlier than blacks living in that region.42 Delany seized upon this dimension of Smith’s study to make broad ethnological claims about black superiority and to advance his emigrationist political agenda.43 In other words, Delany attempted to use Smith’s work to promote his essentialist claims that black Americans were distinct from whites and required a separate nation of their own. Delany’s 1852 pamphlet The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored Race of the United States is perhaps the best example of his attempt to use the field of ethnology to advance the cause of emigration. Delany argued in the text that the distinct climate of Africa had made blacks ‘‘physically superior to any living race of men.’’44 He then went on to argue that this superiority gave black Americans unusual abilities to thrive in the colonies he urged them to establish in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa.45 Two years later, Delany published ‘‘The Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent.’’ Although he continued to advance climatist notions of black superiority in this text, Delany’s central argument in the essay was that blacks should leave America because whites would never accept them as equals. Delany based this rather grim conclusion on the ethnological claim that whites were predisposed by their nature to commit ‘‘deeds of injustice and acts of oppression’’ against the ‘‘colored races.’’46 Despite the fact that Frederick Douglass, undoubtedly the most prominent black leader of the period, was a harsh critic of Delaney’s claims about whites, the view that whites were a naturally distinct and morally

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inferior race emerged as a major current in black intellectual circles throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century.47 Mia Bay sums up black ethnology in the decades after Delaney as follows: By the end of the 1850s, a distinct set of black and white racial stereotypes had emerged in black ethnology. Although they questioned the whole concept of racial differences, African-American thinkers tended to present the races in counterpoint. Moral, pious and benevolent, black people were less aggressive than AngloSaxons. A redeemer race, people of African descent were destined by both providence and their own God-given gifts to endure and survive slavery and oppression, and to lead mankind toward the millennium. By contrast, whites were all but irredeemable. Greedy and warlike, whites had been savages in Europe, and they still terrorized blacks and other people of color.48 It is easy to see why this theme remained a popular strand in late nineteenth-century black ethnology. After all, the Counter-Reconstruction ushered in a period of unspeakable terrorist violence (often state sponsored) against black Americans.49 Lynchings and riots were so commonplace in the 1890s that many black intellectuals believed that whites were bent on proving the black journalist John Edward Bruce’s claim that they were ‘‘modern barbarian[s].’’50 The field of American ethnology began to face serious challenges from new ideas from Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The slow but steady ascendancy of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which pointed squarely to the unity of humankind, in the natural sciences eventually played an important role in leading to the collapse of ethnology.51 Even more important, though, was the rise of the new disciplines of anthropology and sociology in American research universities.52 These disciplines, with their focus on human cultures and institutions, grew up in European universities in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Although a social Darwinism that fetishized European cultural and institutional forms often marred the earliest works in these fields, it did not take long for these new ‘‘human sciences’’ to emerge as the primary locus of modernism in the European academy. When horrific pogroms began to roil Europe in the 1880s, many of the leading lights in these new fields (who also happened to be Jewish) fled to America. These proponents of the view that there were neither innate differ-

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ences between human populations nor an evolutionary path from lower to higher human cultures initially encountered considerable resistance to their ideas from some well-established American thinkers. Leading intellectuals such as the biologist Charles Davenport; Henry H. Goddard, a pioneer in the nascent field of psychology; and William Graham Sumner, a founder of the American Sociological Association, all continued to push the notion of intrinsic racial differences well into the twentieth century.53 For the most part, however, the positivism and reform spirit that swept through American universities during the Progressive Era made most of the e´migre´s’ new colleagues and students very receptive to their ideas.54 Black intellectuals, as a core component of the Progressive reform coalition, were certainly among the most willing and vocal consumers of the ideas associated with these new disciplines. Indeed, Bay claims that ‘‘African American thinkers were among the first to embrace and publicize’’ the work of Franz Boas, the German Jewish e´migre´ whose pioneering work on culture is most often considered the requiem for American ethnology.55 Not surprisingly, once the majority of black scholars came around to the view that race and racial differences were the products of human cultures, they began to realize that black ethnology’s claims about the innate evils of whites were untenable.56 This shift in black thought on whiteness is readily accessible in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, widely regarded as the intellectual father of the whiteness studies movement between 1890 and 1935.57 Du Bois, who was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, began his intellectual career as anything but a modernist on the question of the sources of racial differences in American life.58 On the contrary, most intellectual historians see the early Du Bois as working squarely within the field of American ethnology.59 Du Bois’s speech ‘‘Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization’’ was both his first significant contribution to American ethnology and statement on the character of whiteness.60 The references that Du Bois makes in this speech, which he delivered on the occasion of his graduation from Harvard College in 1890, to white Americans (or, as he referred to them in the speech, ‘‘Teutons’’), evince a firm belief that racial differences were the product of nature. Indeed, Du Bois essentially argued that some innate programming led white Americans to dominate other races and ‘‘crush’’ their civilizations.61 Seven years later, in a speech delivered before the American Negro

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Academy titled ‘‘The Conservation of the Races,’’ Du Bois reconfirmed his commitment to the idea that racial distinctions were a function of indelible natural traits. ‘‘Certainly,’’ he proclaimed before the delegates to the convention, ‘‘we must all acknowledge that physical differences play a great part, and that, with wide exceptions and qualifications, these eight great races of today follow the cleavage of physical race distinctions.’’62 Du Bois did not stop with references to physiognomy. On the contrary, he also argued in the speech that the ‘‘deeper differences are spiritual, psychical differences—undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them.’’63 Having already proclaimed white Americans (or ‘‘Teutons’’) an overly aggressive race in earlier writings, Du Bois wasted no time restating the obvious in ‘‘Conservation.’’ Instead, he used the balance of the speech to revive the earlier tradition of black ethnology that argued that black Americans were a ‘‘redeemer race’’ destined to elevate America through their spiritual talents. Du Bois’s audience at the Negro Academy had a mixed reaction to the ideas he expressed in ‘‘Conservation.’’64 This was so because a number of the attendees had already become familiar with the new social science approaches to racial identity that Franz Boas and other European intellectuals had begun to push in American intellectual circles in the 1890s.65 Some scholars have argued that Du Bois makes several statements in ‘‘Conservation’’ that suggest that he too was already beginning to question the utility of a scientific race concept.66 Most scholars of black political thought, however, believe that ‘‘Conservation’’ represents the height of Du Bois’s commitment to a scientific conception of race.67 There also seems to be general agreement among intellectual historians that Du Bois became a full convert to the view that culture and not innate characteristics explained racial differences after an encounter with Boas at Atlanta University in 1906.68 David Levering Lewis argued that Boas’s lecture ‘‘supplied intellectual reinforcement’’ to Du Bois at a time when he was beginning to rethink his approach to the race concept.69 Once Du Bois made this shift, he quickly surpassed Boas as the foremost champion of the modernist viewpoint that culture and social environment were the source of racial inequality in America. Indeed, no other scholar did more to tear down the field of American ethnology after 1920 than W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s most significant work in this period was Black Reconstruction, his landmark revisionist history of the Civil War and the postbellum eras.

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Although the monograph was primarily a frontal assault on the racist historiography of the Radical Reconstruction produced by mostly (but not exclusively) southern writers, it also contains some of Du Bois’s most significant commentary on whiteness.70 Indeed, the insights that Du Bois presents in Black Reconstruction would later emerge as the foundation of the whiteness studies movement. Although it was Boas who pointed Du Bois away from a scientific notion of the race concept and racial differences, Black Reconstruction reflects the influence that two other intellectual giants of the age, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, had on Du Bois.71 In fact, much to the chagrin of the more conservative Ralph J. Bunche, who reviewed the book for Carter G. Woodson’s Journal of Negro History, the analysis that Du Bois provides in Black Reconstruction was primarily neo-Marxian.72 This approach allowed Du Bois to attribute the rise of slavery (and secession) to the white elite’s desire to establish and maintain a profitable form of economic organization in the South.73 This view is very far afield from Du Bois’s central claims in ‘‘Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization.’’ Du Bois’s penchant for the ideas of Freud is evident in the sections of Black Reconstruction in which he turns his attention to the effects that slavery as a form of economic organization had on the rise of southern culture. Du Bois argues that low-status whites, who under a purely Marxian framework had no real interest in fighting to preserve slavery, joined the Confederate cause not out of an innate desire to oppress blacks but because of a psychological attachment to the culture of white privilege that grew up with slavery in the South. Du Bois described this dynamic as follows: ‘‘They [low-status southern whites] were given public deference . . . because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of people, to public functions, to public parks. . . . The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with leniency. . . . Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect on their economic situation, it had great effect on their personal treatment.’’74 Thus, for Du Bois, white violence against blacks since the end of Reconstruction was a function of what Freud would have called a subconscious desire to preserve the ‘‘public and psychological wage’’ that accrued to them through centuries of living in societies shaped by slave institutions.75 Indeed, most black writers committed very early to the position that the depressed and degraded state of their fellow black Americans was a

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product of environmental factors and not innate differences between the races. At the same time, however, black intellectuals held firm to the belief that white Americans were preordained to commit acts of tyranny against the ‘‘darker races’’ of man. This paradox at the heart of early black ethnology was not resolved until the interwar period, when W. E. B. Du Bois presented the first social scientific account of white skin privilege in Black Reconstruction. This account, as stated above, serves as the intellectual baseline for the whiteness studies movement. The following section will show that Tocqueville’s Democracy in America deserves a comparable status within the movement.

Tocqueville’s Modernist Theory of Racial Difference Seventy-five years before the rise of social scientific accounts of the race concept, Tocqueville penned a modernist account of racial difference in Democracy in America. While previous intellectual histories have demonstrated Tocqueville’s antipathy toward the pseudoscientific accounts of racial difference that were taking root in both America and Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this chapter moves beyond these important studies in two ways. First, I argue that a constructionist approach to the race concept and not the biblical theory of monogenesis, which was the commonplace argument against race science in Tocqueville’s era, was the foundation of his commentary on racial difference in Democracy in America. Second, I demonstrate that, like Du Bois, Tocqueville was an advocate of the view that institutions were the source of both racial identities and white privilege in Jacksonian America. The presence of these strands of thought in Tocqueville’s chapter entitled ‘‘The Three Races That Inhabit America’’ suggests that he, like Du Bois, prefigures the whiteness studies movement. Many critics of Tocqueville’s commentary on racial difference have pointed to the language that he used to refer to blacks and indigenous Americans as evidence that he held racist sensibilities.76 Even a tertiary examination of ‘‘Three Races’’ makes it easy to understand the basis of this analysis. Consider, for example, one of the first references that Tocqueville makes to black Americans. ‘‘His face,’’ Tocqueville wrote in characterizing black physiognomy, ‘‘appears hideous to us, his intelligence limited, and his tastes low; we almost take him for some being

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intermediate between beast and man.’’77 As for indigenous Americans, Tocqueville frequently referred to them as ‘‘savages’’ throughout his text.78 This language certainly reveals that Tocqueville, like most of his white contemporaries, was somewhat affected by the social racism that permeated nineteenth-century culture. It is a mistake, however, to follow the path that so many scholars have taken and dismiss his account as a biased read on American race relations. This is so for three reasons. First, Tocqueville was clearly an opponent of the scientific theories of racial difference that dominated white intellectual circles in the early nineteenth century. Second, he was one of the earliest white proponents of the view that racial differences in America were socially constructed. Third, he conveys important insights about the primacy of economic institutions in shaping racial culture in the United States. We know from his subsequent writings, for example, that Tocqueville was a critic of the pseudoscientific theory of racial difference articulated by his compatriot Arthur de Gobineau in his treatise Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. The central thrust of Gobineau’s work was that there were three distinct races—the white, yellow, and black—and that the last was, by nature, the most inferior. The clearest exposition of this position within the text comes at the juncture where Gobineau states that ‘‘the Negroid variety is the lowest and stands at the foot of the ladder. The animal character . . . is stamped on the Negro from birth and foreshadows his destiny. His intellect will always move within a very narrow circle.’’79 Although Tocqueville and Gobineau had a close personal relationship, the former did not hesitate to tell his friend that his own views on race were ‘‘at the opposite extreme’’ of the theoretical spectrum.80 He even went on to suggest that there was such an ‘‘intellectual world between their doctrines’’ that it would be fruitless to continue conversations about the matter.81 Tocqueville’s writings on slavery in another context add further credibility to the view that he believed that social conditions and not biology divided the races. Just a few months after he submitted his second volume of Democracy in America for publication, he found himself in the position of writing a report on the abolition of slavery in the French colonies for the Chamber of Deputies. The report, which was the newly elected Tocqueville’s first major contribution to the legislative body, was a strong endorsement of the immediatist position.82 The most important thing about the report from the standpoint of the present chapter, though, was

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the fact that Tocqueville clearly articulates his position that the gaps between the white and black races were a function of social conditions and not biology.83 Tocqueville would echo this sentiment in another treatment of slavery in the American context in 1855. Writing in the Liberty Bell, a journal edited by the celebrated American abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman, Tocqueville argued that the persistence of slavery threatened to ‘‘retard’’ the progress of the Union and ‘‘threaten her future glory.’’84 This was so, he argued, because American slavery represented the worst ‘‘spectacle of man’s degradation by man.’’85 Tocqueville closed the essay by expressing his hope ‘‘to see the day when the law will grant equal civil liberty to all the inhabits of the same empire, as God accords the freedom of the will, without distinction, to the dwellers upon earth.’’86 Thus, in Tocqueville’s view, the Americans were undermining the natural equality that ‘‘God’’ had created through their culture of inequality. In light of the fact that he penned these thoughts so long after his visit to America, some scholars might be inclined to see these writings solely as the product of an evolution in this thinking about racial difference. Seymour Drescher casts doubt on this thesis, however, by demonstrating that the French tradition of viewing race ‘‘more as a social than a biological’’ concept developed well before the Revolution.87 Since Tocqueville was a product of this intellectual tradition, thanks to the instruction he received from Francois Guizot, it is far more likely that the views he expressed in his report to the Chamber of Deputies were with him when he disembarked in America than the product of some later intellectual development.88 This modern strand in Tocqueville’s racial thought runs throughout ‘‘Three Races’’ and appears very early in the text. We see this most clearly where he recounts his travels through the Alabama Territory. The central vignette in this section of the narrative is the interaction that Tocqueville claims to have witnessed between a ‘‘little girl of five or six who was of the white race’’ and two women of color, one an indigenous American and the other a slave of African descent. For Tocqueville, the ‘‘condescension’’ that the girl directs towards her adult companions animates the entire scene.89 Tocqueville could have easily dismissed the little white girl’s behavior as a random observation of an overly indulged child. He was far too struck, however, by how the girl’s ‘‘sense of superiority’’ towards her companions ‘‘contrasted with her weakness and her age’’ to make this inter-

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pretation. Nor does Tocqueville attribute her attitude to an essential sense of white superiority. Rather, he construes the episode as an example of how ‘‘prejudice and the laws’’ created ‘‘an immense gap’’ between the races in Jacksonian America.90 By tracing the girl’s social power to ‘‘the law,’’ Tocqueville clearly prefigures the modern constructionists of the whiteness studies movement (and also the critical race theory tradition). Moreover, his keen awareness of how the structure of race relations in Jacksonian America conveyed an expectation of privilege on even the least powerful whites in American society foreshadows the analysis that Du Bois develops more than one hundred years later in Black Reconstruction. We also see a constructionist Tocqueville in his treatment of the differences between whites and indigenous Americans. Indeed, Tocqueville points to the ‘‘resemblance between the political institutions’’ of ancient Europeans and the ‘‘wandering tribes of North America.’’91 For him, these similarities pointed to the fact that ‘‘amid the apparent diversity of human affairs, it is possible to discover a few pregnant facts from which all others derive.’’92 His willingness to see these common elements in indigenous American and European civilizations aligns him with the black environmentalists who rejected polygenesis in the early nineteenth century. One final glimpse of the constructionist Tocqueville comes to us through his analysis of the widespread failure of the manumission laws that most northern states enacted in the wake of the Revolutionary War. Some recent commentators have argued that these passages stand as evidence of Tocqueville’s lack of regard for the plight of black Americans.93 This is so because it is in this section of the text that Tocqueville conveys his deep skepticism about the possibility that the blacks and whites will ever be ‘‘brought anywhere to live on a footing of equality’’ in America.94 This interpretation glosses over the modernism explicit in the ethnology that Tocqueville presents in this section of ‘‘Three Races.’’ Indeed, by pointing to the fact that white racism and not innate physical or moral deficiencies in the black populations of the North led to the widespread failure of the manumission laws, Tocqueville acknowledges the humanity of black Americans.95 Moreover, Tocqueville would have never been able to envision the ‘‘possibility’’ of the two races coming to ‘‘mingle completely’’ if he shared with white Americans (and Gobineau) the popular idea that the chasm between the black and white races was the result of a species difference.96

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This same section of the text also demonstrates that Tocqueville was far ahead of most of his contemporaries in understanding the nature of white supremacy in American society. As we have seen, the major flaw in black ethnology in the nineteenth century was that it framed whites as innately evil. Moreover, Volney, whose work constituted the French tradition on American ethnology before Tocqueville, was largely silent on the character of whiteness in America.97 Tocqueville devotes considerable commentary to the content of whiteness as a social identity in Jacksonian America. On first glance, the similarities between the language that he and the black ethnologists use to describe whites are quite striking. For example, when describing the interactions of white Americans with indigenous Americans he asserts that the former are the ‘‘greediest’’ people in the world.98 He goes on to characterize the white American’s tyranny over blacks and indigenous Americans as a racial project akin to genocide. ‘‘The European [in America] is,’’ Tocqueville argued, ‘‘to men of other races what man is to the animals. He makes them serve his convenience, and when he cannot bend them to his will he destroys them.’’99 Despite the fact that his characterizations of whites sound very similar to the conceptions extant in early black ethnologies, Tocqueville does not share the essentialist tendencies of David Walker, Martin Delany, and the early W. E. B. Du Bois. On the contrary, his intellectual project presages the cultural turn in the study of race relations that Boas and Du Bois popularized in the early twentieth century. Indeed, Tocqueville was among the first democratic theorists to argue that white racism in America was the product of the culture that grew up around slave institutions. The authors of two recent studies have made this last point through analyses that compared Tocqueville’s views on race relations to those held by his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, who, unlike Tocqueville, is widely regarded as a staunch critic of American racism.100 Indeed, both these studies recover language in ‘‘Three Races’’ that illustrates Tocqueville’s belief that white racism and American democracy were ‘‘mutually constitutive.’’101 Their authors both then argue that this language stands as evidence that Tocqueville understood how white Americans created racism to deal with the psychological trauma that accompanied their transition from the stability of aristocratic Europe to what Laura Janara calls the ‘‘democratic flux’’ of America.102 This interpretation, as both Janara and Margaret Kohn point out, pro-

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vides great theoretical leverage for understanding Tocqueville’s commentary on the widespread failures of the manumission laws that the northern state legislatures passed in the wake of the American Revolution. At the same time, however, these laudable treatments have missed some of Tocqueville’s more subtle points about the rise of America’s culture of racism. Chief among these is the fact that Tocqueville, like Du Bois and most scholars associated with the whiteness studies movement, believed that America’s culture of white supremacy was an epiphenomenon of capitalism. Although he was aware that the planter class in the South was engaged in a racial project that attempted to cast itself in the traditional role of Europe’s aristocracies, Tocqueville explicitly articulates the view that profit was the white American’s primary motivation for adopting slave institutions in the South.103 ‘‘Servitude,’’ he wrote in summation of America’s slave economies, ‘‘is more natural and more [economically] advantageous in the South than in the North.’’ Over time, he goes on, the white southerner’s reliance on this economic mode engendered white racism.104 Despite the fact that he believed that the soil of the southern states makes large-scale plantation agriculture a ‘‘natural’’ choice for the planters, Tocqueville completely rejects the climatist arguments for racial slavery that emerged as a major defense of America’s peculiar institution in the wake of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Moreover, Tocqueville based his rejection of this line of thought on the ethnological claim that white Americans are no less capable of toiling ‘‘below a certain latitude’’ than their counterparts in southern Europe: I do not think that this idea [of innate physical differences between the races], with its welcome support from the southerner’s laziness, is based on experience. The South of the Union is not hotter than the South of Spain or Italy. Why cannot the European do the same work there? And if slavery is abolished there without the masters perishing, why should not the same happen in the Union? I do not think that Nature has forbidden the Europeans of Georgia and the Floridas [sic] themselves, on pain of death, to draw their sustenance from the soil.105 Tocqueville was astute enough to realize, however, that this fact did not matter in the racialized culture that served as the foundation of the

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social state in Jacksonian America. Indeed, he was the first democratic theorist to point out how the insidiousness of the privileges tied to skin color in slave societies prevented most whites from interrogating the nature of their own identities. Although he certainly thought this was the case with the white southerners’ inability to recognize that they were of hearty, European stock, he was even more concerned with the way that white supremacy obfuscated the morality of hard work in the minds of white southerners.106 ‘‘The farther south one goes,’’ Tocqueville writes, ‘‘the stronger is the [whites’] prejudice glorifying idleness.’’107 Moreover, it is in these passages that Tocqueville prefigures the view of most whiteness studies scholars that the social and class aspirations of low-status whites in slave societies gave rise to the culture of white supremacy in America. ‘‘In the South of the United States,’’ he writes, ‘‘the whole white race formed an aristocratic body having at its head a certain number of privileged persons whose wealth was permanent and leisure hereditary. These leaders of the American nobility perpetuated the traditional prejudices of the white race in the body they represented, making idleness honorable.’’108 Tocqueville’s identification of ‘‘the traditional prejudices of the white’’ as the social glue between upper- and lower-class whites in the South bolsters Janara’s claim that he understood white privilege to be the by-product of the ‘‘democratic flux’’ that was taking place in the Jacksonian era. Scholars associated with the whiteness studies movement have devoted considerable intellectual energy to understanding the phenomenon of white backlash against the extension of democratic rights to minorities.109 A number of recent studies have demonstrated that neither an actual loss of status nor intimate contact with nonwhite peoples is necessary to engender white backlash movements.110 Stanley Greenberg, who pioneered the study of white backlash with public opinion polls for the Democratic Party in the 1980s, aptly summed up this reality when he stated that even those whites living and working in segregated environments blame blacks for ‘‘almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives.’’111 Tocqueville demonstrated an acute awareness of this dynamic long before the rise of modern polling techniques. This comes across most strikingly in his pronouncement that ‘‘nowhere is [race prejudice] more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.’’112 Tocqueville then goes on to describe the ‘‘harsh’’ treatment that blacks expe-

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rienced as white backlash movements swept through the northern states in the wake of the manumissions laws.113 This section of ‘‘Three Races’’ has received extended commentary in several recent studies of Tocqueville’s racial thought. Most of these treatments argue, correctly in my view, that Tocqueville demonstrates his greatest sensitivity to the plight of black Americans in these passages.114 Moreover, some of these scholars have astutely recognized that Tocqueville develops a conception of racism in this section of his text that foreshadows modern ideas.115 Surprisingly, these admirable studies have overlooked the fact that Tocqueville’s pessimism about the future of race relations in America is rooted in his analysis of white backlash in the North. In other words, Tocqueville regarded the harsh reaction that whites in the North, who lived among far fewer blacks than did their southern counterparts, exhibited in response to black freedom as a bellwether for America’s future after abolition, asking: ‘‘If whites and Negroes do not mingle in the North of the Union, how should they do so in the South?’’ He continues: If I absolutely had to make some guess about the future, I should say that in the probable course of things the abolition of slavery in the South would increase the repugnance felt by the white population toward the Negroes. I base this opinion on analogy with what I have previously noticed in the North. I have mentioned that the white northerners shun Negroes with all the greater care, the more legislation has abolished any legal distinction between them; why should it not be the same in the South?116 This dimension of Tocqueville’s thought is more akin to the arguments made by scholars working in the fields of critical race theory and critical feminist theory than to the position held by those associated with the whiteness studies movement. Whereas critical race theorists and critical feminist theorists express saturninity (or, as they would say, ‘‘realism’’) about the possibility of eliminating racial and gender-based hierarchies in America, most whiteness studies scholars believe that these orders can be unmade through social movements.117 Some have even argued that the ‘‘abolition’’ of whiteness as a social identity is an attainable goal.118 Despite Tocqueville’s skepticism about the solubility of white privilege, the main ideas that animate the whiteness studies movement are extant in ‘‘Three Races.’’ Indeed, Tocqueville was one of the earliest

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white thinkers to assert that racial differences in America were socially constructed. Moreover, his commentary on racial difference and race relations anticipates the analysis that Du Bois develops one hundred years later in Black Reconstruction. The affinities between Tocqueville’s arguments and those of the modernists of the early twentieth century suggest that whiteness studies scholars should view the former as a precursor to their intellectual movement.

Conclusion In this chapter I have examined Tocqueville’s ideas about racial difference as explicated in the text of Democracy in America. My main finding is that there are several points of congruence between Tocqueville’s commentary in his chapter ‘‘The Three Races That Inhabit America’’ and the central tenets of the whiteness studies movement in the American academy. Indeed, Tocqueville places both a constructionist account of racial difference and the notion that a desire to protect white skin privilege is a prime motivating force for whites at the center of his treatment of race relations in Jacksonian America. The comparative analysis presented above has also yielded some important insights. It is clear, for example, that Tocqueville’s outsider status in the Jacksonian republic allowed him to avoid the essentialist pitfalls that marred the writings of most of his black contemporaries who worked in the field of American ethnology. Moreover, Tocqueville’s early focus on the way that America’s slave institutions fomented a culture of racism in the Jacksonian republic foreshadowed the modernism that emerged in the black intellectual tradition in the early twentieth century. These findings bolster previous claims that there is a critical strain in Tocqueville’s commentary on race relations in Jacksonian America. Indeed, Tocqueville develops a theory of the establishment and maintenance of Herrenvolk democracy in the antebellum United States. This fact does not completely erase Tocqueville’s problematic decision, as Sheldon Wolin writes, to ‘‘recommend American democracy to the world,’’ even after acknowledging the power of racism in America.119 However, it does provide a richer understanding of his much-maligned pessimism about the future of American race relations. In other words, political scientists must now acknowledge that Tocqueville’s predictions

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about the future of black-white relations were rooted in a hard-nosed appraisal of the invidious nature of social racism in America and not in a racist mindset.

Notes 1. For detailed explorations of the rise of critical whiteness studies as a field of inquiry, see Shelley Fisher Fishkin, ‘‘Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating Blackness: Remapping American Culture,’’ American Quarterly 47 (1995): 428–66; John Hartigan Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3–23; Peter Kolchin, ‘‘Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,’’ Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (2002): 154–73; Christina Pruett, ‘‘The Complexions of ‘Race’ and the Rise of ‘Whiteness’ Studies,’’ clio 32, no. 1 (2002): 27–50. 2. Kolchin, ‘‘Whiteness Studies,’’ 154. For excellent examinations of the social construction of whiteness in America, see Barbara Fields, ‘‘Ideology and Race in American History,’’ in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 144–75; Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); David Theo Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1997). 3. See, for example, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 1–41. 4. For studies that place a particular emphasis on ‘‘white privilege,’’ see George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Martha Mahoney, ‘‘Segregation, Whiteness, and Transformation,’’ University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143, no. 5 (1995): 1659–1685; Joel Olson, ‘‘Contesting the Color Line: The Democratic Problem of the White Citizen,’’ Constellations 8, no. 2 (2001): 163–83. 5. For recent works that highlight the importance of slavery and labor markets in fomenting white privilege, see Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 19–41, and Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1994). For works that stress the importance of culture and politics, see Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Rutledge, 1997); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 6. See, for example, David Roediger, introduction to Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David Roediger (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 3–26; Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3–13; Pruett, ‘‘The Complexions of ‘Race,’ ’’ 29–33. 7. George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 71–97; Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), chap. 5. 8. Sally Gershman, ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery,’’ French Historical Studies 9, no. 3 (1976): 467–83; Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 97–114; Curtis Stokes, ‘‘Tocqueville and the Problem of Racial Inequality,’’ Journal of Negro History 75, no. 1 (1990): 1–15. 9. Stokes, ‘‘Tocqueville and the Problem of Racial Inequality,’’ 1–15; Rogers Smith, ‘‘Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,’’ American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 549–66; William Connolly, ‘‘Tocqueville, Territory, and Violence,’’ Theory, Culture and Society 11 (1994): 19–40; Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in

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U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 17–21; Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 61–65. 10. Richard Resh, ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville and the Negro: Democracy in America Reconsidered,’’ Journal of Negro History 48, no. 4 (1963): 251–59 and August Nimtz, Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: ‘‘The Absolute Democracy’’ or ‘‘Defiled Republic’’ (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield) are accounts that suggest that Tocqueville’s understanding of the dynamics of race relations in America was limited by his own racism. 11. Both Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind and Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) thoroughly examine this dimension of black ethnology. 12. John Brown Russwurm and Samuel McCune Smith were black contemporaries of Tocqueville who completely avoided the essentialism that marred most American writings about racial difference between 1830 and 1900. For an examination of their writings, see Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 38–75. 13. See, for example, David R. Roediger, introduction to Black on White; Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 3–12; Pruett, ‘‘The Complexions of ‘Race.’ ’’ 14. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, ‘‘Narrative of Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia,’’ in Negro Protest Pamphlets, ed. Dorothy Porter (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 19–20. 15. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 16. 16. James O. Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 90–91. 17. Freedom’s Journal 1, no. 3 (1827): 12. For excellent scholarly treatments of the rise of black America’s first periodical, see Charles S. Johnson, ‘‘The Rise of the Negro Magazine,’’ Journal of Negro History 13, no. 1 (1928): 7–21; Bella Gross, ‘‘Freedom’s Journal and the Rights of All,’’ Journal of Negro History 17, no. 3 (1932): 241–86. 18. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, with its treatment of racial differences between blacks and whites, is widely regarded as the text that popularized scientific racism in America. For excellent commentary on this text and its impact, see Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 429–82; Alexander Boulton, ‘‘The American Paradox: Jeffersonian Equality and Racial Science,’’ American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1995): 467–92; Nicholas Magnis, ‘‘Thomas Jefferson and Slavery: An Analysis of His Racist Thinking as Revealed by His Writings and Behavior,’’ Journal of Black Studies 29, no. 4 (1999): 491–509. 19. Samuel Cornish quoted in Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 26. 20. Ibid. 21. Russwurm received a BA degree from Bowdoin College in 1826. For more on this aspect of his life, see Carter G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History (Washington, D.C.: Associated, 1922), 269–70; William M. Brewer, ‘‘John B. Russwurm,’’ Journal of Negro History 13, no. 4 (1928): 413–22. 22. Russwurm argues that black Americans are descendants of Ham’s sons Cush and Mizraim and not, as American slavers maintained throughout the nineteenth century, his cursed son Canaan. This lineage, he points out, places black Americans on the same human family tree as Noah’s other descendants. For excellent treatments of how American slavers came to view the Ham narrative as support for their claims of polygenesis, see Jordan, White over Black, 17–20, 55–62; Edith R. Saunders, ‘‘The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origins and Functions in Time Perspective,’’ Journal of African History 10 (1969): 521–32. For the argument against polygenesis, see John Russwurm, ‘‘Mutability of Human Affairs,’’ 13 April 1827. See also Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 28–29. 23. Samuel Stanhope Smith (1750–1819) was president of Princeton University at the close of the eighteenth century. In 1787, while still an active member of Princeton’s philosophy faculty,

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Smith popularized the idea that racial differences were the result of exposure to different climates with the publication of his Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. For more on Smith and reaction to his theory, see William H. Hudnut III, ‘‘Samuel Stanhope Smith: Enlightened Conservative,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 17, no. 4 (1956): 540–52; Scott Juengel, ‘‘Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science,’’ English Literary History 68 no. 4 (2001): 897–927. For Smith’s influence on Russwurm and other black ethnologists, see Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 18–20, 28. 24. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 2. 25. Samuel Cornish, Colored American, 25 March 1837, quoted in William H. Pease and Jane Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830–1861 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 83. For an analysis of the racial thought of white abolitionists that confirms Cornish’s impressions, see Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 114–16. 26. I will use the abbreviated title Appeal to refer to Walker’s pamphlet throughout the remainder of the chapter. For excellent treatments of the social context that prompted Walker to write the Appeal, see Bruce Rosen, ‘‘Abolition and Colonization: The Years of Conflict: 1829–34,’’ Phylon 33, no. 2 (1972): 177–92; Moses, Afrotopia, 54–56. 27. See, for example, Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969; Da Capo Press Edition, 1997), 16–17; John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1988), 159–64; Vincent Harding, There Is A River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981), 84–91. 28. For a comprehensive account of Walker’s life, see Peter Hinks, Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). See also James Turner, introduction to David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America, ed. James Turner (Baltimore, Md.: Black Classic Press, 1993), 9–13. See also Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 16–17; Harding, There Is A River, 84–85; Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty, 172–75. For excellent commentary on the reaction to Walker’s Appeal among southern whites, see Hasan Crockett, ‘‘The Incendiary Pamphlet: David Walker’s Appeal in Georgia,’’ Journal of Negro History 86, no. 3 (2001): 305–18. 29. Harding, There Is A River, 86–90; Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 158–59; Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty, 173–75; Ella Forbes, ‘‘African American Resistance to Colonization,’’ Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 2 (1990): 210–23. 30. Walker, Appeal, 27–30, 39–41. See also Moses, Afrotopia, 54–57; Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 34–35. 31. Walker, Appeal, 81. 32. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 33. Bay’s work is the only book-length study to focus on the subject of the black tradition in American ethnology to appear to date; several leading historians have lauded the volume as a significant contribution to several fields in American history. See, for example, Wilson Jeremiah Moses, ‘‘Review of Mia Bay’s The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925,’’ Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (2001) and Grace Elizabeth Hale, ‘‘Review of Mia Bay’s The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925,’’ American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 887. 33. Walker, Appeal, 80. 34. Ibid. 35. Members of Boston’s free black community found David Walker’s dead body on the street in front of his home in June 1830. Although many in Boston’s black abolitionist circles suspected foul play, historians have never been able to find conclusive evidence to corroborate these opinions. Thus, historians continue to attribute his demise to either uncertain or natural causes. See Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty, 174; Crockett, ‘‘The Incendiary Pamphlet,’’ 307.

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36. John H. Pease and William H. Pease, ‘‘Confrontation and Abolition in the 1850s,’’ Journal of American History 58, no. 4 (1972): 923–37; Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 30–31. 37. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 71–97. 38. For the most comprehensive treatment of Martin Delany’s remarkable career, see Dorothy Sterling, The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Delany: African Explorer, Civil War Major, and Father of Black Nationalism (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996). 39. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 82–101. 40. Ibid., 53. 41. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 59–60. 42. Ibid., 60. 43. For shorter pieces that deal primarily with Delany’s emigrationist views and activities, see Richard Blackett, ‘‘Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell: Black Americans in Search of an African Colony,’’ Journal of Negro History 62, no. 1 (1977): 1–25; Robert M. Kahn, ‘‘The Political Ideology of Martin Delany,’’ Journal of Black Studies 14, no. 4 (1984): 415–40. 44. Martin R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 36. 45. Kahn, ‘‘The Political Ideology of Martin Delany,’’ 433–35; Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 65–66. 46. Martin R. Delany, ‘‘The Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent,’’ in Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, ed. Frank E. Rollin (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 334. 47. Herbert Aptheker, ‘‘Afro-American Superiority: A Neglected Theme in the Literature,’’ Phylon 31, no. 4 (1970): 336–43; Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 68–72. Delany and Douglass were rivals who disagreed on virtually all aspects of American politics. For an excellent exploration of their clashing views and personalities, see Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Levine explores their disagreements over ethnology at 94–97. See also Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 66–71. 48. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 71. 49. For detailed accounts of this violent period, see Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986); Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). 50. John Edward Bruce quoted in Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 103. 51. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 367–70, 413–20. 52. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 187–90; Brad Evans, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 5. 53. Thomas Carl Patterson, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 59–61. 54. Ibid., 35–71. 55. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 187; see also Regna Darnell, Invisible Genealogies: A History of American Anthropology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 33–51. 56. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 187–88. 57. David Roediger, Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David Roediger (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 3–26, 29–38, 184–204; John Shuford, ‘‘Four Du Boisian Contributions to Critical Race Theory,’’ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 35, no. 3 (2001): 301–37; Ricky Lee Allen, ‘‘Whiteness and Critical Pedagogy,’’ Educational Philosophy and Theory 36, no. 2 (2004): 121–36. 58. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 3–4, 146.

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59. K. Anthony Appiah, ‘‘The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,’’ in ‘‘Race,’’ Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 21–37; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 99–102, 168–74; Moses, Afrotopia, 40, 149–55; Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 187–200. 60. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 100–102. 61. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization,’’ in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 17–19. 62. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘Conservation of the Races,’’ in Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 22. 63. Ibid. 64. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 195; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 173–74. 65. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 195–97. 66. Lucius Outlaw, ‘‘ ‘Conserve’ Races?: In Defense of W. E. B. Du Bois,’’ in W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture, ed. Bernard W. Bell et al. (New York: Routledge, 1996), 15–39; Robert GoodingWilliams, ‘‘Outlaw, Appiah, and Du Bois’s ‘The Conservation of Races,’ ’’ in Bell et al., W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture, 39–57. 67. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 134–36; Appiah, ‘‘The Uncompleted Argument,’’ 21–37; Thomas C. Holt, ‘‘The Political Uses of Alienation: W. E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903–1940,’’ American Quarterly 42 (June 1990): 301–23; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 169–73; Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 189–90. 68. Werner Lange, ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois and the First Scientific Study of Afro-America,’’ Phylon 44: 2 (1983): 135–46; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 351–53; Moses, Afrotopia, 153, 158; Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 188–89, 196. 69. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 352. 70. Ralph J. Bunche, ‘‘Reconstruction Reinterpreted: A Review of W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction,’’ Journal of Negro History 4, no. 4 (1935): 568–70; Charles H. Wesley, ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois— The Historian,’’ Journal of Negro History 50, no. 3 (1965): 147–62; Kenneth Potts, ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois’s Achievement as Historian: A Review Essay,’’ History Teacher 28, no. 1 (1994): 13–30; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 353–57; 367–75. For other important writings on the nature of whiteness after Du Bois’s conversion to a social science approach to the race concept, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 21–37; W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘‘Dialogue with a White Friend,’’ in Roediger, Black on White, 29–37. 71. Holt, ‘‘The Political Uses of Alienation,’’ 301–23. 72. Bunche gave Black Reconstruction a positive review with the caveat that Du Bois’s ‘‘pseudoMarxist interpretation’’ will give ‘‘pause’’ to the ‘‘student of the social sciences.’’ See Bunche, ‘‘Reconstruction Reinterpreted,’’ 569–70. 73. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: Free Press, 1992), 3–16; 48–51. 74. Ibid., 700–701. 75. Ibid., 701. 76. Resh, ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville and the Negro’’; Stephen Frederick Schneck, ‘‘Habits of the Head: Tocqueville’s America and Jazz,’’ Political Theory 17, no. 4 (1989): 638–62; Nimtz, Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America. 77. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (1835, 1840; New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), 342. 78. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 322, 326, 329. 79. Arthur de Gobineau, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: H. Fertig Press, 1967), 120. 80. Alexis de Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, trans. John Lukacs (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 222.

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81. Ibid. 82. Gershman, ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery,’’ 472; Pitts, introduction to Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xxix–xxxii. 83. Gershman, ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery,’’ 473. 84. Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 7, ed. Francois Melonio, Lisa Queffelec, and Anthony Pleasance (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 163–64. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. For an excellent treatment of this piece in the secondary literature, see Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings, ‘‘The Third Democracy: Tocqueville’s Views of America After 1840,’’ American Political Science Review 98, no. 3 (2004): 391–404. 87. Stokes, ‘‘Tocqueville and the Problem of Racial Inequality,’’ 4; Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968), 171; Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); James T. Schliefer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2000), 66. 88. Stokes, ‘‘Tocqueville and the Problem of Racial Inequality,’’ 2; George Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938); Edward T. Gargan, De Tocqueville (New York: Hillary House, 1965). 89. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 320. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid., 328. 92. Ibid. 93. Schneck, ‘‘Habits of the Head’’; Nimtz, Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America, 18–21; Charles W. Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 203, 211. 94. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 356. 95. Ibid., 343, 350–51. 96. Ibid., 355. 97. The French philosopher Constantin-Francois Volney (1757–1820) published an account of his travels through America in the late eighteenth century, View of the Climate and Soil of the United States (London, 1804), in which he made several ethnological claims about the populations he encountered. Most of his commentary, however, focuses on the character of the indigenous populations that he encountered. Tocqueville cites Volney’s observations in several sections of Democracy in America. 98. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 317. 99. Ibid. 100. Margaret Kohn, ‘‘The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery,’’ Polity 35, no. 2 (2002): 169–93; Laura Janara, ‘‘Brothers and Others: Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism,’’ Political Theory 32, no. 6 (2004): 773–800. For excellent commentary of Beaumont’s racial thought, see Stanley M. Elkins, ‘‘Review of Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie or Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America, translated by Barbara Chapman,’’ American Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1959): 437; Serge Garronsky, ‘‘American Slavery and the French Liberals an Interpretation of the Role of Slavery in French Politics during the Second Empire,’’ Journal of Negro History 51, no. 1 (1968): 36–52; Remi Clignet, ‘‘The Contributions of Beaumont to Democracy in America: His Analysis of Race Relations and Slavery,’’ American Studies International 39, no. 2 (2001): 34–53. 101. Janara, ‘‘Brothers and Others,’’ 775–78; Kohn, ‘‘The Other America,’’ 187–92. 102. Janara, ‘‘Brothers and Others,’’ 776. 103. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 349, 352–53. 104. Ibid., 353. 105. Ibid., 352.

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106. Ibid., 346–50. 107. Ibid., 353. 108. Ibid., 349. 109. See, for example, Charles A. Gallagher, ‘‘White Racial Formation: Into the Twenty-First Century,’’ in Critical White Studies, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 6–11; Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 1–84, 121–97; Roger Hewitt, White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 110. See, for example, Frederick R. Lynch, ‘‘Race Unconsciousness and the White Male,’’ Society 29, no. 2 (1992): 30–36; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994), 113–37; Joe Feagin and Eileen O’Brien, White Men on Race: Power, Privilege, and the Shaping of Cultural Consciousness (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 155–226. 111. Stanley B. Greenberg, ‘‘Report on Democratic Defection’’ (to the Democratic Party), 15 April 1985, 13. For an excellent treatment of Greenberg’s study, see Paul Frymer, Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 111–18. 112. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 343. 113. Ibid., 343–45. 114. Stokes, ‘‘Tocqueville and the Problem of Racial Inequality,’’ 9–12; Mark Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 63–65; Joel Lieske, ‘‘Race and Democracy,’’ ps: Political Science and Politics 32, no. 2 (1999): 217–24; Kohn, ‘‘The Other America’’; Janara, ‘‘Brothers and Others.’’ 115. Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free, 63–65; Janara, ‘‘Brothers and Others,’’ 792–93. 116. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 357. 117. See, for example, David Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). Derrick Bell’s ‘‘Racial Realism,’’ Connecticut Law Review 24, no. 2 (1992): 363–79 is the essay that initiated the view among critical race theorists that racial hierarchy is a ‘‘permanent feature’’ of American society and politics. For a similar expression in the feminism literature, see Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), chap. 3. 118. John Garvey’s and Noel Ignatiev’s edited volume titled Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996) contains several excellent essays that make this argument. However, Joel Olson’s article ‘‘Whiteness and the Participation-Inclusion Dilemma,’’ Political Theory 30, no. 3 (2002): 384–409 offers the most theoretically sophisticated argument in this direction. 119. Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 268.

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11 The Separate Spheres Paradox Habitual Inattention and Democratic Citizenship

Jocelyn M. Boryczka Habitual inattention must be reckoned the great vice of the democratic spirit. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Disorder and chaos pulsed through Jacksonian America when Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont stepped onto its shores in 1831. Universal white manhood suffrage, immigration, urbanization, and nascent industrialization combined to draw the nation into a whirlwind of change. Paralleling these economic and political transitions, the family, Tocqueville recognized, also transformed from an institution shaped by European aristocracy to one fitting American democracy. Equality, I extend my thanks to Jill Locke for her thoughtful commentary on and careful reading of this chapter.

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Tocqueville observed, so dismantled the hierarchical aristocratic family that ‘‘in America, the family, if one takes the word in its Roman and aristocratic sense, no longer exists.’’ Eradicating inherited wealth leveled aristocracy’s hierarchical father-son relationship so that in America, equality ‘‘reigns around the domestic hearth.’’ Tocqueville links the family to broader political change as he declares that ‘‘democracy which destroys or obscures almost all social conventions and . . . makes it harder for men to establish new ones, [it] leads to the complete disappearance of almost all the feelings originating in such conventions.’’ The egalitarian family evokes deep concerns for Tocqueville, since, freed from this mooring of social convention, democracy could drift towards an abyss of disorder. To provide a countervailing force against this threat, Tocqueville finds that the separate spheres of public man and private woman effectively preserve the natural equality and economic efficiency necessary for social order and prosperity.1 Changes in the family, for Tocqueville, pose but one threat among many to a fledgling democracy. The proliferation of ‘‘habitual inattention’’ equally concerns him to the extent that he identifies it as ‘‘the great vice of the democratic spirit.’’ Habitual inattention evolves from the constant fluctuations of a democratic society that pushes the people from one ‘‘great’’ issue to the next without granting them enough time for focused, much less thoughtful, consideration. Americans, Tocqueville explains, are ‘‘often carried away, far beyond the bounds of common sense, by some sudden passion or hasty opinion. . . . Unable to be expert in all, a man easily becomes satisfied with half-baked notions.’’ The people, overwhelmed by an extensive amount of information about the issues and little time to digest it, tend simply to adopt the majority’s opinion, promoting the tyranny of the majority that dictates public opinion and stifles minority voices that often fail to be heard in this fast-paced political environment. To counter these corrosive effects of habitual inattention on the democratic spirit, Tocqueville warns that, in addition to ‘‘the most important affairs’’ such as voting for representatives, Americans should attend to the ‘‘small or private matters’’ of politics, particularly those related to administration, that shape the concerns of daily life. The despotism caused by government indiscriminately intervening in the people’s ‘‘petty affairs’’ deeply concerns Tocqueville, who sees this incremental process as leading Americans to ‘‘give up using their free will’’ (da, 2:610, 611, 694). Constant attention to the ‘‘small or private matters’’ of everyday life related to family and civil society, Tocqueville’s

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argument suggests, can help prevent democracy from slipping into despotism by establishing the private sphere as a zone of personal freedoms.2 Clearly demarcating public from private life, for Tocqueville, in addition to upholding social order, protects the democratic spirit from the vice of habitual inattention. Current efforts to revitalize Tocqueville’s America are especially beholden to his vision of the family as a haven. His contemporary followers include conservatives, civic republicans, and communitarians who share his concern about how changes in the American family may erode civil society and, thus, the foundation of democracy.3 Many cite increased rates of divorce, single motherhood, teen pregnancy, and school violence as indicators of the broader social decay arising from families in which both parents now work in the paid labor force.4 These neo-Tocquevillians see Americans, without the moral compass provided by a traditional two-parent family, as driven almost entirely by individualism and materialism. Retrieving a sense of the common good to check these damaging forces then demands a renewed commitment to the family as the place where future citizens initially learn the moral beliefs that connect them to the political community. The family, functioning at the nexus of civil society’s churches, schools, and voluntary associations, acts as ‘‘the seedbed of virtue’’ that creates fertile enough ground for a common good to counter the vices of selfishness, ambition, and promiscuity eroding the democratic moral character. Relying on civil society and particularly the family to energize American democracy, I contend, undermines the goal of these Tocqueville followers who ultimately relegate formal politics and participation in it to the margins of democratic life by overlooking the public and placing hope for the nation’s future on the private sphere. The more conservative neo-Tocquevillians whose scholarship focuses on women and the family in Democracy in America explicitly express their anxiety about women’s participation in the public sphere.5 They build their position on Tocqueville’s gendered separate spheres argument wherein ‘‘the Americans do not think that man and woman have the duty or the right to do the same things, but they show an equal regard for the part played by both and think of them as beings of equal worth, though their fates are different’’ (da, 2:603). For these advocates, the blurring boundary between male public and female private life in the wake of second-wave feminism represents a primary source of social decay. The struggle for women’s sexual liberation and equal opportunity

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in the workplace, education, and politics endangers democracy, these Tocqueville followers assert, by turning women’s attention away from their primary responsibility for the family. Restoring social order from the chaos caused by the second wave then requires returning to the gendered separate spheres that ultimately offers the best that can be expected, given the limitations of democratic justice. In this chapter my analysis of male and female virtue and vice in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840) reveals a paradox in this separate spheres position with important implications for women’s and democratic citizenship: by defining what men and women do and why they do it in terms that devalue direct political engagement, Tocqueville fosters the very habitual inattention to politics that he fears will destroy democracy. Adherence to the separate spheres position, I argue further, focuses Tocqueville’s contemporary followers on the private sphere of family and civil society, and what might happen as a result of gender role confusion and women’s participation in the public sphere, which blinds them to the threat that habitual inattention poses for democracy. Their position supports, even if unwittingly, an evisceration of resources for a democratic public by diluting citizen responsibility and devaluing political action. In particular, the separate spheres rely on a gendered conception of morality that denies full citizenship to women. Contemporary conservatives’ portrayal of women as moral guardians deeply embedded in America’s political script in fact facilitates backlash arguments against feminist advances and makes their position relevant to women’s ongoing struggle for full citizenship. Essentially, this logic locks American women into a dualistic choice either to accept their role as moral guardians over the nation’s virtue or to be held morally responsible for America’s decline into vice and eventual acquiescence to democratic despotism. This dualism provides neo-Tocquevillians and others engaged in ‘‘family values’’ debates with the moral framework for equating women’s increased participation in public life with abandoning their responsibility for the family and causing democracy’s decline. I find, however, that liberatory possibilities can arise through identification of and then escape from this separate spheres paradox that confines women to a political identity as moral guardians and the people to a thin conception of citizenship antithetical to democracy’s demands.

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The Separate Spheres Paradox: Female Moral Guardianship’s Double Burden of Moral Responsibility and Male Obligation Women’s moral guardianship of the family and religion acts as a countervailing force in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America against democratic despotism, a dynamic that entails—what I call—the double burden of moral responsibility, which ultimately casts American women as scapegoats for democracy’s weaknesses. Tocqueville, though never using the term explicitly, captures female moral guardianship at a founding moment of American democracy that builds on women’s past political identity and foretells its future.6 I use the term moral guardianship to break through historically bound references to American women as Republican Mothers, Victorian Traditional Women, Progressive Era True Women, and New Women of the 1950s to convey how the language of morality, regardless of historical context, anchors women’s citizenship in guardianship. Tocqueville bases women’s capacity to protect democracy’s exceptional future on their morality. As ‘‘I come near the end of this book in which I have recorded so many considerable achievements of the Americans,’’ Tocqueville declares, ‘‘if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women’’ (da, 2:603). Female superiority derives from women’s close affiliation with religion in an increasingly secularized democracy that shifts virtue from public to private life, leaving vice to men in the economic and political arenas. Tocqueville’s women channel mores to the public sphere through their husbands and guard the private from democracy’s instability, immorality, and chaos, which threaten to sink the nation into despotism. Women’s virtue ensures the stability necessary to generate ‘‘the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation,’’ enlisting private women in the enterprise of American exceptionalism. Alternatively, female vice can cause democracy to fall. The double burden of moral responsibility then shapes women’s primary role as mothers and wives into the political identity of moral guardians whose political power derives from their political exclusion. This paradox leaves American women readily available scapegoats for democracy. The double burden of moral responsibility, as conceived here, contri-

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butes to feminist political theorists’ work on moral responsibility in two ways. First, identifying the ‘‘double burden’’ emphasizes both the permeability of the boundary typically drawn between men and women’s moral labor and the heavy weight placed upon women’s moral responsibility. Carol Gilligan initially demarcates separate moral spheres when specifying men’s ethic of rights and women’s ethic of responsibility. These two ethical orientations intersect with a gendered ‘‘division of moral labor’’ in which men’s rights-based morality corresponds to the market’s demand for productive labor and women’s to a responsibility for reproductive labor in the private sphere. This sexual division of moral labor, identified by Marilyn Friedman, performs ‘‘the dual function of preparing us each for our respective socially defined domains and of rendering us incompetent to manage the affairs of the realm from which we have been excluded.’’7 Women, according to this separate spheres logic, assume moral responsibility for the care work traditionally done in the private sphere to meet human needs. As women increasingly move between the unpaid and paid workforce, they take on the double burden of productive labor outside the home while still doing most of the reproductive labor in it.8 The double burden, in this analysis, extends from women’s material to moral labor and emphasizes a public-private boundary more permeable than the one found in Friedman and Gilligan to convey how women’s moral responsibility can translate into America’s success or failure. Framing female responsibility in these terms clarifies how women’s political identity as moral guardians limits their full citizenship. Second, the double burden narrows the terrain of what counts as moral responsibility. Responsibility, as Joan Tronto explains in her ethic of care, represents a moral category based on the ambiguity and flexibility to assess when and how to respond to multiple needs in a range of contexts that connect immediate self-interest to a broader view of human needs. Assigning responsibility for caregiving to women, Tronto finds, allows men, typically care receivers, to exercise ‘‘privileged irresponsibility,’’ which grants them ‘‘the opportunity simply to ignore certain forms of hardships that they do not face.’’9 Freed from the constraints of responsibility, men’s moral labor centers around obligation, the more rigid requirements and specifications, most explicitly laid out in contracts, arising from the formal rules and promises characteristic of political and economic life. This sexual division of moral labor then tracks the separate spheres to align responsibility with the female private sphere and obligation with the male public sphere. ‘‘To make care more valued pub-

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licly,’’ Tronto states, ‘‘a change will be required in our fundamental notions of responsibility.’’10 Building on Tronto’s conception of responsibility, I contend that this change requires shifting the double burden from women to all democratic citizens; in sum, this entails revisioning how morality relates to politics in order to dislodge women’s political identity as the nation’s moral guardians. Tocqueville’s work opens up an analytic space conducive to seeing this double burden of moral responsibility. In particular, I focus on a less visible pair of Tocqueville’s Americans—the pioneer wife and her husband—since their existence on the frontier blurs the boundary between the separate spheres and the sexual division of moral labor enough to disrupt gendered categories and allow for a feminist interpretation that diverges from that of Tocqueville’s conservative commentators.11 Leaving behind the East Coast for the Michigan Territory’s frontier physically brought Tocqueville into a dramatically different geographic location where, instead of cities bustling with industry, he encounters hastily built, rustic log houses standing in the middle of clearings. There, in contrast to Eastern cities where men work outside the home and women in it, the pioneer husband and wife toil in much closer proximity, to clear land, plant crops, and raise their children. Additionally, Tocqueville locates this pioneer couple at the heart of the nation-building process. Carving land out of wilderness, these pioneers literally expand the United States economy and territory that grants them both an explicitly political role in Tocqueville’s eyes. Male and female pioneers, in contrast to European immigrants in the East, embody the nation’s adventurous, ambitious spirit for Tocqueville as ‘‘true’’ Americans, born on its land, seeking their fortunes in the West. They then represent to Tocqueville the essence of American moral character. The virtue of courage characterizes Tocqueville’s American men and women, who all struggle daily with the volatile changes accompanying nation-building, whether pioneering the West or building the East. Attributing this traditionally masculine virtue to women indicates the permeability of the sexual division of labor that facilitates transforming republican into democratic virtue in the American context. Tocqueville particularly admires the pioneer man and his wife for exhibiting courage when exchanging the luxury and safety of civilization for the deprivation and danger of the wilderness. Their motivations for doing so, however, differ. The pioneer husband endures ‘‘for a time the life of a savage in order to conquer and civilize the backwoods’’ so to pursue his fortune in

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the West. Economic gain, not political ambition or patriotism, drive this pioneer and his Eastern counterpart alike. Whether pioneers, businesspeople, or wage laborers, Tocqueville’s American men possess the courage to face dangers inherent to a lifelong pursuit of wealth in a cyclical market economy. This economic imperative also influences a female courage marked by the capacity for endurance. Indicating this gendered dynamic, Tocqueville explains that ‘‘in no country of the world are private fortunes more unstable than in the United States. It is not exceptional for one man in his lifetime to work up through every stage from poverty to opulence and then come down again. American women face such upheavals with quiet, indomitable energy. Their desires seem to contract with their fortune as easily as they expand’’ (da, appendix 1, 732, 2:593–94). The American woman endures these ‘‘upheavals’’ caused by the American man’s ongoing pursuit of wealth with a ‘‘quiet, indomitable energy’’ that reflects Tocqueville’s admiration for female courage, the unwavering ability to stand up to adversity. Responsibility for the family, rooted in social conventions, grounds American women in a source of steadfast strength that is unavailable to men who are carried on the tides of the market. Marriage, of course, establishes the family, an act which, for Tocqueville’s American woman, demands perhaps her greatest courage, since ‘‘it is the very enjoyment of freedom that has given her the courage to sacrifice it without struggle or complaint when the time has come for that’’ (da, 2:593). Young American girls, unlike American men who retain their freedoms, sacrifice theirs in marriage, after which American women withstand whatever trials result from their husbands’ adventures, even the poverty faced by pioneer women. Tocqueville describes how the pioneer woman’s ‘‘want, suffering, and loneliness have affected her constitution but not bowed her courage.’’12 Such moral fortitude in the face of physical deprivation captures the spirit of courage in Tocqueville’s account of American women whose quiet strength of will sustains their families as a pillar of order amid chaos. While Tocqueville grants American men and women the courage to confront the challenges of building a nation, male courage derives from actively participating in the market that generates the very instability against which female courage acts as a countervailing force. Neither form of courage, however, requires aggressive bravery in politics or on the battlefield, since virtue, quite differently from the republican tradition, arises either from the market or from the family, not from politics.13 Differences in Tocqueville’s account of male and female chastity ex-

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emplify the double burden of moral responsibility placed on American women, whose virtue, rather than their husbands’, preserves marriage as the cornerstone of the family and the common good. Male chastity, by contrast, tempers the American man’s mercurial spirit, regulating his habits enough to preserve domestic harmony, since family disputes and buying luxury goods draw man’s attention away from accumulating wealth. Public opinion’s external force cajoles American men into acting chastely; ‘‘to win the esteem of their fellows, [Americans] are bound to conform to regular habits. In that sense one can say that it is a point of honor to be chaste’’ (da, 2:622). Male chastity, however, does not extend to sexual constraint. American men who visit prostitutes, Tocqueville explains, only engage in a minor vice that does not amount to a general failure of moral character or a threat to the common good. Woman’s chastity, however, requires her sexual constraint, which, coupled with the virtue of fidelity, bases her morality on sexual purity before marriage and the unfailing commitment to her spouse afterward. American women’s association with religion, in contrast to the external honor motivating male chastity, gives women the internal strength of will to adhere to the female virtues of chastity and fidelity. Tocqueville finds that the importance of women’s morality to the broader community led American legislators to protect female virtue by making rape, a crime judged by public opinion more severely than all others, punishable by death (da, 2:603). Women’s chastity, unlike men’s, requires legal protection, since it preserves the family and, thus, the common good. This sexual double standard indicates how Tocqueville’s Americans make women into political scapegoats by associating their failure to obey the dictates of virtue with endangering democracy. Chastity also possesses a rational dimension that moderates the American male and constrains the female, further indicating the heavier moral burden placed on American women. Tocqueville most clearly conveys this rationality in his account of the pioneer husband and wife perhaps because he observed these Americans, in contrast to their urban counterparts, literally at quite a distance from the temptation of prostitutes and danger of sexual predators. Upon meeting the pioneer husband, Tocqueville expresses near astonishment at the cold, methodical hospitality with which he is received. Although Tocqueville does not seem to enjoy his company, he appreciates this pioneer who belongs ‘‘to that restless, calculating, and adventurous race of men who do with the utmost coolness things which can only be accounted for by the ardor of passion.’’

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Rationality regulates his temperament enough to channel the pioneer’s energy into the difficult labor of frontier life, which requires both passion and discipline. This same trait evokes a romantic sense of loss when Tocqueville describes the pioneer woman, who, before moving West, experiences the education of the American girl, one that makes ‘‘her morals . . . pure rather than her mind chaste,’’ which, Tocqueville laments, tends ‘‘to make women chaste and cold rather than tender and loving companions of men.’’ Even in the isolated log house, where an entire family shares one room, Tocqueville fails to find intimacy between the pioneer husband and his wife, whom he never describes in direct relationship to one another. Although this chaste disposition renders private life less charming, it is, Tocqueville emphasizes, ‘‘a secondary evil, which should be faced for the sake of the greater good’’ (da, appendix 1, 732, 2:591, 592, 592). American women, unlike men, give up their passions to satisfy the demands of the greater good. This double standard both authorizes male sexual desire and frees men from the direct and heavier burden of moral responsibility for the broader community. Hard work, the central male virtue, entails a level of pragmatism that transforms republican virtue into democratic honor, resulting in a comparatively thin male moral code. Contrasting the value of leisure held by Europe’s landed aristocracy, Tocqueville observes that ‘‘in a democratic society . . . where fortunes are small and insecure, everybody works and work opens all doors. That circumstance has made the point of honor do an about turn and set it facing against idleness.’’ Americans honor men who, in the absence of inherited wealth, work incessantly to achieve fragile fortunes, a behavior seen as dishonorable by European aristocrats. In America, Tocqueville explains, ‘‘one still finds some scattered notions detached from the old European aristocratic conception of honor, but they have no deep roots or strong influence. It is like a religion whose temples are allowed to remain but in which one no longer believes.’’ Tocqueville, though reserving some respect for the Protestant work ethic driving America’s economic growth, finds that Americans decouple the work ethic from its religious origins to devote themselves to pragmatism and materialism, the key beliefs in the American man’s ‘‘new religion.’’ Instead of receiving glory for serving God or the greater good, financial gain earns men honor, defined by Tocqueville as ‘‘nothing but this particular rule based on a particular state of society, by means of which a people distributes praise or blame.’’ Honor then ‘‘is only effective in full view of the public, differing from sheer virtue, which feeds upon itself, contented

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with its own witness’’ (da, 2:623, 620–21, 617, 626). Public opinion, not internal religious or moral conviction, determines the American male’s honor, exposing his personal character to the forces of conformity that, despite his strong individualism, promote the tyranny of the majority. Observing a way to protect against these dangers to democracy, Tocqueville sees men’s participation in political and civil associations as vital to preserving the individual everyday liberties that check the conformist impetus of equality. Yet the male virtues of courage, chastity, and hard work reveal how monetary pursuits determine men’s moral worth, which turns their attention to economic matters and away from political or civic concerns. Civil associations, according to Tocqueville and those of his contemporaries who advocate for civil society, bind the nation together by joining men collectively for intellectual and moral reasons that allow their feelings and ideas to expand to encompass others. Civil society’s voluntary associations promote a sense of morality and community and counter the individualism and materialism that cause many ills in the democratic body politic. Political associations differ from the civil, since they derive from man’s self-interest, which reluctantly drives him to band together with others, at times, to secure government assistance. Tocqueville reflects on the American male’s conflicted relationship with the state when explaining that ‘‘the inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to combat the ills and trials of life; he is restless and defiant in his outlook toward the authority of society and appeals to its power only when he cannot do without it’’ (da, 1:189). Political engagement represents a last resort for American men, who define themselves as essentially self-reliant and independent from governing authority. Politics then serves as an instrumental means to American men’s economic ends. Tocqueville captures this relationship when stating, ‘‘The passions that stir the Americans most deeply are commercial and not political ones, or rather they carry a trader’s habits over into the business of politics. They like order, without which affairs do not prosper, and they set an especial value of regularity of mores. . . . One must go to America to understand the power of material prosperity over political behavior, and even over opinions’’ (da, 1:285). Secondary to commercial concerns, politics becomes a ‘‘business’’ that maintains the order necessary for economic prosperity. American men’s deep passion for commerce reflects the male virtues that together capture how their moral worth derives from the economic gain demanding men’s full attention and pro-

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motes a view of politics as an instrumental obligation deserving of habitual inattention, exactly the problem Tocqueville hopes that democrats can avoid. Democracy then suffers since an economically driven selfinterest motivates male citizens to participate in politics based on, not a commitment to or consideration of the common good, but a sense of obligation. ‘‘Self-interest properly understood’’ translates Tocqueville’s views of male morality into a political identity premised on obligation, which, I find, grants men the power to exercise privileged irresponsibility toward politics. Tocqueville’s concept of self-interest properly understood enables American men with a capacity to temper individualism enough to act with an awareness of the broader community, which can motivate them to join civil and political associations. ‘‘The doctrine of self-interest properly understood,’’ Tocqueville explains, ‘‘does not inspire great sacrifices, but every day it prompts some small ones; by itself it cannot make a man virtuous, but its discipline shapes a lot of orderly, temperate, moderate, careful, and self-controlled citizens. If it does not lead the will directly to virtue, it establishes habits which unconsciously turn it that way.’’ Self-interest properly understood derives from a rational calculus in which American males assess when, how, and to what degree small everyday sacrifices benefit the community and, thereby, their self-interest. American men can then exercise privileged irresponsibility regarding those matters disconnected from their immediate self-interest, particularly that of the common good. Framed as an instrumental obligation, political engagement for American men becomes a secondary concern commanding only habitual inattention, in part, because of the nature of representative democracy, which assigns primary responsibility for the daily business of politics to elected officials. Tocqueville further uses the example of bribing politicians to show how Americans often conflate business and politics, which generates a view of government as corrupt and vice ridden, lacking in virtue or deserving of honor (da, 2:527, 1:220–21). American men, failing to see political participation as morally valuable for its own sake, assume the privilege of taking an irresponsible posture towards political engagement as only occasionally deserving of their attention. In the contemporary context, this habitual inattention perpetuates sporadic participation, ill-informed opinions, and a conflation of economic with political issues. Political activity for its own sake lacks moral worth, devaluing its role in democratic citizenship. American women’s central virtue of self-sacrifice permits American

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men the moral freedom to exercise, through self-interest properly understood, privileged irresponsibility for the common good, for which women as the nation’s moral guardians assume the double burden of moral responsibility. Tocqueville’s pioneer wife most fully embodies the female virtue of self-sacrifice that makes her a paradigm of American women’s moral guardianship. First, in marrying her husband, she tears herself away from ‘‘that innocent cradle of her youth. . . . To devote herself to austere duties, submit herself to privations which were unknown to her, embrace an existence for which she was not made, such was the occupation of the finest years of her life, such have been the delights of marriage.’’ The East Coast woman abandons her youth, lifestyle, and presumably personal interests to ‘‘embrace’’ a pioneer’s hard life and ‘‘devote herself’’ to marital duties. Then, in raising a family, the pioneer wife literally transfers her physical strength to her children to the point that, Tocqueville states, ‘‘one might think that the life she has given them exhausted her own, and yet she does not regret what they have cost her.’’ Despite losing her youth, interests, desires, and even physical well-being, the pioneer woman never communicates regret or suffering. Tocqueville describes how the woman expressed an angelic quality: ‘‘Her whole physiognomy bore marks of religious resignation, a deep peace free from passions, and some sort of natural, quiet determination which would face all the ills of life without fear and without defiance.’’14 This ‘‘deep peace’’ forms the moral backbone of the pioneer woman, who symbolizes the American woman’s guardianship, characterized by a ‘‘quiet determination’’ that conveys a tension between the active ‘‘determination’’ needed to face life’s challenges and the ‘‘quiet’’ or passive ‘‘resignation’’ to its changing circumstances. Religion empowers women to resign themselves to ‘‘all the ills of life’’ and serves as the source of virtue for Tocqueville’s American women, granting them the strength to exercise courage, chastity, and fidelity and, most important, to sacrifice the self for the family and ultimately the common good. As Tocqueville explains, ‘‘Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions, for although it did not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use thereof.’’ Religion, instead of influencing laws, directs the mores that regulate domestic life and, thereby, ‘‘helps to regulate the state’’ by securing the moral order and restraint necessary to exercise freedom while ‘‘maintaining the rule of democracy.’’ Without direct access to public life, how-

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ever, the church relied on women, since American men, focused on the material, economic matters of public life, rendered religion ‘‘powerless to restrain them in the midst of innumerable temptations which fortune offers.’’ With women confined to a private life dominated by religion, Tocqueville finds that religion ‘‘reigns supreme in the souls of women,’’ permitting them the virtue to convey religious morality to the family. ‘‘It is woman who shaped these mores,’’ Tocqueville declares. ‘‘Therefore everything which has a bearing on the status of women, their habits, and their thoughts is, in my view, of great political importance’’ (da, 1:292, 292, 291, 2:590). This political responsibility involves an energetic tension between women’s passivity and their active engagement in shaping mores that transforms them into scapegoats for democracy. The American woman acquires this ‘‘great political importance’’ as a conduit through which religion channels morals in the diluted form of mores to her husband, who ‘‘derives from his home that love of order which he carries into affairs of state.’’ Mores (moeurs), according to Tocqueville, are ‘‘the habits of the heart, but also to the different notions possessed by men, the various opinions current among them, and the sum of ideas that shape mental habits . . . the whole moral and intellectual state of a people’’ (da, 1:292, 287). This expansive dimension reflects the spirit of a nation that extends well beyond its formal laws and constitutions to encompass the ‘‘whole moral and intellectual state of the people.’’ Mores, in this sense, represent the common good that transcends the material reality of each individual’s life to join them together in a belief system that forms the democratic spirit. American women assume the double burden of moral responsibility for private life, where they shape the mores necessary to maintain public order and the entire nation’s common good. This double burden, moreover, entails a transcendent, spiritual dimension, derived from female virtue’s religious origins, that loosens the connection between women and material reality enough to hold them morally responsible for a people and its future. As such, the double burden places women in the precarious position of assuming responsibility for a nation on the basis of their exclusion from it. The marriage decision that transforms American girls into mature moral guardians reveals a contradiction in Tocqueville’s account of force and freedom in female virtue, which suggests his possible awareness of the paradox that the separate spheres causes for democracy. Establishing the separate spheres requires the American girl to sacrifice her youthful

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freedoms and ultimately her self when entering marriage and, as Tocqueville describes, losing ‘‘her independence forever in the bonds of matrimony.’’ This self-sacrifice grants American women a republican virtue in terms of a double burden of moral responsibility for the common good that emanates from their role in private life. Since men’s thinner obligation to public life only demands democratic honor, women’s virtue becomes the standard of moral excellence for American democracy. The heavy political weight placed on women’s virtue requires a degree of moral perfectionism that empowers Tocqueville’s American women with a superhuman ability to protect against democratic despotism from the privacy of their homes. To do so, female virtue must emanate from internal, often religious, sources supposedly independent of external forces, particularly the whims of public opinion that pose a serious threat to democratic freedom. Free will, independent of external force, determines virtue for Tocqueville, who declares that ‘‘ ‘[political] freedom is, in truth, a sacred thing. There is only one other that deserves the name: that is virtue. Yet what is virtue, if not the free choice of what is good?’ ’’15 If virtue requires free choice, then American women must decide to marry freely in order to attain the moral capacity necessary to guard democracy’s future. Force, however, enters Tocqueville’s account of the circumstances in which the American girl reaches this decision. Religion and industry act as two external forces pressuring the young girl to marry. Tocqueville sees Americans at this moment in religious terms as Puritans who consider marriage to be the best regulator of women’s habits and ‘‘the surest sign of the purity of her morals.’’ Pressure to conform to these religious mores permeates society and leaves American women the choice either to marry or to be associated with impurity and vice. The nation’s industrial character further leads Americans to view women’s marriage as a ‘‘continual sacrifice of pleasure for the sake of business’’ or the greater economic good. Tocqueville articulates how after the marriage decision is made, ‘‘in America inexorable public opinion carefully keeps woman within the little sphere of domestic interests and duties and will not let her go beyond them.’’ ‘‘Inexorable public opinion’’ conveys the powerful force shaping the marriage decision and keeping women confined to private life. Tocqueville, despite this awareness, insists that the American woman exercises free choice in the marriage decision, since she ‘‘knows beforehand what will be expected of her, and she herself has freely accepted this yoke. She suffers her new state bravely, for she has chosen it’’ (da,

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2:592, 593). Tocqueville, according to his own logic, must preserve free choice in order to grant American women what he deems to be true virtue. As such, he struggles with the contradiction between force and freedom, perhaps because he frames American women’s virtue in republican terms that diverge from the demands of democracy. Traditional republican virtue aligns public men with political participation in the common good, whereas American democracy disconnects virtue from public life by locating it in the female private sphere. The separate spheres, Tocqueville may have realized, attenuate the degree to which female virtue could possibly prevent democratic despotism. Male and female vice, though less evident than virtue in Tocqueville’s work, further illustrate the double burden of moral responsibility assigned to women when American men’s immorality facilitates the democratic despotism against which American women’s virtue must protect. Tocqueville, who certainly appreciates how Americans freely express their interests in the political arena, worries that the ‘‘tumult’’ and ‘‘confused clamor’’ naturally pulsing through Jacksonian democracy could threaten it. Chaos, ambition, and greed find fertile ground in a context in which men’s political interests derive from instrumental economic gain instead of the common good, which creates a thin obligation to politics and the opportunity for democratic despotism. Tocqueville raises the issue of male vice when considering how new immigrants arrive in American cities, where they carry ‘‘out our worst vices to the United States without any of those interests which might counteract their influence.’’ Men, unchecked by the countervailing force of marriage that binds Americans to the common good, cause extreme political disorder, such as riots in Philadelphia and New York City, which, for Tocqueville, represents the epitome of vice (da, 1:278n1). American society, despite men’s full inclusion as citizens in public life, still assigns its women the double burden of moral responsibility for preventing vice and the democratic despotism resulting from it. For it to do so, the young American girl enjoys free access to the public realm, where, Tocqueville observes, she learns the ways of democracy, ‘‘so the vices and dangers of society are soon plain to her, and seeing them clearly, she judges them without illusion and faces them without fear, for she is full of confidence in her own powers, and it seems that this feeling is shared by all around her.’’ Schooled in public vice, though maintaining a critical distance from it, Tocqueville’s American girl acquires the power to protect the family and democracy against its despotic influences when she marries. Marriage, the cornerstone of

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political stability, then demands extensive protections from corruption. Tocqueville highlights how ‘‘all those vices which tend to impair the purity of morals and the stability of marriage are treated in America with a severity unknown in the rest of the world’’ (da, 2:590, 622). Anchoring democratic order, marriage erects a barrier against the vice of instability, one solely defended, not by the male citizen’s honor, but by the female moral guardian’s virtues of chastity, fidelity, courage, and sacrifice. Although Tocqueville never explicitly articulates the American woman’s vices, the opposite of the female virtues—promiscuity, infidelity, cowardice, and selfishness—represent strong possibilities. The heavy political burden placed on women’s moral responsibility, demanding perfectionism, suggests that any divergence from the virtuous path necessary to maintain the common good results in female vice. Politically, any moral misstep, whether real, perceived, or fabricated, can hold women morally responsible for democracy’s decay, given female virtue’s essential role in protecting the private sphere from corruption. Women’s pursuit of freedom then ironically, in a democracy, equates with vice in this dualistic logic, since it entails abandoning a moral guardianship premised on selfsacrifice and restraint. To see the political implications more fully, American women’s vice must be located in American exceptionalism’s biblical discourse that highlights how Eve, ignoring God, ate from the tree of knowledge, and caused the fall of humankind. The American daughters of Eve, according to the functions of the double burden of moral responsibility, will similarly take democracy down the path of evil and decay if they break with the community’s moral standards that uphold the status quo. Advocating for change constitutes perhaps American women’s most serious vice, placing them in the precarious position of either supporting a status quo based on their constraint and exclusion or taking action that equates with democracy’s decay, leading to their being charged as traitors to the common good. Tocqueville’s account, in either case, reveals how female morality limits American women to a defensive posture toward public life based on indirect participation in it. Comparing the gendered operations of morality in Tocqueville’s Americans reveals how the separate spheres and sexual division of moral labor promote the ‘‘habitual inattention’’ that, Tocqueville warns, ‘‘must be reckoned the great vice of the democratic spirit’’ (da, 2:611). This sexual division of moral labor focuses women’s attention on the family and men’s on economic gain. American women assume the double burden of moral responsibility for the common good consistent with their

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republican virtue that allows men, granted full citizenship, to exercise privileged irresponsibility for it, as democratic honor only requires an instrumental obligation to politics as a means to greater economic ends. The common good of the political community, compared to the social and economic spheres, only merits American men and women’s habitual inattention as a secondary, indirect concern. Direct attention to politics falls into a gap filled by politicians, the representatives elected ostensibly to attend to their constituents’ interests, which, in a utilitarian calculation, can amount to the common good. Yet, as we have seen, American morality derives from women in the family, whose moral guardianship preserves republican virtue, while men attain honor primarily for economic achievement. Citizen participation in formal politics, devoid of female virtue or male honor, becomes, at best, amoral and, at worst, vice ridden. Excluded from public life, Tocqueville’s American women serve as its moral guardians, a political identity dependent on the absence of direct political activity, and they embody virtue. This combination elevates direct political inactivity to a standard of moral excellence in American democracy. Civil society’s voluntary associations, outside the corrupt sphere of formal politics, gain moral value as jury duty, taxpaying, voting, and petitioning lose it. Although participation in civil society is crucial, habitual inattention to formal politics can promote a level of citizen inactivity that is dangerous to democracy. Tocqueville’s support for the separate spheres then ultimately perpetuates, instead of prevents, the democratic despotism that he feared. Democratic despotism depends not on women’s inattention to the private sphere, but on the habitual inattention that naturally develops from a lack of direct political participation. Tocqueville saw Americans, despite their seriousness in some matters, as susceptible to their passions that prompted hasty opinions often reflecting the scant amount of time spent on political issues. As the equality of conditions spreads in democracy, Tocqueville fears a proportional loss of freedom, as citizens, focused on individualistic concerns, conform to popular opinion when bothering with politics. The tyranny of the majority then arises when the force of equality overtakes freedom to raise conformity to the level of omnipotent power, leading the people to abandon reason for passion, majority for minority voices, and formal laws for mores. In contrast to the explicit physical force of traditional tyrants, Tocqueville finds that this ‘‘majority is invested with both physical and moral authority, which acts as much upon the will as upon behavior and at the same moment prevents both

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the act and desire to do it,’’ creating an insidious power to control inner thought and external action. Habitual inattention perpetuates this insidious form of oppression in which the state softens and bends the wills of its citizens until ‘‘each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.’’ To protect against this eventuality, Tocqueville is ‘‘inclined to think that liberty is less necessary in great matters than in tiny ones’’ (da, 1:254, 2:692, 694). Freedoms that citizens exercise particularly in their everyday lives then establish a front line of defense against unnecessary government intervention. The sexual division of moral labor, however, reveals how inattention necessarily becomes ‘‘habitual’’ when industry attracts the focus of male citizens, and the family that of women. Only ‘‘great’’ matters can possibly capture the people’s attention, given these circumstances. In the end, a morally impoverished sense of citizen engagement as only obligatory and instrumental promotes a habitual inattention to politics that diminishes the importance of direct, consistent activism in democratic citizenship and threatens despotism.

Resolving the Separate Spheres Paradox: Habitual Attention and Full Democratic Citizenship American exceptionalism acts as the discursive stream that channels moral guardianship from one moment in the political culture to the next, allowing it to escape the boundaries of particular historical contexts. Moral guardianship then retains a powerful pull in contemporary political discourse, which, despite voting rights, reproductive freedoms, and equal opportunity legislation, continues to construct women’s political identity around moral responsibility for the family. Separate spheres arguments still resonate in American political discourse, even though they respond to complex gender issues with a dualistic logic more consistent with nineteenth- rather than twenty-first-century thought. Contemporary scholars of civil society frequently invoke Tocqueville to advocate for the family (and women’s role in it) as ‘‘the seedbed of virtue’’ from which grows the moral character necessary for an orderly, stable democracy. Conservative Tocqueville scholars such as Delba Winthrop and Sanford Kessler also lament the loss of virtue, particularly in the public sphere, which makes it such an undesirable place. Winthrop, as such, rejects feminist calls for

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gender equality to argue that contemporary women should return to their conventional role in the family, since ‘‘democratic public life is not and cannot be just enough or fulfilling enough to bring meaningful ‘liberation’ to either sex.’’ Women simply share men’s ‘‘necessarily unhappy’’ existence in a public life without virtue or honor and, thus, should return to the private.16 Winthrop fails to consider men’s possible participation in the private sphere, though Tocqueville emphasizes the closer fatherson relationship under democracy, or their happiness. Her position then clearly rests upon a negative portrayal of public life as an unhappy obligation for men and undeserving of women’s attention, much less political engagement. Furthermore, Kessler hopes to rebuild a sexual division of moral labor by blaming women’s—not men’s—increased sexual liberation in the 1960s for ‘‘an unprecedented increase in promiscuity, adultery, rape, and other forms of sexual behavior relatively rare in Tocqueville’s day.’’17 The entire society incurs the damage of crime, suicide, drug abuse, welfare dependency, and illegitimacy as a result of women’s moral irresponsibility. Kessler concludes that since the sexual revolution greatly relaxed mores, legislators should step in to create laws regulating chastity. These arguments for the separate spheres read Tocqueville narrowly and, as a result, they promote, not prevent, the contemporary conditions of democratic despotism in four ways. First, defenders of separate spheres maintain American women’s double burden of moral responsibility by framing their functional roles as wives and mothers as necessary to their happiness and the prevention of social decay. Men remain in public life, free to exercise privileged irresponsibility for the family and society. Public life retains its affiliation with the unhappiness of vice and corruption that devalues citizen participation and promotes the habitual inattention conducive to despotism. Second, Kessler’s call to legislate morality contradicts Tocqueville’s view that virtue demands free choice. This strategy would introduce public opinion and government intervention into the internal private life of moral belief, exposing a space of everyday freedom to the insidious influence of the tyranny of the majority. Third, this myopic view of Tocqueville ignores his attention to political change and its dynamic demands. Although Tocqueville surely did not foresee the Nineteenth Amendment, he did recognize women’s attendance as spectators at political meetings and the temperance movement, in which women participated extensively (da, 1:242, 243). More important, Tocqueville understood that the inevitable increase in the equality of conditions demands a pro-

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portional increase in freedom. His position’s logic then suggests that as women achieve greater political, economic, and social equality, their freedom should expand, not contract, as conservatives argue, to protect against despotism. Finally, the reliance on nineteenth-century moralism assigns women the double burden of moral responsibility as individuals without accounting for structural changes to the family and the public-private boundary. Jody Heymann, speaking to long-term structural changes, illustrates that the problems confronting families today result from 150 years of transitions in the American labor force that now characterize a postindustrial society in which, by 1990, 70 percent of families with children require every parent to work.18 Failure to engage with this reality deflects attention away from public policy issues such as affordable care for the elderly and children, paid family leave for both parents, and expanded early educational opportunities, such as Head Start, that address the changing needs of the American family. Framing this complex issue in terms of individual moral responsibility only fosters habitual inattention to structural issues that, instead, require participation in formal politics to meet democracy’s dynamic demands. A preoccupation with moral guardianship continues to prevent women from escaping the double burden of moral responsibility, which deflects attention away from politics and public life. This approach to the contemporary context undermines the democratic values of freedom and political participation that can, according to Tocqueville, prevent democratic despotism. Resolving the separate spheres paradox evident in Tocqueville and his conservative followers’ work entails aligning morality with full democratic citizenship. The female double burden of moral responsibility and male obligation, I contend on the basis of this reading of Tocqueville, establishes habitual inattention as a standard of moral value antithetical to democracy that we must move beyond in order to revision women’s and, thus, democratic citizenship on the basis of freedom and direct political activity. Habitual attention to politics, I think, engages citizens in the practice of protecting everyday freedoms from needless government intervention and preventing the democratic despotism that Tocqueville fears. Habitual attention further requires the moral valuing of all citizens’ participating in formal politics, a shift that demands escaping the static moralism used to buttress separate spheres positions. A nonmoralistic, dynamic, and inclusive morality should be brought to bear on contemporary politics. Responsive to contextual reality, this

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morality, for instance, recognizes that both parents usually work to support their families. This structural perspective recasts the American family as the responsibility of all its citizens. The double burden of moral responsibility then transfers from women to all citizens, which facilitates, among other things, the equalization of parenting and the transformation of care into a practice critical to democracy’s public sphere. This nonmoralistic approach also emphasizes that developing a morality conducive to democracy demands attention to complexity and intersections, complicating, in this case, the feminist understanding of responsibility, best represented in the work of Joan Tronto. Tronto is right to suggest that responsibility possesses an expansive quality that can extend from individual to social needs, a process essential to valuing care as the work of citizens and transforming democracy. My reading of the double burden of moral responsibility, however, highlights how this expansive quality also functions to blame women for societal problems well beyond their capacity to address. Obligation then can check such broad assumptions by also framing citizenship in the concrete terms of formal rules and laws agreed to by the political community. Balancing responsibility and obligation suggests how we might begin revisioning the way in which morality shapes political identity, indicating liberatory possibilities. Morally valuing direct participation in and habitual attention to politics holds the hope of preserving the freedoms necessary to protect against despotism by distributing moral responsibility for the nation’s future to all its citizens.

Notes 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 2:585, 587, 589, 603, 601. The epigraph above is from 2:611. Hereafter this work is cited as da. 2. While it is typically understood that religion acts as the primary check on habitual inattention, in this chapter I demonstrate how the family and civil society also act as crucial defenses against this vice. 3. Mary Ann Glendon and David Blankenhorn, eds., Seedbeds of Virtue: Sources of Competence, Character, and Citizenship in American Society (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1995); William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michael Sandel, Democracy and Its Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996); Amatai Etzioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Gertrude Himmelfarb, One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution (New York: Vantage Books, 1999);

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Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1986); The Good Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). 4. See, for instance, Mary Ann Glendon, introduction to Glendon and Blankenhorn, Seedbeds of Virtue, 3; Etzioni, The New Golden Rule, 61–62; Himmlefarb, One Nation, Two Cultures, chaps. 2, 3. 5. See Delba Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress,’ ’’ Political Theory 14, no. 2 (1986):239–61. Similarly, Dorothea Israel Wolfson contends that Tocqueville views women as natural, rather than conventional, caregivers, a higher calling than democratic justice to which women should return; see Dorothea Israel Wolfson, ‘‘Tocqueville on Liberalism’s Liberation of Women,’’ Perspectives on Political Science 25, no. 4 (1996): 203–7. On issues of female sexual liberation, see Sanford Kessler, ‘‘Tocqueville on Sexual Morality,’’ Interpretation 16, no. 3 (1989): 465–80. Regarding women’s role in the family as a central pillar of religion and morality, see F. L. Morton, ‘‘Sexual Equality and the Family in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,’’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 27, no. 2 (1984): 309–24; and William Mathie, ‘‘God, Woman, and Morality: The Democratic Family in New Political Science of Alexis de Tocqueville,’’ Review of Politics 57 (Winter 1995): 7–30. 6. Tocqueville, often seen as his prote´ge´, may have been influenced by Montesquieu’s use of guardianship language in reference to women. In The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), for instance, Montesquieu states that ‘‘the laws that give guardianship to the mother are more attentive to the preservation of the person of the ward; those that give it to the closest heir are more attentive to the preservation of the goods. Among peoples whose mores are corrupt, it is preferable to give the guardianship to the mother’’ (323). 7. Marilyn Friedman, ‘‘Beyond Caring: The De-moralization of Gender,’’ in Feminist Social Thought: A Reader, ed. Diana Tietjens Meyers (New York: Routledge, 1997), 667. Before Friedman, Virginia Held articulates a ‘‘division of moral labor,’’ although she does not focus on its gendered dimensions, in Rights and Goods: Justifying Social Action (New York: Free Press, 1984), chap. 3. 8. See Arlie R. Hochschild’s The Second Shift (New York: Penguin Books, 1989, 2003). 9. Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), 120–21. 10. Joan Tronto, ‘‘Care as the Work of Citizens: A Modest Proposal,’’ in Women and Citizenship, ed. Marilyn Friedman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 136. 11. Gender functions in this analysis as a tool for disrupting the dualistic framework that characterizes conservative interpretations of Tocqueville on women and the family in order to uncover a previously unseen sexual division of moral labor. This approach follows that used by Laura Janara in her feminist interpretation of Tocqueville. As Janara explains, ‘‘this whole dynamic—the looming multiplication of gender into erratic categories, an ensuing fear of chaos, and the reactionary deployment of rigidly dichotomous gender categories—is precisely what is found in the symbolic subtext of Democracy in America.’’ Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 23. 12. George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 245. 13. For further discussion of how the republican tradition changes in the American context, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967); and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). In addition, see the republican motherhood literature, primarily Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) and Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

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14. Pierson, Tocqueville in America, 245; da, appendix 1, 733,732. 15. See Voyages en Angleterre, in Oeuvres, papiers et correspondances d’Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. J. P. Mayer, vol. 5 (Paris, 1951–), 2, 91, quoted from Cheryl Welch’s De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 51. 16. Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress,’ ’’ 245. 17. Kessler, ‘‘Tocqueville on Sexual Morality,’’ 475. 18. Jody Heymann, ‘‘Can Working Families Ever Win?’’ Boston Review 27, no. 1 (2002): 4.

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12 Tocqueville’s Authority Feminism and Reform ‘‘Between Government and Civil Society’’

Barbara Cruikshank

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840) is the very ground of authority when it comes to democratic reform in the United States. It has not always been so.1 Yet today it is almost impossible not to quote him or to hear him quoted if the subject is democratic reform. The iterations of his name in political speech often attend the act of spinning reform schemes and new modes of association into life, from faith-based organizations (fbos) and evangelical prisons to microcredit and self-help Many thanks to Eileen Hunt Botting, Janice Irvine, Lena Zuckerwise, and especially Jill Locke, for reading one or more drafts of this chapter. Any errors and all strategic miscalculations that remain are mine alone.

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programs. His authority enlivens such regulatory fictions as ‘‘social capital,’’ ‘‘third way,’’ ‘‘broken windows,’’ ‘‘traditional values,’’ and ‘‘workfare,’’ among others.2 The repetition of his name to authorize new reform agendas is apparently compulsory.3 While his authority is certainly not the limit of all democratic imagination in any way, it does clearly help to authorize legislation and social policy in the United States.4 Tocqueville’s democratic theory is spun (some might say twisted) into bold and grandiose governing discourses today despite the fact that as a reformer himself, he was wholly ambivalent about systematic attempts to solve the problems of class inequality, crime, poverty, and abandoned children. Nevertheless, communitarians, neo-Tocquevillians, neoliberals, neoconservatives, and radical democrats all evoke and aim to capture the authority of Tocqueville for their reform schemes. I do not aim here to save Tocqueville from the contest of reform with a redemptive or authoritative feminist interpretation or to rescue him from the clutches of contemporary usage.5 Rather than join in these struggles to capture Tocqueville’s authority for feminist reforms, I emphasize the unstable qualities of his authority. For while the evocation of his authority may well be compulsory, his authority does not resolve political conflict over reform or determine its course. Tocqueville is a site of both authority and contestation. While feminists must concede for the moment that citing Tocqueville is compulsory, in this chapter I lay out a manner of doing so that promises to subvert the antifeminist uses to which his authority is put and, possibly, to restore feminism to the center of contestation over reform. In addition to the fact that Tocqueville’s authority is a site of political contest, the ground of his authority is also destabilized by his own ambivalence about reform. His writing on reform aimed to reveal both the good and the ill effects of particular reforms rather than advance a grand theory. There is always ample evidence in his writing to contradict the uses to which his writing is put in political speech. His attitude was that every reform scheme would inevitably have both good and bad consequences because reform is always undertaken in the midst of forces—for example, the progress of industrialization and equality of conditions—to which one must adapt rather than overcome. He did not count upon reform as a final solution, but as an ongoing and imperfect endeavor to adapt to the politically dangerous consequences of progress, such as the increase of inequality attending industrialization that might lead to revolution, and new threats to liberty attending democracy that might lead to despotism.

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Rather than diminish his passion for reform, as we shall see, his ambivalence incited him to avidly pursue reforms both to prevent revolution and to secure liberty. In the first section of this chapter below, I recommend his ambivalent yet avid approach to feminist reformers caught up in the midst of forces they cannot control and struggling to defend women’s liberty against the revolutionary forces of the New Right and neoconservativism. My first aim here is to understand the place of feminism within the contemporary context of Tocqueville’s authority and to put his ambivalence to work, so to speak, against the forces that aim to capture his authority. To that end, in the second and third sections of this chapter, I explore one episode in the contest of reform in which Tocqueville’s Memoir on Pauperism (1835) is put to use against welfare entitlements and in defense of civil society, the privatization of social provision, and voluntary charity. It is one episode in a larger story of how Tocqueville’s authority is put to use against feminism and poor women in the American culture wars and in the passage of the 1996 welfare reforms that inaugurated what political scientist Gwendolyn Mink calls the ‘‘welfare police state.’’6 The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (prwora) introduced a host of draconian and moralistic measures to compel poor single mothers to work outside the home, to get married, and to practice sexual abstinence; prwora strips poor women of the right to welfare, caps women’s reproductive rights, and stringently pushes paternity and fatherhood initiatives over and against the rights of women. The place of feminism in the context of the 1996 reforms is deeply contested on a number of fronts. While I give an account of some of those contests, my second aim is to read Tocqueville’s Memoir on Pauperism against its recent deployment in the governmentalization of civil society, by which I mean state power and new rationalities of governance coming to bear upon churches, schools, families and sexuality, work, social service, all in the name of shoring up the erstwhile domains of voluntary action and association. That deployment, I will argue, has the potential to confound feminist reforms undertaken at the margins of the state by squeezing them out between the government and a fully governmentalized civil society. In the end, I evoke Tocqueville’s ambivalence to combat the uses to which his authority, unstable as it is, is put against feminist reform. Feminists rarely evoke Tocqueville’s authority and, coincidentally or not, we rarely see feminist theory transformed into governing discourses

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today. Feminist theory was, of course, transformed into governing discourses in the United States in the past (women’s suffrage, sexual harassment, family law, sexual and domestic violence, reproductive rights, Titles IX and X, and so on) and continues to be in other places.7 Yet while feminists of every kind remain active in reform efforts today (empowering women in Croatia; doling out microloans to women all over the world; operating battered women’s shelters, rape crisis centers, and birth control clinics; teaching safe-sex practices, running antiracism workshops, and engaging in community organizing, to name only a few of many possible examples), it is commonplace to hear that feminism and the Left in general are exhausted, and to hear it especially from feminists and the Left. But if you listen instead to the neoconservative Right, as I do below, feminism is a raging force in American politics. Neoconservatives may disingenuously flatter feminism; we are all too familiar with the ways that inequality between women divides the women’s movement.8 As second-wave feminism advanced in the United States, translating feminist theory into practical discourses to advance the liberation of women, inequality between women became more extreme and intractable.9 prwora stripped poor women of entitlements altogether as feminists either gave a weak defense of welfare entitlements or actively advocated for workfare and child support enforcement.10 As always in the history of American feminist reform, the liberation of (some) women appears to exacerbate the domination and exclusion of poor women, especially women of color. In the case of prwora, the feminist liberation of (some) women from domestic labor into wage work was the very stick used to beat poor women into compulsory labor, or ‘‘workfare.’’ The cruel, albeit unintended, consequences of feminist reform are too big a subject for this chapter. However, it is with the general contradictions of feminist reform in mind that I aim to situate feminism within the contemporary context of reform, to illuminate the dangers for feminist reform lurking in the space between government and civil society that is grounded upon Tocqueville’s authority, and to combat that authority by invoking his ambivalence toward reform. His paradoxically ambivalent yet avid pursuit of reform is exemplary for feminists who recognize that our reforms (and even the best or most radical feminist theory) cannot completely transform the circumstances of women’s lives that are conditioned by the forces of capitalism and racism. However, those imperfect reforms may be our best defense against the revolutionary forces of neoconservativism

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and the New Right today. Modeling our struggles upon Tocqueville’s avid pursuit of reform in the face of its imperfection is the surest way of protecting our political liberty, now threatened by the neoconservative state.

The Reformer Tocqueville himself lived in strenuous pursuit of reform schemes to remedy the evils of industrializing and democratizing nations, for governing their colonies, their paupers, their abandoned children, and their criminals, and he advocated for the abolition of slavery. He traveled, he wrote, studied, compared, and counted; he examined philanthropists in conversation and letters; he scrutinized the utility of various reform schemes tried in different associational, national, and colonial contexts. He never doubted that the forces of industry, democracy, and equality were on the advance and he feared their consequences for liberty as much as he deplored the misery he carefully documented in their wake. Yet he struck a tone of caution, advising his readers that they might undertake to guide these forces and remedy their worst effects, but they should never be foolish enough to try to stop them through either revolution or grandiose reform schemes. Revolution could only exacerbate the negative effects of those forces. Grandiose reform schemes inspired by ‘‘vain theories’’ promising to cure every ill were equally dangerous undertakings because they were blind to practical realities and history and produced disastrous consequences.11 A cautious and ambivalent reform, then, ongoing rather than episodic, was the only possible course of action, and Tocqueville’s sense of urgency to secure liberty through reform was driven by both his fear of revolution and his desire for liberty. Reforming is a particular kind of governing. It is one that is premised on the progress of forces to which one must adapt rather than overcome. Progress, one way or another, would be had; the question was whether liberty would also be had. Tocqueville’s vision of liberty was mindful of the ways that individual liberty could produce its opposite in collective forms of despotism (colonies, racial exclusion, westward expansion, prisons, and tyranny of the majority) as well as individual powerlessness. But without a full measure of liberty there was no possibility of ever defending it, if one was lucky enough to enjoy a bit of it. Tocqueville understood that under the conditions of capitalism, liberty was often at odds with

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what we would call social justice today, and yet he valued both dearly. Hence he was an ambivalent, if avid, reformer and his attitude was that every reform scheme would inevitably have both good and bad consequences. Like so many others of his time, Tocqueville discovered pauperism in England, which, he wrote, was ‘‘the only country in Europe which has systematized and applied the theories of public charity on a grand scale’’ and which had done so for 250 years.12 Tocqueville believed that while there have always been poor people and cause for private charity, industrialization created ever larger numbers of paupers, and hence the need for welfare rights, for several reasons. The first is that industrial economies increased general prosperity, but were less stable than agricultural ones and more subject to fluctuations in market demand. ‘‘The industrial class which gives so much impetus to the well-being of others is thus much more exposed to sudden and irremediable evils.’’13 The instability of capitalism explains why pauperism increases alongside economic progress. Tocqueville wrote in the Memoir that the ‘‘rise of industrial capitalism produced pauperism in proportion to its advance. The higher the standard of living a nation enjoys, the more paupers it produces.’’14 Increased numbers of paupers was the price of general prosperity. Second, and related, he advanced the theory of relative poverty. In Portugal and Spain, he argued, hordes of people are impoverished, but none are paupers. In England, by contrast, there are general prosperity and large numbers of paupers. As general well-being and comfort rises, so too do ‘‘needs’’ increase. The novelties of new commodities and pleasures soon become commonplace ‘‘needs.’’ As new commodities and pleasures are produced, old ones are rejected and whole industries go under at the whim of consumers accustomed to change. Third, then, as those commodities increase the general comfort and multiply life’s pleasures (as well as increasing the pauperization of large numbers), the contrived ‘‘needs’’ met by industrialization become habitual. Thus ‘‘artificial needs’’ produce new paupers begging in the streets for tobacco money. ‘‘Among very civilized peoples, the lack of a multitude of things causes poverty; in the savage state, poverty consists only in not finding something to eat.’’15 There was no way to stop industrialization as a cure for the poverty it produced, according to Tocqueville. The human toll that followed upon the advance of civilization must be grappled with, but that advance could never be conquered. In his nightmares the pauper would become a revolutionary, and in his

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daydreams Tocqueville would discover a scheme for governing the poor consistent with liberty, that is, in such a way that the poor became enlightened about their own self-interest, autonomous and independent, and fully capable of self-government. He never did realize a dream of the perfect machine to reform the character of ‘‘man.’’ Nor did any class of paupers become a revolutionary force overtaking private property altogether. Nevertheless, in his ‘‘Second Memoir on Pauperism’’ (1837), he found promise in the association of workers: ‘‘When workers have tried to dispense with capitalists, to associate themselves, to combine their money and manage their work themselves with the aid of a union, they have been unable to succeed. . . . I am led to believe, however, that a time is approaching when it will be possible to manage many industries in this manner.’’16 He was vaguely hopeful that the power of association, especially through savings schemes and unions, could remedy class inequality once education and the art of association advanced among the population and governments learned to appreciate rather than fear such associations. Yet he had little confidence that the capitalists could be dispensed with in his own time. Given this, the two remedies for pauperism already in practice—private charity and England’s Poor Laws— consumed his attention. In the Memoir, Tocqueville describes ‘‘man’s natural passion for idleness’’ and only two incentives to work, which are ‘‘the need to live and the desire to improve the conditions of life. Experience has proven that the majority of men can be sufficiently motivated to work only by the first of these incentives. The second is only effective with a small minority.’’17 The state provision of welfare, he warned, will destroy the first incentive of the majority to work and will threaten the liberty of the minority to pursue the second incentive to improve their condition. Tocqueville’s nightmare of a revolutionary class of paupers was not fueled by a fear that the poor would become revolutionaries on their own behalf, but that well-meaning states might undertake to provide for the poor and unintentionally produce and enlarge class antagonism and, hence, indirectly deploy a revolutionary class of paupers. His fears are spelled out in one of his most breathless sentences: But I am deeply convinced that any permanent, regular, administrative system whose aim will be to provide for the needs of the poor, will breed more miseries that it can cure, will deprave the population that it wants to help and comfort, will in time reduce

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the rich to being no more than the tenant-farmers of the poor, will dry up the sources of savings, will stop accumulation of capital, will retard the development of trade, will benumb human industry and activity, and will culminate by bringing about a violent revolution in the State, when the number of those who receive alms will have become as large as those who give it, and the indigent, no longer being able to take from the impoverished rich the means of providing for his needs, will find it easier to plunder them of their property at one stroke rather than to ask for their help.18 Rather than aiding in the general progress of society, public welfare led directly to barbarism, violence, and depravity. By undercutting the first incentive to work, welfare state provision destroys the very humanity of the poor and ruins the chance that they will ever follow the second incentive to improve their own lot or act collectively to improve the lot of all. ‘‘What can be expected from a man whose position cannot improve, since he has lost the respect of his fellow men which is the precondition of all progress, whose lot could not become worse, since being reduced to the satisfaction of his most pressing needs, he is assured that they will always be satisfied?’’19 He lives as an animal does, writes Tocqueville, or a vegetable in the field, insensible to human progress. It was by gaining the right to public welfare (for those who do not work) that paupers threatened the rights of all (who might work to improve themselves). As an exception to the nobility of rights in general, he held that the right to public welfare is ‘‘accorded by reason of a recognized inferiority,’’ a kind of legal, public, and permanent degradation.20 According to Tocqueville, in societies with no public right to welfare, a claim to private charity is also degrading, but it is temporary and the claimant’s inferiority is acknowledged only in private between the giver and receiver of charity. In societies where the right to welfare is generalized, Tocqueville held that the class of paupers would become permanent, ever larger, and dangerous. Public charity threatened both the liberty of all society and not just that of the poor. State welfare in England, or what he called ‘‘legal charity,’’ curtailed the liberty of all by preventing the poor from moving away from the parish where their basic needs were met to improve their lives elsewhere. ‘‘Through their Poor Laws, the English have immobilized a sixth of their population. They have bound it to the earth like the medie-

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val peasantry. Then, man was forced against his will to stay on the land where he was born. Legal charity keeps him from even wishing to move.’’21 Tocqueville refers to medieval subjects and modern paupers as ‘‘vegetables.’’ The former are made so by tyranny, but the latter submit to a vegetative life either voluntarily or as the consequence of forces beyond their understanding and control. Eager to prevent paupers from moving into their parish, officials imposed limits on the movement of all. ‘‘Thus legal charity has not only taken freedom of movement from the English poor, but also from those who are threatened by poverty’’ (33). Irrationally, the Poor Laws made paupers out of people who might otherwise have found a way to remain in the condition of liberty. The morality of all was similarly threatened and particularly by the state’s recognition of illegitimate children. Tocqueville was appalled at the shameless mothers of illegitimate children who appeared before a court he observed to claim their right to public relief in the south of England. In one of the cases he relates, a woman ‘‘approaches without showing the slightest sign of hesitation, her gaze not at all lowered by a sense of shame. The overseer accuses her of having had the baby she is carrying through unlawful intercourse’’ (34). She admits to the charge and the overseer asks her under oath to name the father. After the man is identified, the court delivers the sentence that he support the child. The couple leaves and ‘‘the incident does not excite the least emotion in an audience accustomed to such scenes’’ (35). The problem, says Lord X (an anonymous lord) to Tocqueville after the scene, is that public relief guarantees that vice pays ‘‘a dowry of infamy.’’ Moreover, it is paid to individuals regardless of the wealth or poverty of an illegitimate child’s relatives. Since illegitimate pregnancy pays, lower-class women are encouraged to misconduct themselves, and if the father is rich he may still evade responsibility for his illegitimate children. The implication, of course, is that the right to welfare corrupts the sexual morality of all society and not only the poor. Both the rich philanderer and the impoverished mother evade taking moral and financial responsibility for their illegitimate progeny. Corruption; the loss of liberty; and ultimately, revolution were inevitable effects of public welfare, according to Tocqueville. They were not the effects of the character of the poor upon society (as we shall see, this is a key point upon which Tocqueville’s authority is abused). Rather, immorality was an effect of welfare and not itself a cause of poverty. It was an effect that could be avoided by withdrawing the legal entitlement to wel-

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fare and by relying upon private charity to remedy the ills of industrialization. Although he admired as a virtue the desire to help the poor, Tocqueville was unequivocally critical of the British Poor Laws: ‘‘Any measure which established legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class’’ (30). He was equally unequivocal in his praise of private charity. Private charity ‘‘is as old as the world; it began with human misfortune’’ (25). ‘‘It can produce only useful results. Its very weakness is a guarantee against dangerous consequences. It alleviates many miseries and breeds none’’ (37). (While the ‘‘weakness’’ of private charity made it less dangerous than public legal charity and causes him to heap praise upon it, we will see below that its very weakness led Tocqueville to argue that industrialized nations could not rely solely upon private charity.) Private charity and associational schemes worked to improve society, as well as to aid the poor, by establishing ‘‘a moral tie’’ between the rich and the poor. Private philanthropists, for example, knew well how to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving poor because they knew them personally or, at the very least, lived in close proximity to their suffering. Public charity, however, Tocqueville warned, will never have the intimate knowledge necessary to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving and so inevitably rewards vice. Instead of class antagonism, private charity created cross-class contact, mutual respect and understanding, and the gratitude of the poor.22 Moral ties united ‘‘two rival nations, who have existed since the beginning of the world and who are called the rich and the poor.’’23 Acting out of a timeless instinct to help the poor, the rich became interested in understanding and remedying the plight of the poor; for their part, knowing they had no right to the voluntary assistance of the rich, the poor became morally bonded and beholden to the rich. So stabilizing class relations, private charity in every way promoted the progress of society. It produced none of the vices of ‘‘modern’’ systems of charity and, in fact, generated social virtue and mutual ties by so linking the two classes. Individual acts of charity could safeguard the liberty of all, and even more so if they were combined in association. However, Tocqueville’s ambivalence extended even to private charity because he recognized it as unreliable and inadequate, given the scale of industrial societies and the number of paupers capitalism produced. He counseled that private char-

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ity should be relied upon in the ordinary course of events, but that some system of temporary public charity would be necessary in light of the upheavals and instability of industrialization. Both his enthusiasm for private charity and his fear of public charity were tempered by his recognition of the conditions of capitalism. Although he held the social cohesion produced by private charity in high esteem, he had little confidence that private charity alone could redress the social conditions of capitalism. To his way of thinking, both private and public charity are ‘‘powerless to cure the ills of the impoverished classes.’’24 His ambivalence over reforms undertaken to remedy poverty resonate with his commentaries on abandoned children, colonies, and other arenas of reform. For example, in his writing on prison reform, Tocqueville often vacillated on the question of whether ‘‘men’’ could ever be fully redeemed by their reform, and wavered consistently in his convictions about the ‘‘perfectability of man.’’ (It is, of course, unclear whether to say that he meant ‘‘men’’ to the exclusion of women or not.) Along with Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville repeatedly cautioned against the tendency of reformers to apply grand theories to questions of reform rather than consider the practical realities and limitations of any reform scheme.25 Practical realities almost always spelled unfortunate and unintended consequences to any social undertaking and no matter how urgent the need for reform, no matter how dangerous the problem to be solved, he was prone to fear that the consequences of remedies might be worse than the problems they were intended to redress. Tocqueville understood poverty, crime, and child abandonment, and their remedies to be pivotal determinants of public morality and of the relations between citizens and government. In every case he advocated associational remedies, and where these were not appropriate or practicable (usually in France), he advocated a cautious governmental response, preferably administered and adapted at the local level. For example, as Michael Drolet writes, quoting Tocqueville, ‘‘He believed there was no other issue ‘more governmental in nature than that of abandoned children,’ and thought ‘nothing influenced more directly the destiny of citizens, their well-being, their duties, their rights and their existence than the laws relating to abandoned children.’ ’’26 As a debate raged on the tours, a device designed for the humanitarian purpose of eliminating the stigma attached to child abandonment in order to protect children from death by abortion, exposure, and infanticide, Tocqueville challenged both advocates of the tours and those who called for its abolition. Each

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side was mistaken in its belief that declining public morality was either caused or cured by the tours. (The debates on the tours bear a remarkable similarity to contemporary debates over needle-exchange programs, foster care, and safe-sex education, for example, attesting to the fact that neither Tocqueville nor anyone else is able to solve the liberal problem of government when its citizens’ actions do not conform to the expectations of reason, economy, and morality.) The causes of child abandonment were many, and so its remedy could not possibly be found in the singular invention of the tours. Alongside some of the critics of the tours, Tocqueville advocated replacing them with new local government administrations called ‘‘the admissions office,’’ which, like the houses of juvenile detention he visited in America, were situated ‘‘halfway between a college and a prison,’’ to act upon public morals.27 There is much to learn from a comparison of his various works in all these areas of reform and by delving into the intellectual influences that sharpened his vision of democracy.28 This chapter, however, is focused upon his Memoir on Pauperism published in 1835, and then, still more specifically, with the republication of the Memoir in 1997 by Civitas in the United States and Britain. As we shall see, none of Tocqueville’s ambivalence over weighing the advantages and disadvantages of any given scheme to remedy the ills produced by capitalism is reflected in the use to which his Memoir on Pauperism is put today.

Civitas Civitas (the Institute for the Study of Civil Society) reissued Seymour Drescher’s 1968 translation of Tocqueville’s Memoir on Pauperism in 1997, made it available free online, and dressed it up with an introduction by the neoconservative and antifeminist historian Gertrude Himmelfarb and a foreword by economic historian Max Hartwell.29 Civitas is described on its Web site as a ‘‘non-partisan think-tank’’ dedicated to encouraging ‘‘social cohesion’’ and concerned with ‘‘the division of responsibilities between government and civil society’’ (my emphasis).30 By way of Tocqueville’s authority, Civitas proposes to put civil society to work as an alternative to both welfare state and market-based solutions to social problems. ‘‘Social cohesion,’’ the Web site explains, is best left to the institutions of civil society such as two-parent biological families,

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churches, and voluntary and charitable organizations. Civitas rejects both the liberal welfare state and state socialism as solutions to social problems and stands in favor of policies consistent with the American neoconservative movement to remoralize civil society, such as the promotion of heterosexual marriage, ‘‘school choice,’’ and faith-based organizations. Without offering a new translation, Civitas relies upon Himmelfarb’s recommendation of the Memoir in bringing it to our attention. Himmelfarb is professor of history emerita at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her many historical books on the history of ideas, charity, philanthropy, and the welfare state include more social scientific works that I emphasize here alongside her introduction to the Memoir on Pauperism.31 Her two social scientific works were written to have an impact on social and governmental reform and to shape public discourse in the same vein as Charles Murray’s 1984 crossover hit, Losing Ground.32 These two books promote the idea that the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, and especially its feminist wing, was a success. Between her 1994 and 1999 books, Himmelfarb reappraises the success of the sexual revolution. In her 1994 version of recent American history, feminists and their allies won. ‘‘What is striking about the 1960s ‘sexual revolution,’ as it has properly been called, is how revolutionary it was, in sensibility as well as reality. In 1965, 69 percent of American women and 65 percent of men under age thirty said that premarital sex was always or almost always wrong; by 1972, those figures had plummeted to 24 percent and 21 percent’’ and continued to decline.33 The counterculture of the 1960s became, she insists, the ‘‘dominant culture’’ of our day. Our society’s tolerance of sexual variety and experimentation and our generosity and ‘‘value-neutrality’’ with regard to the poor and the criminal creates a society whose values and culture, she warns darkly, threaten liberty and democracy. ‘‘We are accustomed to speak of the sexual revolution of this period, but that revolution, we are now discovering, is part of a larger, more ominous, moral revolution.’’34 Himmelfarb holds that the resulting ‘‘demoralization of society’’ can be combated only by imposing the stern Victorian authority of absolute moral standards, philanthropy, and thrift and by restoring the civic republican virtues of hard work, voluntary service, self-control, and the ‘‘traditional family.’’ She quotes Edmund Burke approvingly: ‘‘ ‘Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the

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less of it is within, the more there must be without.’ ’’35 Given the success of the cultural revolution—for example, the liberation of women and of queers, the appetites unleashed by popular culture, by multiculturalism, by single-parent families—she calls for a ‘‘counter-counterrevolution’’ in her 1994 jeremiad against the ‘‘dominant culture’’ reproduced by liberal education in universities, popular culture, television, film, and journalism. Against the many and powerful forces of the 1960s counterculture, including feminism, multiculturalism, nihilism, and the secular welfare state, Himmelfarb launches a revolutionary strategy, throwing many of the punches feminists have taken in the American culture wars. She herself writes as a ‘‘dissident,’’ as a ‘‘counter-counterrevolutionary,’’ and as a culture warrior writing in resistance to the simultaneously repressive and permissive quality of countercultural societies in America and England. Feminists might scoff at the claim that the counterculture won and now forms the dominant culture in America. It sounds like another one of neoconservativism’s ruses, like ‘‘the liberal media’’ or the ‘‘liberal bias against Christmas.’’ Alternatively, we might revel in the glory of learning that we won. However, Himmelfarb is not claiming that feminism won a revolution overtaking the state, but that it won a cultural revolution. What is the difference? Rather than gaining control over the state, the 1960s counterculture transformed ‘‘the manners, morals, and mores of society. This does not mean that it has transformed every realm of life, any more than did other revolutions worthy of the name [the industrial revolution or the technological revolution]. . . . But it has a profound effect upon our institutions and relationships, public and private.’’36 Poverty, rising crime rates, drug use, single-parent families—the ‘‘demoralization of society’’—all are reduced to the consequences of the feminist cultural revolution of the 1960s. What happened, according to Himmelfarb, is that the feminist counterculture destroyed the moral underpinning of democratic order, our ability to control and to govern ourselves properly, and so the state must step in to compel morality. Thus she places the blame for the 1996 welfare reforms squarely upon the shoulders of feminists and their countercultural allies. It is because of feminism’s success that the ‘‘new paternalism’’ of prwora must be imposed upon poor single mothers. Himmelfarb thus avoids taking responsibility for the power that neoconservatives hold. That is, she succumbs to moralism as a substitute for claiming power.37 It is as if she says, ‘‘It is their fault that we need to take

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authoritarian measures. I am a good democrat, I love equality and liberty. I am not an authoritarian. But they have all the power.’’ In that sense, her claim that the counterculture won is a ruse, a cover for the power held by conservatives. But it is dangerous to dismiss her claim as merely a ruse, for then we too risk falling into moralism, if feminists were to say, ‘‘All the alternatives to neoliberalism, neoconservativism, and global capitalism are exhausted or discredited. Feminists and the Left do not have any power.’’ It is worthwhile to adopt Himmelfarb’s idea that feminism won, if only to avoid the powerlessness that attends moralism. If feminists are not powerless, but take action in matters not fully within our control, we must take responsibility for the ways that our programs, reforms, and movements led to good or bad, if unintended, consequences. And sorting out the difference between the good and the bad is not easy, because feminists often disagree with each other. The unintended consequences of the women’s movement, such as the double work day, the feminization of poverty, the exclusion of women of color and lesbians, and workfare, among others, are not the result of our powerlessness but, at least in part, of the ways feminism has shaped the world.38 Rather than reject the idea that the cultural revolution succeeded, and fall back on the claim that neoconservativism disempowers feminism and displaces democracy, we would do well to adopt Tocqueville’s attitude and some of his ambivalence about feminist reform. Particular reforms are undertaken within contexts never fully unfolded and under conditions of capitalism that cannot be conquered. But adopting an attitude of ambivalence does not let us off the hook. Feminists must combine ambivalence with avidity; we must take responsibility for the ways that feminist reforms produced or exacerbated inequality between women and re-reform or amend our existing programs and positions. Gertrude Himmelfarb blamed the 1996 welfare reforms on the success of feminism. Feminists themselves hold conflicting views about the role of feminism during the passage of prwora, but they appear united in viewing the reforms as emblematic of feminism’s failure. Gwendolyn Mink, for example, points out that ‘‘white middle-class feminists’ emphasis on women’s right to work outside the home—accompanied by women’s increased presence in the workforce—gave cover to conservatives eager to require wage work of single mothers even as they championed the traditional family.’’39 She emphasizes that white middle-class feminists supported prwora in Congress and argues that they generally failed

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to defend entitlements for poor women: ‘‘A white and middle-class solipsism enforced a general feminist silence about the stakes of welfare provisions for poor women, and that silence gave permission to policymakers to treat punitive welfare reform as a no-lose situation.’’40 In other words, the moral and political failure represented by prwora was caused by white middle-class feminists acting in their own interests at the expense of poor women. By contrast, Wendy Brown argues that the feminist defense of welfare entitlements called for by Mink betrays the feminist critique of welfare entitlements as the instruments effecting the domination and subordination of women. Brown emphasizes that former feminist critics of the welfare state, such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Frances Fox Piven, came to the defense of welfare state entitlements for poor women. To her way of thinking, the political failure of feminists was not solipsism, as Mink contends, but a failure of political desire or the will to stick by the critique of the welfare state as an institution effecting women’s domination.41 Citing the defense of the welfare state as part of a more general political ‘‘disorientation’’ about freedom on the part of the Left, Brown contends that the proper object of feminist critique is state domination, and she calls for a new feminist theory of the state. Both Brown and Mink ask whether feminists should defend or criticize the welfare state. That question is misplaced because it implies that our political and intellectual convictions are the sources of feminist failure, as if reform were a matter of will, desire, or getting our theory right. The failure of feminism to turn back draconian welfare reforms in 1996 was not a moral, political, or intellectual failure, not a failure of solipsism or one of grand theory, so much as a failure to sustain ambivalence about the welfare state. Feminist critics of the welfare state such as Brown are right: we cannot simply defend entitlements because they are the instruments effecting women’s domination and subordination.42 Feminist defenders of the welfare state such as Mink are right that without the protections afforded by the state poor women, and disproportionate numbers of women of color, are abandoned to the forces of the market. The consequences of Aid to Families of Dependent Children (afdc) were both good and bad. The problem for feminism is that some—Mink’s ‘‘solipsistic’’ legislators and Brown’s ‘‘disoriented’’ defenders of the welfare state—allowed themselves to get backed into standing simply for or against the 1996 reforms. The politics of reform does not require taking

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such a stand unless we are foolish enough to believe that reform is episodic rather than an ongoing endeavor. In fact, the vast majority of feminists throughout the period of welfare reform to the present kept doing what they had been doing: working in legal aid to defend poor women, operating women’s health clinics, teaching, marching, running collective farms and battered women’s shelters, and doing hundreds of other kinds of things to realize their antiracist, anti-classist, anti-imperialist, and anti-homophobic visions of the feminist movement. Their failure to collectively rally to the call—to either defend welfare entitlements for poor women or revolutionize the state— suggests ambivalence about both the welfare state and its reform. I suspect that many feminists just kept doing what they had been doing out of the conviction that however welfare was reformed, it would never be fully feminist or democratic. That is, they embraced something akin to Tocqueville’s ambivalent yet avid stance toward reform. Rather than being exhausted or disoriented, feminists on the Left are busy on organic farms and cooperatives, teaching in alternative high schools, running shelters, speaking out against imperialism, and always fund-raising. It is no failure of solipsism, political will, or the desire for freedom; it is not a failure of feminist vision or theory. Feminists are attuned to how feminist theory is spun into governing discourses that exclude, punish, and constrain the liberty of some women even as they advance the liberty of others. I believe that in general feminists recognize that the forces of calamity in 1996 could only be tamed and not overcome and that part of the calamity was caused by feminist reforms. Feminists, in short, have become ambivalent, if avid, reformers. Feminists remain committed to innumerable programs undertaken at the margins of the state, accepting the political limitations imposed on nonprofit organizations, avoiding the strings attached to federal money while providing services to poor people. Thus, rather than attempting to capture Tocqueville’s authority in the arena of democratic reform to transform feminist theory into governing discourses, we should more avidly embrace Tocquevillian ambivalence. But the spaces available to embrace Tocqueville’s ambivalence are shrinking. In the immediate aftermath of the 1996 reforms, keeping the state at bay became a priority, and it seemed that Clinton’s neoliberal policies would afford feminists the opportunity to continue their work at the margins of the state. This is getting much harder to do as the neoconservative Bush administration pursues the governmentalization of

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civil society and the space of such action is being squeezed out between civil society and the state. Ever more, Tocqueville’s authority is being put into effect in ways that profoundly alter the political landscape upon which feminists have found room to act outside or at the margins of the state. Ever more, his authority is evoked to conceptualize and governmentalize ‘‘civil society’’ in ways that are likely to intrude upon feminists’ embrace of his ambivalence.

‘‘Between Government and Civil Society’’ Civitas puts Tocqueville’s Memoir on Pauperism to work to ‘‘restore the balance between government and civil society,’’ against welfare entitlements and in defense of ‘‘civil society,’’ the privatization of social provision, and voluntary initiatives to remedy poverty. ‘‘At this point,’’ Himmelfarb writes, ‘‘Tocqueville’s discussion of private charity as opposed to public relief takes on added significance, for it confirms one of the main themes of Democracy in America: The importance of civil society. If public relief is an invitation both to individual irresponsibility and to an overweening state, private charity, filtered through the institutions of civil society, may be a remedy for both.’’43 Himmelfarb uses the Memoir to laud private (voluntary) charity over and against the welfare state, as we shall see, but for only some of the same reasons and with none of the foresight and ambivalence with which Tocqueville does so. In her introduction to the Memoir, Himmelfarb notes approvingly that in Britain and the United States, the legal entitlement to welfare is ‘‘being called into question.’’44 She applauds the 1996 ‘‘devolution’’ of the federal welfare administration to the states. In the spirit of praising the 1996 ‘‘devolution revolution,’’ she does not cite the many federal strings attached to block grants ‘‘devolved’’ to the states that feminists might emphasize: the ‘‘incentive’’ rewards to states for decreasing illegitimate births without raising abortion rates; the creation of a massive child support enforcement regime; the imposition of family caps; or mandatory abstinence-only education.45 Rather, she glowingly cites the potential of further ‘‘devolution from the states to local governments,’’ and still further to ‘‘private institutions—charities, churches, community groups, business enterprises, mutual aid societies, and, above all, families.’’46 Her wish is to expand, decentralize, privatize, moralize, and deregulate the

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government of poor women and single mothers to the level of civil society. Himmelfarb takes up where Tocqueville trailed off at the end of the Memoir. ‘‘If public charity is unsatisfactory and private charity inadequate, how can this new kind of pauperism be averted so that the working classes do not ‘curse the prosperity that they produce?’ ’’47 Dismissing his hopes for worker associations, Himmelfarb notes Tocqueville’s ‘‘failure of imagination about the potentialities of industrialism to improve the condition of the poor without recourse to charity, private or public.’’48 Had Tocqueville followed Adam Smith, as his own mentors did, she argues, he would have learned of the virtues ‘‘of free trade and a free market (which Tocqueville favoured), but also [of] the virtues of industrialism, capitalism, and technology, toward which Tocqueville was either hostile or, at best, ambivalent.’’49 Whereas Tocqueville located the origins of pauperism and threats to liberty in industrialization, Himmelfarb identifies capitalism as a source of democracy and liberty; she considers paupers a threat to democracy. ‘‘Democracy survived and progressed, not in spite of but because of the democratic tendencies inherent in industrialism itself.’’50 Like the idealists that Tocqueville so often chastised for ignoring practical reality, Himmelfarb presumes that all ‘‘good things’’ (capitalism and democracy) go together. She eschews Tocqueville’s stance as that of a timid and ambivalent reformer even as she evokes his authority to cover her claim to moral and political authority. Her own answer to the question she poses (above), to stave off the revolutionary and anticapitalist impulses of the poor, is that welfare must be reformed and ‘‘devolved’’ into something akin to what Tocqueville called ‘‘private charity’’ even if there is no chance that the poor might govern themselves. The poor must be governed harshly rather than achieve liberty to govern themselves, and preferably they will be governed by civil society and not by the state. Civil society is not, as we shall see, the opposite of government, but an arena of government and one that aims to overtake the spaces of association upon which Tocqueville pinned his hopes for the future. By the time her 1999 book was published, America, as we know, was a different place in no small part because of the political ascendance of neoconservativism.51 Between 1994 and 1999, she abandoned the jeremiad because by 1999 neoconservatives were poised to overtake the Republican Party in alliance with the New Right. Next, of course, they took the White House. The fact that a Democratic president signed prwora

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in 1996 drained conviction away from the claim that liberalism was sending us to hell in a handbasket. However, Himmelfarb contends that the ‘‘new paternalism’’ introduced in prwora, remoralizing welfare policy with tough love, abstinence-only, and absolute moral standards, was not an ultimate victory. prwora was not enough to transform civil society, because a demoralized and deformed civil society will never turn away from countercultural values back to traditional values on its own. It must be forced to do so, and only a revolutionized illiberal state could have the authority and power to do so from without. In the 1999 book, which rehashes many of the same arguments found in the 1994 volume, measured against improving moral statistics after the ‘‘devolution revolution,’’ Himmelfarb revises her earlier claim that the stronger forces of the counterculture are dominant. America is no longer depicted as harboring a homogenously ‘‘demoralized society.’’ It is, rather, polarized and embattled, divided between ‘‘two cultures’’—hers, a ‘‘dissident culture,’’ versus ‘‘the dominant (feminist) culture’’—at war, and the counter-counterrevolutionary forces are in full swing. The battles waged in the culture wars are more evenly matched by this time also because of the overwhelming revival of civil society by liberals, communitarians, civic republicans, social movements, and neoliberals, as well as neoconservatives. The balm that civitas—in the form of moral order and voluntary effort—might be for the wounds to our morality suffered at the hands of the counterculture is not out of stock, and she disputes neo-Tocquevillian Robert Putnam’s thesis that ‘‘social capital’’ is on the wane: ‘‘In fact, the problem today would seem to be not an insufficiency of civil society, but its deformation. . . . Trade unions and trade associations, philanthropies and foundations, universities and cultural organizations, are often so large and influential that they are, in effect, quasi-governmental institutions. . . . These institutions are not quite what Tocqueville, or his disciples, had in mind by ‘voluntary associations.’ So far from being voluntary, some are very nearly mandatory.’’52 While she would prefer to allow civil society to cure the ‘‘diseases of democracy,’’ she finds civil society is in a state of ‘‘demoralization’’ and inactivity in 1994 and in a somewhat livelier condition of ‘‘deformation’’ in 1999. Civil society is ‘‘deformed’’ by the ‘‘soft proponents’’ ‘‘who pay lip service to the idea but lack the will or conviction to implement it,’’ crowding out the ‘‘hard proponents’’ of civil society who understand that ‘‘approbation and disapprobation are all the more necessary in a liberal society, for the more effective social

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sanctions, the less need there is for the legal and political sanctions of the state.’’53 While, according to Himmelfarb, it is the proper role of civil society to restore the democratic order, the state must still be called upon to step in to bring civil society up to the task: ‘‘If civil society is to become an effective instrument of social mediation and reformation, it will have to affirm the moral principles that give it its distinctive purpose. And it can do that only by exercising its authority and using social sanctions available to it, sanctions that may be as coercive, psychologically if not physically, as the legal sanctions imposed by the state.’’54 In other words, before it is possible to reform either civil society or government, a counter-counterrevolution in morals must occur first to transform the liberal state and its people, to make them willing and able to use state authority to legislate morality. To restore the proper balance between civil society and government, to restore the civic republican virtues she respects and the absolute moral standards she favors to bring shame down upon deadbeat dads, single mothers, and pregnant teens, the undemocratic measures of revolution and cultural warfare must continue to shape an undemocratic state, all under the cover of Tocqueville’s authority. Both books double back and forth between a furious call to revolution and a gentler advocacy of reform. Neoconservativism, like any other social movement, finds itself divided between revolution and reform.55 Himmelfarb writes at arm’s length about democratic tolerance. (A cynic might expect her newfound respect for tolerance and pluralism to be her means of keeping hold of the reins steering the fury of the New Right. The ascendance of neoconservativism, it is true, was impossible without the unsteady alliance of the Right.) Whereas the moral polarization of Americans could be taken as evidence that her first book succeeded in rallying the forces of the counter-counterculture, Himmelfarb is far from smug. She does take comfort in the revival of civil society even as she disapproves of many purposes civil society is put to. She also welcomes the fact that ‘‘family values’’ is no longer a slogan just for conservatives. For example, ‘‘ ‘family values’ is no longer a conservative slogan; it is invoked by those who take a most liberal view of what constitutes a family (gay couples, for example, who seek the right of marriage).’’56 The rising statistics on illegitimate births and crime rates stoked the fires of her revolutionary zeal in 1994, but by 1999 these numbers were in decline. However, she is clear that the forces of morality are still in the minority and on the defensive, but have nevertheless managed to gener-

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ate momentum enough to create a ‘‘dissident culture’’ of reaction actively taking ground in the culture war. The culture wars are not over and America is divided along cultural lines, she argues, but for a variety of reasons she concludes that while ‘‘counterrevolution is unlikely, a more modest reformation is not.’’57 In her afterword to the 2000 Vintage edition of One Nation, Two Cultures, she reports that ‘‘the term ‘culture wars’ has been more expansively defined to encompass social, economic, even political issues as well as specifically moral ones.’’58 The front lines of the culture war are expanding. However, in the 1999 text, she writes that it ‘‘is common these days to deplore the expression ‘culture war,’ as if the very term is uncivil and inflammatory, a slander upon good, decent, and pacific people. It should hardly need saying that the ‘culture war’ is a ‘war’ only metaphorically, just as the ‘cultural revolution’ is a ‘revolution’ only metaphorically.’’ All the lessons in civility were apparently turned back upon the teachers. Her 1994 call to revolutionary action is tempered in 1999, to the promotion of sustaining a ‘‘dissident culture.’’ Yet despite the ‘‘pluralism’’ of the ‘‘two cultures,’’ they remain at war. The proper balance has yet to be struck between civil society and government. The Republican Party’s Contract with America, its ‘‘devolution revolution’’ in 1996, did not decentralize the state or downsize government and welfare spending as promised. Traditional conservatives balk at the neoconservative agenda to create a bigger, more expensive, intrusive, and authoritarian state. Traditional conservatives want liberty, and a smaller government, not a bigger and meaner one. Himmelfarb is calling for government to accomplish the tasks that a deformed and demoralized civil society cannot accomplish itself. The state must step in regardless of the costs to taxpayers. She scolds that in ‘‘their eagerness to do away with the nanny state, however, some conservatives risk belittling, even delegitimizing the state itself.’’59 Dissent within the ranks of the counter-countercultural forces has moderated her call to action. For Himmelfarb, the remoralization of the poor is the condition not of their liberty, as Tocqueville would have it, but of their qualification for help and welfare. With paternity testing, marriage promotion, abstinence-only, tough love, and clear moral standards, Himmelfarb is confident that the state and civil society will be able to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving poor. Why else call upon the legions of civil society other than to sort them out?

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Civil society itself is dependent upon the judicious use of law and government, if only to preserve and strengthen its constituent parts. Thus a sensible tax policy can encourage two-parent families, as it presently encourages home-ownership. Or divorce laws can be devised to deter the breakup of the family, rather than, as at present, facilitating it. Or the courts can once again support, as they did for most of our history, the rights of communities to enforce anti-pornography and anti-obscenity ordinances. Or the government can induce private philanthropy, by means of fiscal and other incentives, to devote more of their resources to the needy, thus complementing the public ‘‘safety net’’ with the kinds of services that only private charities can provide.60 The state, then, not civil society, is the fountain of ‘‘voluntary effort’’ and association by means of ‘‘incentives,’’ ‘‘deterrents,’’ and ‘‘enforcement,’’ and by any reckoning, voluntary association is thereby less so.61 By this reasoning, which is at odds with Tocqueville’s, civil society is not only a space of voluntary action, but also a space of moral government. Hence, it is not a balance between civil society and government that she seeks, but the (moral and authoritarian) governmentalization of civil society. Appealing to Edmund Burke to justify her view that because we are demoralized we cannot govern ourselves properly, Himmelfarb only somewhat reluctantly calls for authoritarian reforms and culture war to impose the proper balance between civil society and government. She is determined to mobilize Tocqueville against the autonomy and liberty of individual women on welfare and against those who persist in the shameless, public, and ‘‘demoralized’’ practice of single parenthood. (Himmelfarb’s son, William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative magazine the Weekly Standard, was the author of Dan Quayle’s famous Murphy Brown speech assaulting the shamelessness with which single motherhood was portrayed on prime-time television.)62 Himmelfarb and Tocqueville share a horror of shameless women and paupers, but for Tocqueville the cause of their shame was not their moral character but the economy and the right to welfare. Both of them trade in the moral science of statistics, and since they cannot parade women and paupers themselves in the public square to shame them, the shame of these women and paupers is portrayed by their numbers. As Himmelfarb writes, ‘‘In demoralizing social policy—divorcing it from any moral criteria, requirements,

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even expectations—we have demoralized, in the more familiar sense, both the individuals receiving relief and society as a whole.’’63 Her aim is not to see private charity and civil society create ‘‘social cohesion’’ (the mission of Civitas) in the way Tocqueville does, but to assure that the poor are governed according to absolute moral standards by private and faith-based organizations or, at the very least, that the bad will be governed by the good. Moreover, Tocqueville and civil society are put to work here not to protect liberty, as was his aim, but to morally sanction the poor and shameless. Far from relying on absolute moral standards to govern the poor (moralism), as we saw earlier, Tocqueville’s ideal of private charity created common ties between the two classes to ensure the liberty of each. Further, Tocqueville held that private charity could not fully replace state welfare in the context of capitalism. Himmelfarb’s appeal to Tocqueville’s authority on behalf of civil society and private charity is no less problematic in the face of his ambivalence than is her appeal to him against the welfare state. Clearly, for him, all ‘‘good things’’ do not go together and some ‘‘good things’’ are also sources of danger. Himmelfarb does not directly address Tocqueville’s claim that the Poor Laws originated in the political weaknesses of the monarchy and in the power of Protestantism, despite the fact that she revels in his condemnation of public welfare. To her way of thinking, religion, like capitalism, is innocent of any ill effects. Hence, she assumes that it is safe and more efficient for the state to give faith-based organizations (fbos) the funding and power to govern the poor. Similarly, private enterprise and voluntary associations for governing the poor, for sorting out the ‘‘deserving’’ from the ‘‘undeserving,’’ are not recognized by Himmelfarb as possible threats to the liberty of the poor but as, in fact, their saviors. Quite unlike Tocqueville, she is quite confident that sentencing fathers to support their children following paternity tests will bring ‘‘deadbeat dads’’ within the grasp of moral reformers; that ‘‘fatherhood initiatives’’ and ‘‘marriage promotion’’ will pay off in the remoralization of the poor rather than coming at the price of a terrible new despotism and powerfully centralized administration of civil society.64 Eschewing Tocqueville’s ambivalent stance as a reformer while also seeking the cover of his authority would be very tricky indeed if the text in question were Democracy in America, where the emphasis is on voluntary associations as the wellsprings of liberty. For Himmelfarb, as we have seen, associations and civil society are the wellsprings not of liberty, but of moral authority. Also, whereas Tocqueville presumed that the moral

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order in America was a settled one, in Himmelfarb’s world the moral order is at war and the nation is divided not by class, but by culture. And Himmelfarb does not fear the centralization of power that her project entails, as Tocqueville would. One of the surprising things about the Memoir in the body of Tocqueville’s work is the absence of ‘‘centralization.’’ Elsewhere in his writings, Tocqueville is alert to the terrible threats that governmental centralization poses to democratic liberty, individual rights, political participation, and associational freedom. All these themes except centralization figure prominently in the Memoir. This can be explained in part, of course, because he was writing about England, which he admired for the way in which governmental administration was decentralized. But that does not stop Himmelfarb from ignoring the political context of his argument and resorting to the cover of the Memoir’s authority on this subject. While many other civil society revivalists and civic republicans celebrate the decentralization of administration and government to civil society as a site of self-government and voluntary association, Himmelfarb understands its potential as a site of moral and authoritarian government. Civil society is treated as a site of self-governance by neoliberals, a site of private morality by secularists, a space of entrepreneurship by fbo advocates, and a site of direct democracy by advocates of participatory budgets and some civic republicans.65 Today, civil society encompasses just about everything: private life, family, sexuality, economic enterprise, religion and faith, and politics, all rolled into one in ways that clash and confound any lingering hope, including Himmelfarb’s, that civil society is the opposite of the state.66 Whereas Tocqueville valued private charity for its voluntary and moral character, Himmelfarb aims to capture Tocqueville’s authority on behalf of governmental initiatives to moralize and discipline the poor through civil society rather than to ensure their liberty. Himmelfarb concedes that the proper balance between civil society and government will have to be tipped in favor of control from without first, in order to remoralize civil society back to a state of virtue. To restore democracy and liberty, she argues, it is necessary to take undemocratic and authoritarian measures. If the liberal state fails to censor and sanction according to moral absolutes, well, then, Himmelfarb recommends civil society to the task. However, civil society cannot succeed without state power and so it is rapidly becoming the handmaiden of the state.67 Civil society and government can no longer be opposed to one another, whether or not they ever were in Tocqueville’s day. They are not,

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on the one side, a space of voluntary action, and on the other, a space of control and obedience. By this I mean to also imply that centralization and decentralization (or devolution) are not opposites either. Even if neoconservatives fall from power, the rationalities of their programs for governmentalizing the space of civil society—from marriage promotion to the promotion of democracy abroad, privatization and decentralization of government, fbos, cbos (community-based organizations), private associations and charities, to school vouchers and child support enforcement—will continue to squeeze out voluntary effort that is not directed by the state. As civil society is expanded and governmentalized, the heightened state regulation of nonprofit organizations, political and civic associations, and social movements will have a squeezing effect upon the political liberty of feminists to pursue reform at the margins of the state. ‘‘Civil society’’ is one of the ways that Tocqueville’s authority is set against feminist reform. The spaces left for embracing ambivalence are shrinking because the governmentalization of civil society imposes moral truth, conviction, abstinence, and ‘‘traditional’’ values upon practical reform efforts. Feminists must resist ‘‘the call to civil society’’ and Tocqueville’s authority by embracing and evoking his ambivalence and by resisting the temptation to simply defend or criticize the welfare state.68

Conclusion By evoking Tocqueville’s ambivalence, by reading him as a reformer rather than as a political theorist, as I do here, feminists will not see the pathways to democracy or the liberation of all women much clearer. Tocqueville is not the source of any ready-made program for postcolonial, postwelfare, or postindustrial reformers and it is important to remember that while he exemplified the love of liberty in France, he gave up on advancing the cause of liberty in its colonies.69 Tocqueville was as fearful of grand strategies of revolution and reform as he was of centralized and expanded government. His authority will no doubt be put to new tests in support of the Patriot Act, the imposition of democracy on Iraq, the defense of marriage, and prison reform, among other policies and laws. But feminists have a defense against the authority of Tocqueville in his own ambivalence. We do not need a grand theory of the welfare state or

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a mass mobilization of women to defend the liberty of all women (including in Iraq and Afghanistan) so much as we need to defend the spaces of reform from the conceptualization and governmentalization of civil society. In the Memoir on Pauperism, Tocqueville’s ambivalence about the prospects of both public and private charity leads some commentators such as Gertrude Himmelfarb to conclude that his thoughts on the subject of pauperism are incomplete. Rather than conclude that his work was unfinished, however, I draw lessons from his ambivalence about the reform schemes he witnessed and those he hoped to see tested. I do not suggest that we should embrace ambivalence out of weakness, but because feminist reform is confounded by and often exacerbates inequality between women. So too the legacy of neoconservative reforms will be confounded by their failure to ‘‘moralize’’ poor women and criminals, to put everyone to work, and to revolutionize the state. Episodic reforms undertaken in the name of Tocqueville, like prwora and the governmentalization of civil society, reforms that promise to revolutionize the state, are dangerous. In the context of reform, everything is dangerous. To respond by entering into the culture wars or by proposing episodic reforms of our own is folly. Ambivalence in the context of reform is not a weakness, but a means of continuing to avidly pursue reform, for if we act out of the conviction born of a grand design or feminist theory of the state, we will surely become disappointed or cynical when all our efforts fail to overcome inequality between women in the context of capitalism. It is not feminists’ powerlessness or privilege that confounds feminist reform efforts so much as the authority of Tocqueville. For feminists to combat the (ab)use of Tocqueville’s authority, it is necessary to marshal his ambivalence. To keep doing what we are doing, feminists must actively resist the call to civil society.

Notes 1. See Isaac Kramnick, introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald Bevan (1835, 1840; New York: Penguin Books, 2003). 2. See Michael Shapiro, ‘‘Bowling Blind: Post Liberal Civil Society and the Worlds of NeoTocquevillian Social Theory,’’ Theory and Event 1, no. 1 (1997), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ theory_and_event/v001/1./shapiro.html. 3. Kramnick concludes his introduction to Democracy in America thus: ‘‘Tocqueville, he who must be quoted’’ (xlvii). Kramnick points out that ‘‘anyone who gives $10,000 or more to the charity

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giant United Way anywhere in the United States is automatically made a member of the National Alexis de Tocqueville Society, created by the United Way in 1972 and so named because, as the brochure puts it, ‘Tocqueville’s most important observation was that Americans helped each other in time of need’ ’’ (xi). Kramnick also explains, ‘‘The widespread conservative takeover of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America has merged in recent years with the communitarian embrace, making Tocqueville the official prophet of communitarianism and Democracy in America its sacred text’’ (xlv). It is ‘‘protean text’’ adaptable to any use (xliii). President George W. Bush plans to capture Tocqueville’s authority for his presidential library, ‘‘to create a policy center focused on the spread of democracy and Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of America as a nation made better by its ‘associations’ or community groups.’’ See Elisabeth Bumiller, ‘‘His Legacy and His Library Occupy Bush’s Thoughts,’’ New York Times, May 8, 2006, A16. In a commencement speech at Calvin College in 2005, Bush declared, ‘‘Tocqueville’s account is not just the observations of one man—it is the story of our founding. It is not just a description of America at a point in time—it is an agenda for our time.’’ http://www.whitehouse.gove/news/releases/2005/ 05/print/20050521–1.html, 2. 4. To get some idea of new modes of democratic participation unfolding that are not Tocquevillian, see, for example, Arjun Appaduri, ‘‘Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,’’ Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 21–47; Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Romand Coles, Beyond Gated Communities: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Kevin Olsen, Reflexive Democracy: Political Equality and the Welfare State (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); Anna Marie Smith, ‘‘Democratic Theory for a New Century,’’ in Contemporary Political Philosophy: A Reader and Guide, ed. Alan Finlayson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 559–70. 5. Michael Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), provides the most recent and thorough historicist interpretation as well as a comparison of Tocqueville’s writings on reform. See also Eric Keslassy, Le libe´ralisme de Tocqueville a` l’e´preuve du paupe´risme, Pre´face de Françoise Me´lonio, (Collection L’Ouverture Philosophique, L’Harmattan, 2000). An excellent and detailed account of the influences on Tocqueville’s methodology is contained in a review essay by Melvin Richter, ‘‘The Deposition of Alexis de Tocqueville?’’ Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 23, no. 2 (2002): 173–99. Chad Goldberg ‘‘reconstructs’’ rather than merely cites Democracy in America to craft social policies that are ‘‘enabling rather than tutelary, universalistic rather than targeted, preventive rather than compensatory, associative rather than atomizing,’’ in ‘‘Social Citizenship and a Reconstructed Tocqueville,’’ American Sociological Review 66 (April 2001): 289–315 (291). His target is to reconstruct Tocqueville’s arguments against both those who seek to operationalize Tocqueville’s theory of democracy such as George W. Bush and historicists who caution against applying the text to the present such as Michael Drolet. Sheldon Wolin emphasizes Tocqueville’s intellectual and political doubts and the ways he was tormented by his own desire for certainty in Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001), especially 78–112. My emphasis here is not on his intellectual doubt and methodological torments, but on his practical ambivalence about reforms and his ability to acknowledge both the good and the bad effects of a single reform. By reading him here as a reformer rather than a political theorist, I am able to show how Tocqueville exemplifies a passion for reform that is never to achieve, once and for all, the final solution. Tocqueville combined his passion for reform with ambivalence about its effects. 6. Gwendolyn Mink, Welfare’s End (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1998), 133. 7. Millie Thayer, ‘‘Traveling Feminisms: From Embodied Women to Gendered Citizenship,’’ in Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, ed. Michael Burawoy et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000): 203–34. Thayer explains a great deal about how feminist theory is translated into discourse, how it crosses or may be blocked

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at borders, and how it either succeeds or fails to enliven reform movements. She follows two feminist texts, an early translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Collective, and Joan Scott’s canonical essay, ‘‘Experience,’’ in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22–40, back and forth between Recife, Brazil, and Boston, Massachusetts. The reception and translation of Joan Scott’s poststructuralist feminist theory into a practical feminist discourse in Recife is surprising and inspiring in the face of how decisively that translation is blocked in the United States. 8. See, for example, Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983); Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books 1997). Most influential on my own argument here is Dorothy Roberts, ‘‘Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship,’’ Yale Law Journal 105, no. 6 (1996): 1563–602. 9. See ‘‘Feminism Today: An Interview with Gwendolyn Mink,’’ New Politics 8, no. 3 (2001), http://www.wpunj.edu/⬃newpol/issue31/mink31.htm. 10. Below, I discuss these two positions. Wendy Brown emphasizes the feminist defense of the welfare state and Mink emphasizes the support of middle-class feminists for work requirements. 11. See Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform, especially 107 and 121 and Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, especially 389. 12. Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, trans. Seymour Drescher (1835; London: Civitas, 1997), 25–26. 13. Ibid., 23. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 24. 16. Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘‘Second Memoir on Pauperism,’’ in The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics, ed. Olivier Zunz and Alana Kahan (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2002),150. 17. Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 27. 18. Ibid., 37. This is a classic expression of what Albert O. Hirschman calls ‘‘the jeopardy thesis,’’ here expressed as the unacceptable price of liberty and progress exacted by state welfare provisions. It also smacks of the ‘‘perversity thesis,’’ that a well-intentioned plan will bring about the very consequence it is intended to forestall. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1991), especially 86–109. 19. Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 27. 20. There are obvious yet complex resonances between Tocqueville’s argument and Wendy Brown’s argument that rights claimed on the basis of injury fuel ressentiment. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 21. Memoir on Pauperism, 33. Further references to this work appear parenthetically in the text. 22. For a brilliant illustration of the importance of cross-class contact in a democracy, see Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Tocqueville vaunted the moral ties created by the poor asking the rich directly for help rather than taking for granted that the state will step in between them. One might consider, as Jill Locke recalled to me, the contemporary instances of city ordinances against panhandling—against the poor asking the rich directly for help. Such ordinances are used to discourage both the poor asking and the rich giving a hand out between them on the street. The ordinances might suggest that the multitudes of homeless and destitute produced by capitalism today as well as their erstwhile benefactors are being encouraged to take for granted that the state or organized charity will step between them. Yet that makes little sense in the context of dismantling the welfare state. It may suggest instead that moral ties between the rich and poor are actively discouraged to prevent the rich taking up the cause of the poor, as Tocqueville predicted they would. 23. Memoir on Pauperism, 31. 24. Quoted in Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform, 157.

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25. Ibid., 139. 26. Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform, 164. 27. Quoted in Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform, 163. 28. Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 25–26 (see n. 12, above). 29. Gertrude Himmelfarb, introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism (London: Civitas, 1998), 9–34. 30. www.civitas.org/uk. 31. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 2001). In a more philosophical vein, Himmelfarb mobilizes Hegel and history in reaction to the continued impact of Nietzsche and the counterculture in On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). For Himmelfarb’s histories of welfare, see The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Vintage Books, 1985); and Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). 32. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 33. Himmelfarb, The De-moralization of Society, 236. 34. Ibid., 253. 35. Himmelfarb, One Nation, Two Cultures, 157. 36. Ibid., x. 37. See Jane Bennet and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., The Politics of Moralizing (New York: Routledge, 2002). 38. See ‘‘Feminism Today’’ (see n. 9, above). 39. Mink, Welfare’s End, 24. 40. Ibid., 7. 41. Brown, States of Injury, especially 172–73 and 194–95. 42. See, for example, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997) and Barbara Cruikshank, The Will To Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 43. Himmelfarb, introduction to Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 14. 44. Ibid., 13. 45. For an enumeration of these strings, see Anna Marie Smith, ‘‘The Sexual Regulation Dimension of Contemporary Welfare Reform: A Fifty State Overview,’’ Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 8, no. 2 (2002): 121–218 and ‘‘The Politicization of Marriage in Contemporary American Public Policy: The Defense of Marriage Act and the Personal Responsibility Act,’’ Citizenship Studies 5, no. 3 (2001): 303–20. 46. Himmelfarb, introduction to Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 13–14. 47. Ibid., 10. 48. Ibid., 11. 49. Ibid., 12. 50. Ibid. 51. Republican National Committee, Contract with America (New York: Times Books, 1994) echoed Himmelfarb’s claims about the ‘‘de-moralization’’ of America. 52. Himmelfarb, The De-moralization of Society, 36. 53. Ibid., 38. 54. Ibid., 37–38. 55. There is in fact every reason to question the contrast between revolution and reform. Although I do not have the space to develop this line of argument, it seems to me that feminists might have much to gain by rethinking the contrast strategically.

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56. Himmelfarb, The De-moralization of Society, 156. 57. Ibid., 144. 58. Ibid., 149. 59. Ibid., 78. 60. Ibid., 74. 61. See Susan Brin Hyatt, ‘‘From Citizen to Volunteer: Neoliberal Governance and the Erasure of Poverty,’’ in The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States, ed. Judith Goods and Jeff Maskovsky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 201–35. 62. See Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 246. 63. Ibid., 243. 64. References to these policies are peppered throughout Himmelfarb’s social scientific works as well as at the Web site for Civitas. 65. See John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Also, for an account of the abuses to which neo-Tocquevillians subject his vision of civil society, see Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially chap. 5. 66. See, for example, Martha Minow, Partners, Not Rivals: Privatization and the Public Good (New York: Beacon Press, 2002); Nancy L. Rosenblum and Robert C. Post, eds., Civil Society and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 67. Himmelfarb’s claims are echoed in a pamphlet by the Council on Civil Society: ‘‘But the core challenge facing our nation today is not primarily governmental or economic. Neither government action on its own, nor economic growth on its own, nor the two in tandem, can cure what ails us most.’’ Council on Civil Society, A Call to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths (New York: Institute for American Values, 1998), 4. 68. Jill Locke. ‘‘Just the Facts, Please: Why Civil Society Does Not Need Moral Truths,’’ in The Politics of Moralizing, ed. Jane Bennet and Michael J. Shapiro (New York: Routledge, 2002), 183–99. 69. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

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Annotated Bibliography on Alexis de Tocqueville and Gender, Feminism, and Race Christine Carey

The following bibliography lists works that deal with Tocqueville’s thought as it relates to gender, feminism, and race. The works have been ordered by their subject matter, into the categories of gender, the family, feminism, and race and slavery. This bibliography is limited to works that directly engage with Tocqueville’s writings and political theory in regard to these categories. The manner in which these works engage with Tocqueville’s thought within these parameters ranges from interpretations and analyses of his ideas on any one of the categories to sustained discussions of the applicability of his theories to contemporary problems relating to gender roles, feminism, racial issues, and the status of the family. I have attempted to describe the works in their own terms in the annotations. As many of the entries represent larger projects that do not discuss these issues exclusively, I have restricted my annotations to discuss only the authors’ engagement with Tocqueville as it relates to gender, feminism, and race. A number of works fall in multiple categories and so have been cross listed. I am greatly indebted to Drew Cramer and Matt Holbreich for help in compiling annotations for the French texts in this bibliography and to Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting for their guidance and suggestions.

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Annotated Bibliography

Gender Baer, Judith A.—see Feminism. Beecher, Catherine. A Treatise on Domestic Economy, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar. New York: Schocken Books, 1977. Beecher uses Tocqueville’s commentary on women in America to substantiate her own arguments on the status of women under democratic institutions. She argues that American women have an equal stake in social and civil issues, and that the promotion of the interests of men over women can never be right, but that women entrust their civil and political interest to men, thus remaining subordinate within the domestic realm. Bloom, Allan. ‘‘Rousseau on the Equality of the Sexes.’’ In Justice and Equality Here and Now, ed. Frank S. Lucash. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Bloom positions Rousseau in the role of ‘‘teacher’’ to Tocqueville on the nature of the equality of the sexes, on the basis of parallels in each thinker’s arguments. Bloom asserts the naturalistic element within Tocqueville’s conception of gender roles, claiming that the pervasion of equality and freedom into the family takes the form of moral equality and moral freedom, namely, a freedom to choose. Janara, Laura.—see Feminism. Kessler, Stanford.—see Feminism. Koritansky, John C. Alexis de Tocqueville and the New Science of Politics: An Interpretation of Democracy in America. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1986. Koritansky details the impact democracy has on sexuality and ‘‘feminine charms’’ in Tocqueville’s theory. Koritansky argues that it is not democracy per se that destroys sexuality, passion, and feminine charms and causes American women to approach marriage in a stern, sober manner; rather, such asexuality is particular to American democracy. Koritansky uses Rousseau’s Emile as a point of comparison and claims that Tocqueville’s predictions concerning democracy’s impact on family, marriage, and sexuality seem wholly out of focus in contemporary times. Manent, Pierre. Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. John Waggoner. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996. In his chapter on democracy and religion, Manent provides an antifeminist interpretation of the role that family and the division of roles between men and women play in Tocqueville’s theory of democracy. The division of feminine and masculine roles, Manent argues, provides the moderating principle in democracy, which fully conforms to the natural difference between men and women and does not contradict the fundamental equality of the sexes. This understanding of the connection between the different roles of the sexes and nature allows Tocqueville to argue that democratic principles do not force a conclusion that the primacy of men derives from aristocratic convention. Manent traces the relationship of religion, family, and society within Tocqueville’s thought. Mathie, William—see Family. May, Gita. ‘‘Tocqueville and the Enlightenment Legacy.’’ In Reconsidering Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, ed. Abraham S. Eisenstadt. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988. May situates Tocqueville within the Enlightenment tradition, arguing that he draws on the intellectual legacy of Rousseau and Montesquieu, among others. She links Tocqueville’s views on women to those of Rousseau, claiming that Tocqueville approved of the morality and character of American

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women that made them good wives and mothers and asserts that nature had created woman with certain differences that made them dependent on men and their roles of mother and wife natural. May, Gita. ‘‘Tocqueville on the Role of Women in a Democracy.’’ In Voltaire, the Enlightenment and the Comic Mode: Essays in Honor of Jean Sareil, ed. Maxine G. Cutler. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. May presents Tocqueville’s analysis of American women within the naturalistic, Rousseauian tradition in its endorsement of the view of women as holding different natural capacities and the division of labor between the sexes that results from these natural differences. While Tocqueville perpetuates Rousseau’s conception of women as holding the moral and devotional qualities that make them good wives and mothers, May argues that he breaks with Rousseau in his awareness of the differences between American and European women created by the democratic education of young women and by the effects of the harshness of frontier life on women. Ozouf, Mona. Women’s Words: Essay on French Singularity. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. In her ‘‘Essay on French Singularity,’’ Ozouf argues that Tocqueville, using the American case as an example, offers an argument for separate spheres for men and women and contrasts this with the push for full equality in French society. Ozouf situates Tocqueville’s argument for the American system of separate spheres that elevate the status of women as preferable to the steady equalization of men and women in France. Schneck, Stephen Frederick.—see Race/Slavery. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Smith criticizes Tocqueville’s treatment of blacks, Indians, and women, contending that he ignored serious issues of racism (treating it merely as prejudice) and supported a ‘‘slightly modified’’ ascriptive hierarchy between the sexes. Smith also criticizes Tocqueville’s vision of the American woman as romanticized and constrained within a separate sphere based on sexual differences (a position Smith describes as no longer widely supported). Snyder, R. Claire. ‘‘Radical Civic Virtue: Women in 19th-Century Civil Society.’’ New Political Science 26, no. 1 (2004): 51–69. Snyder challenges Tocqueville’s claim that nineteenth-century American women confined themselves to the domestic sphere by highlighting the public work accomplished by women that bettered communities through charity work and various benevolent societies. She notes that nineteenth-century women pushed the roles that they held in the home, such as taking care of human needs, into public life. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Lettres choisies, Souvenirs. Ed. Françoise Me´lonio and Laurence Guellec. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. This volume of Tocqueville’s letters provides access to Tocqueville’s private viewpoints on a number of subjects, including his views on women and the family. The rich introduction points out the differences in tone and subject matter between Tocqueville’s letters to men and women, offering juxtaposition between Tocqueville’s public thoughts on women and the family and his private words and actions. Turner, Jack. ‘‘American Individualism and Structural Injustice: Tocqueville, Gender, and Race.’’ Polity 40, no. 2 (2008): 197–215. Through an analysis of Tocqueville’s observations on individualism and gender and race differences in America, Turner shows how American individualist ideology feeds structural injustice. He argues that Tocqueville shows that the individualist is actually dependent on structures

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of exploitation, such as racial and gender dominance, for his independence. Turner notes that Tocqueville’s analysis of gender and race fits with Tocqueville’s conclusion that the absolute independence the individualist professes is merely folly and conceit. Verge, Francine. ‘‘Le the`me de la famille et de la femme chez Tocqueville.’’ Paris: Me´moire dea, E´tudes Politiques, Paris II, 1979. Verge analyzes the relationship of the family to democracy in Tocqueville’s thought. She criticizes Tocqueville for not addressing the possible negative effects democracy has on the family. Verge argues that, for Tocqueville, democracy does not change the roles of women, but how they fulfill these roles. Welch, Cheryl. De Tocqueville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Welch argues that Tocqueville’s discussion of women in democracy must be understood within the historical context as well as the psychological roots of his thought. She presents Tocqueville’s insistence on the confinement of women to domestic life as not merely the result of classical republican views that women would create sexual jealousy and disorder, nor merely of a functionalist view of their domestic roles, but of the belief, founded on historical observations, that their presence in civil and political life is dangerous and destabilizing to democracy, identifying the social visibility of women with the ‘‘worst excesses’’ of the Old Regime and of the Revolution. Wolfson, Dorothea Israel.—see Feminism Wolin, Sheldon S. Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. The uneasiness Tocqueville felt toward the effectiveness of external controls on democratic passions reveals itself within his discussion of the American woman, Wolin claims. The family, and women in particular, serve not to socialize people into democracy, but rather as moderating influences on the political system. Wolin points to Tocqueville’s American woman as embodying both sexes and as highlighting Tocqueville’s personal confusion and complex views about sexuality and sex roles. Young, Louise M. ‘‘Women’s Place in American Politics: The Historical Perspective.’’ Journal of Politics 38, no. 3 (1976): 229–335. Within a chronological analysis of the involvement of women in American politics from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, and as part of her discussion of foreign visitors’ views regarding this subject, Young gives a brief discussion praising Tocqueville’s perceptiveness of the ways in which the increased equality of women profoundly influences not only social life, but also political life.

Family Allen, Barbara. Tocqueville, Covenant, and the Democratic Revolution: Harmonizing Earth with Heaven. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. Allen argues that Tocqueville did not consider ‘‘natural’’ differences to be a sufficient basis for gender divisions; rather, Tocqueville argued that elements of choice and necessity on the part of women were central to these differences. Allen traces the development of republican notions of the family, beginning from covenantal relations in which complementary heterogeneous parts formed a social whole. She argues that with the increasing separation of public and private came the privatization of the socializa-

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tion process. This privatization isolated socialization not only to the domestic sphere, but also to one parent: the mother. This shift created a difference, but also an inequality, between the sexes that Tocqueville does not report. Baer, Judith A.—see Feminism. Bloom, Allan.—see Gender. Boesche, Roger. The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Boesche situates Tocqueville in opposition to many liberal thinkers who praise individualism. He argues that, for Tocqueville, individualism—or retreating out of the public sphere and into the private sphere of the household— could only lead to a servile society. For Tocqueville, democracy strengthens the ‘‘natural’’ ties and affections of the family, which need to be relied upon as people become more and more isolated in modern society. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. In her discussion of patriarchalism and the liberal tradition, Elshtain points out that Tocqueville recognized the breakdown of the older theories of patriarchalism in his study of the relationship between public and private in nineteenth-century America. Elshtain presents the question of whether the family predominantly influences, or is more influenced by, the social and political structures around it. She concludes that Tocqueville sees the flow of influence as moving from the public world to the private, yet he fails to fully theorize the dynamics of this process. ———. ‘‘Women, Equality, and the Family.’’ Journal of Democracy 11, no. 1 (2000): 157–63. Elshtain defends Tocqueville’s observations of the family and the relations between the sexes as helpful both as a historical account and as contributing to the scholarship surrounding the enduring question of the equality of the sexes. She argues that the American mixing of equality and individualism, which Tocqueville observed and critiqued, helps to explain the somewhat unstable and even tumultuous state of contemporary gender relations, families, and communities Janara, Laura.—see Feminism. Manent, Pierre.—see Gender. Mathie, William. ‘‘God, Woman, and Morality: The Democratic Family in the New Political Science of Alexis de Tocqueville.’’ Review of Politics 57, no. 1 (1995): 7–30. Mathie argues that when Tocqueville attributes the American people’s power and prosperity to the superiority of American women, he is arguing that the defense of democratic liberty depends on the new role of women as the makers of morals. Mathie maintains that understanding women as defenders of strict conjugal morality requires their exclusion from the world of commerce and makes it possible for religion to operate through them. This shift consequently removes men from the role of ‘‘arbiters of mores’’ and defenders of the aristocratic definition of liberty. Matsumoto, Reiji. ‘‘Tocqueville on the Family.’’ Tocqueville Review 8 (1986/1987): 127– 52. Matsumoto presents three perspectives through which to view Tocqueville’s understandings of the family: first, as a description of the nineteenth-century American family; second, within the historical context of changing family patterns in France; and third, in the context of Tocqueville’s own personal experiences. Matsumoto shows that Tocqueville’s treatment of the American family reflects influences of Enlightenment sensibilite´ on French family life and that it offers a criticism of the predominant negative attitude toward intermarriage be-

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tween classes in France. This criticism has ties to Tocqueville’s own life experiences, particularly his family’s reaction to his marriage to a woman of a lower class. May, Gita.—see Gender. Mitchell, Joshua. The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Mitchell argues that Tocqueville strengthens the passive element (nature, family, and religion) through the logic of the active element (‘‘father industry’’ and the public sphere). Mitchell argues that Tocqueville would view the submission of the passive to the active as unthinkable. Morton, F. L. ‘‘Sexual Equality and the Family in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.’’ Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 17, no. 2 (1984): 309–24. Morton challenges the interpretation of Tocqueville as presenting the two-tiered antidote to ‘‘the problem of democracy’’—‘‘self-interest rightly understood’’ combined with the preservation of religious belief—by pointing to a third tier: the democratic family. Tocqueville’s conception of the family, Morton claims, is of a cooperative refuge that nurtures habits of altruism and that upholds men and women as ‘‘different but equal.’’ Okin, Susan Moller. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Okin groups Tocqueville together with Hegel and Rousseau. She claims that their respective treatments of the family and its importance in moral and political life separate public life from private life. This separation of public and private allows them to easily defend the hierarchy found within the family even in light of their attacks on hierarchies in the public sphere. Okin argues that for these theorists, family life is founded on sentiments (such as love, altruism, and generosity) rather than the just, egalitarian social structures that they advocate. Poggi, Gianfranco. Images of Society: Essays on the Sociological Theories of Tocqueville, Marx, and Durkheim. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972. In contrasting Tocqueville’s views on aristocracy and democracy, Poggi positions the family in a democracy as quite different from the aristocratic family. The aristocratic family is influenced by ascriptive and hierarchical principles and does not conform to generalized democratic social relations. Schneck, Stephen Frederick.—see Race/Slavery. Shapiro, Michael J. For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. While praising many of Tocqueville’s insights about new social spaces and their political implications, Shapiro claims that these insights are limited by Tocqueville’s failure in regard to perceptions of spaces of otherness. The cause of this failure of insight, Shapiro argues, is the families on which Tocqueville based his generalizations: namely, the white, well-off families that hosted him in America. Shapiro shows how this failure of Tocqueville’s is especially clear when African American families and the social spaces they inhabit are included in the discussion. Verge, Francine.—see Gender. Wolin, Sheldon S.—see Gender. Zuckert, Catherine H. ‘‘American Women and Democratic Morals: ‘The Bostonians.’ ’’ Feminist Studies 3 (Spring–Summer 1976): 30–50. Zuckert sets forth Tocqueville’s understanding of individualism as the fundamental problem of democracy. She also presents his view of the role of women as a possible check on this problem as

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a partial precursor to the thought of Henry James. She argues that, for Tocqueville, the natural ties of affection do not make the family dependent on women for its morality. As evidence, she points out that Tocqueville only stresses the ties between men within the family. Rather, it is the self-restraint that women demonstrate when they sacrifice their pleasures to their duties that maintains morality within democracy. Zuckert argues that James challenges this notion as fundamentally problematic and ineffective, although he shares Tocqueville’s concerns with democratic individualism and women’s relation to it. ———. ‘‘Not by Preaching: Tocqueville on the Role of Religion in American Democracy.’’ Review of Politics 43, no. 2 (1981): 259–80. Zuckert argues that, for Tocqueville, religion acts in concert with other factors in maintaining civic peace through stable domestic life. She acknowledges Tocqueville’s argument that religion produces self-restraint, and his example of the maintenance of the family through religion’s effect on women, but argues that the primary cause of the sanctity of the marriage bond is actually economic interest.

Feminism Antoine, Agne`s, L’impense´ de la de´mocratie, Tocqueville, la citoyennete, et la religion. Paris: Fayard, 2003. Antoine examines the role that citizenship and religion play as remedies to democracy’s dangerous excesses in Tocqueville’s political theory. Antoine shows how the effect of Enlightenment philosophy on ideas of human nature modified the social and familial fabric and the relationship of women to religion. Antoine helps to situate feminist themes in Tocqueville within the broader framework of his political science. Baer, Judith A. The Chains of Protection: The Judicial Response to Women’s Labor Legislation. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978. Baer contrasts the reasoning behind Tocqueville’s view of sex roles as based on nature to contemporary arguments that assert women’s duty to the home. She argues that contemporary arguments are founded on an identification of women’s interests with family interests that is merely an assumption. Tocqueville, however, made no assumptions about the tie of women’s interests to that of the family and children. Elshtain, Jean Bethke.—see Family. Goldstein, Leslie Friedman. ‘‘Europe Looks at American Women, 1820–1840.’’ Social Research 54, no. 3 (1987): 519–42. Goldstein analyzes Tocqueville in relation to Fanny Wright, Frances Trollope, and Harriet Martineau. Goldstein argues that Tocqueville recognizes women as restricted from the public sphere (and thereby from the company of men) in order to improve and maintain their (primarily sexual) morality, but also as ‘‘checks’’ on their husbands’ power much like the structure of democratic government. She argues that Tocqueville is neither feminist nor antifeminist, but falls somewhere in between these two categories. Janara, Laura. Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. In a historically grounded, psychoanalytical interpretation of Democracy in America, Janara presents Tocqueville as grappling with postaristocratic passions and the flux of democratic society by using gendered and familial symbolism. Tocqueville represents this political drama as a symbolic bourgeois family drama, in which the

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combination and clash of feminine, masculine, and infantile metaphorical figures take center stage. This conceptual framework posits gender and family as informing all parts of society and culture and challenges the interpretation of Tocqueville’s Democracy as embodying a separation between public and private spheres. Kerber, Linda. ‘‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History.’’ Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 9–39. Kerber identifies Tocqueville as the source of the method of looking to the ‘‘circle of domestic life’’ to understand women, a method employed by historians more than a hundred years later. She attributes to Tocqueville the metaphor of the ‘‘sphere’’ that became the trope that scholars interested in women’s place in American culture came to rely on for their work. Kessler, Sanford. Tocqueville’s Civil Religion: American Christianity and the Prospects for Freedom. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Kessler identifies the dangers to sexual morality and the democratic family that Tocqueville feared in light of increased and unchecked equality. Kessler argues that Tocqueville saw this equality as leading to a greater propensity for sexual license (among women as well as men) and the disruption of tradition family roles and that the events of the 1960s embody these fears of Tocqueville. ———. ‘‘Tocqueville on Sexual Morality.’’ Interpretation 16, no. 3 (1989): 465–80. Kessler argues that Tocqueville’s treatment of sexual morality in Democracy in America has been mostly ignored, despite its importance. Kessler explores Tocqueville’s account of the possible factors behind American women’s chastity, in particular the racial makeup of the population, climate, religious beliefs, social conditions, and the role of statesmanship. Tocqueville’s analysis of sexual morality provides Kessler with a framework in which to evaluate the dramatic changes in American sexual behavior occurring in the later half of the twentieth century. Kristol, William. ‘‘Women’s Liberation: The Relevance of Tocqueville.’’ In Interpreting Democracy in America, ed. Ken Masugi. Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991. Kristol argues that Tocqueville’s thoughts on women’s place in democracy remain relevant today, especially in the context of the consequences of the women’s liberation movement. He argues that Tocqueville would suggest a need to embrace the following practices in contemporary life: the necessity of marriage, the importance of good morals, and the necessity for inequality within marriage. Kristol presents Tocqueville as a naturalist who argues that American mores do not flow from free individual choice, but rather from nature’s intentions for men and women. Kristol maintains that women’s liberation breaks down the foundations of natural mores, which is dangerous for democracy. He also points out that Tocqueville’s understanding of the ‘‘natural’’ course of democracy may have anticipated this move toward equality between the sexes. Kristol does not explain why we should not then accept, on Tocquevillean terms, the equality of the sexes and related mores as ‘‘natural’’ outcomes of democratization. Shogan, Colleen J. ‘‘Tocqueville’s ‘Feminism in America’: A Reconsideration of Women’s Equality and Dignity.’’ Journal of Contemporary Thought 13 (Summer 2001): 55– 69. Shogan uses Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as a tool for understanding the tension between liberalism and modern feminism. She argues that the feminist push for equality has left women with diminished dignity in America and that Tocqueville’s arguments on the necessary equilibrium between public and private spheres speaks to this problem. Tocqueville’s emphasis on the power of custom

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over the power of law indicates that increased equality for women in law has not been met with a similar change in customs, resulting in a lack of guarantee of respect for women within society. The drive of feminism toward total equality threatens the stability of the family, which, Shogan argues, requires a restoration of the balance between the domestic and public spheres. Smith, Rogers M.—see Race/Slavery. Wolfson, Dorothea Israel. ‘‘The Superiority of the American Woman: Tocqueville’s Teaching on Women, Marriage, and the Family.’’ Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1995. Wolfson frames her extended analysis of Tocqueville’s understanding of the nature of the democratic family and the role of women therein around the problems faced by American women since the 1960s, pointing specifically to problems of rape and family breakdown. She argues that these problems mirror those faced by Tocqueville’s French women and that his prescriptions are not only relevant to women today, but also superior to the teachings of modern feminist scholarship on these problems.

Race/Slavery Bonetto, Gerald M. ‘‘Tocqueville and American Slavery.’’ Canadian Review of American Studies 15, no. 2 (1984): 123–39. Bonetto contends that there are two important aspects of Tocqueville’s thought on slavery. First, Tocqueville argues that slavery is wrong from both a pragmatic and a moral standpoint, shown by his claims that slavery is damaging to the economy and stability of the Union and that it also violates standards of justice. Second, Bonetto argues that Tocqueville demonstrates an affinity between modern slavery and despotism. Colwell, James L. ‘‘ ‘The Calamities Which They Apprehend’: Tocqueville on Race in America.’’ Western Humanities Review 21 (1967): 93–100. Colwell critiques Tocqueville’s predictions of the future of race relations in America. He argues that the calamities Tocqueville foresaw have not come to pass and have been mitigated by the work of Americans and the gradual integration of Blacks into free and equal society. Colwell claims that Tocqueville is a good source for history, but is overly pessimistic about the nature of Americans and their future. Connolly, William E. ‘‘Tocqueville, Territory, and Violence.’’ Theory, Culture and Society 11 (1994): 19–40. Connolly describes Tocqueville as a ‘‘Rousseauian pluralist,’’ in that he celebrates diversity, but argues that that diversity must be founded on a common identity. Connolly claims that the creation of the American territory, and the identity, civilization, and mores that are necessarily part of the boundary (what he names ‘‘civi-territory’’), sets the preconditions of morality, and any action that is necessary to this formation cannot then be considered immoral. Connolly points specifically to the violence perpetrated against the Indians as an action that Tocqueville recognizes as deplorable, but that he simply cannot describe in terms of immorality and, consequently, struggles to discuss with regret but without any mention of the injustice or immorality it presents. Craiutu, Aurelian, and Jeremy Jennings. ‘‘The Third Democracy: Tocqueville’s Views of America After 1840.’’ American Political Science Review 98, no. 3 (2004): 391–404. Craiutu and Jennings offer an examination of Tocqueville’s changing views of America after the publication of the second volume of Democracy in America.

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They argue that after 1840, Tocqueville expressed an increasing pessimism regarding the stability and future of the Union, which was fueled by his views on slavery. Craiutu and Jennings show how Tocqueville became progressively more vocal about his antislavery stance as the years passed. Crouthamel, James L. ‘‘Tocqueville’s South.’’ Journal of the Early Republic 2, no. 4 (1982): 381–401. In detailing Tocqueville and Beaumont’s travels through the United States, Crouthamel concludes that Tocqueville’s depiction of the South is inadequate and flawed. Crouthamel argues that the cause of this inadequacy lies in a lack of interest on Tocqueville’s part to witness slavery firsthand, and in Tocqueville’s reliance primarily on secondary accounts of life in the South, creating a picture of the South that is problematic not only in itself, but also in the depictions of slavery therein, and in Tocqueville’s comparison of it with the North. Drolet, Michael. Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Drolet shows the similarities between Tocqueville’s portrait of slavery and Alban Villeneave-Bargemont’s observations of industrial working classes. Drolet argues that both groups were dehumanized, and that civil war is one of the consequences of the weakened individual morals and public manners that slavery and economic inequality create. Frohnen, Bruce. Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: The Legacy of Burke and Tocqueville. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. Frohnen locates Tocqueville’s views on slavery and colonialism within the conservative tradition, arguing that for Tocqueville, the American Black and the American Indian had been degraded by habits of servitude and habits of excessive freedom, respectively, and that liberty could not be merely imposed on these groups. Frohnen also argues that Tocqueville attempted to retain a semblance of conservatism in framing his arguments in favor of colonialism. Gershman, Sally. ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery.’’ French Historical Studies 9, no. 3 (1976): 467–83. Examining Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, his articles for Le Sie`cle, and his private correspondence and travel writing, Gershman asserts that Tocqueville’s arguments against the institution of slavery are both pragmatic and philosophical. While Tocqueville emphasizes the pragmatic, economic reasons for the abolition of slavery, underlying these arguments is a consistent philosophy that regards slavery as contrary to both Christian belief and the rights of man. Glazer, Nathan. ‘‘Race and Ethnicity in America.’’ Journal of Democracy 11, no. 1 (2000): 95–102. Glazer argues against considering Tocqueville’s chapter on slavery as separate from the rest of part 1 of Democracy in America, claiming that the chapter makes his work more comprehensive. Glazer explains how even though Tocqueville spent only one chapter on slavery and Indians in America, he was completely appalled by the treatment of them. Glazer also details how Tocqueville could not envision a viable solution to this treatment. Janara, Laura. ‘‘Brothers and Others: Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism.’’ Political Theory 32, no. 6 (2004): 773–800. Janara identifies racism in Tocqueville and Beaumont’s America as rooted in postcolonial, postaristocratic anxieties—of ‘‘democracy in flux.’’ U.S. racism and democracy are intertwined within the writings of Tocqueville and Beaumont. Janara also notes that within these writings exists a critical narrative of European Americans’ relations with Indians (portrayed as a siblinglike rivalry) and with blacks (one of

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‘‘absolute differentiation’’). Both these portrayals are rooted in anxieties over democracy’s flux. Kennedy, Randall. ‘‘Tocqueville and Racial Conflict in America: A Comment.’’ Harvard Blackletter Law Journal 11 (Spring 1994): 145–53. Kennedy praises Tocqueville’s observations regarding the ramifications of the treatment of the Indians in America. Kennedy maintains that Tocqueville’s writings on the Indians and slavery has a sense of the tragic rather than outrage. He shows how Tocqueville portrays Indians in a positive image and Blacks in a negative image, and how his predictions are ultimately flawed, as his understanding of the nature of the Indians and Blacks made it so he could not predict the resiliency of the Indians and the active participation of Blacks in their emancipation. Kessler, Sanford. Tocqueville’s Civil Religion: American Christianity and the Prospects for Freedom. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Kessler analyzes the role of American Christianity within Tocqueville’s discussion of race and slavery in America. While this discussion was done almost exclusively in secular terms, Kessler argues that Tocqueville’s own views on slavery are intertwined with his religious views, but that he criticizes American Christianity for failing to addressing the issue. Kohn, Margaret. ‘‘The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery.’’ Polity 35, no. 2 (2002): 169–93. Kohn challenges readings of Tocqueville that depict his blindness toward racial hierarchies and seek to separate such ascriptive hierarchies from his views on American liberalism. She claims that Tocqueville and Beaumont’s writings actually show racism and liberalism to be interdependent both theoretically and psychosocially. Koritansky, John. ‘‘Democracy and Nobility: A Comment on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.’’ Intercollegiate Review 12, no. 1 (1976): 13–27. Koritansky argues that Tocqueville’s depiction of the three races, ‘‘the reds, the blacks, and the whites,’’ is intended to symbolize the ‘‘three fundamental human conditions: aristocratic but barbaric freedom, abject servitude, and democratic equality.’’ The conclusions taken from the comparison between the three races are analogous to Tocqueville’s views on democratic equality. The relationship of whites to the other races illustrates democratic equality’s natural primacy over the other human conditions. ———. Alexis de Tocqueville and the New Science of Politics: An Interpretation of Democracy in America. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1986. Koritansky presents Tocqueville’s discussion of Indians as a romantic picture that represents the Indian as holding a childlike innocence and independence. Koritansky argues that Tocqueville’s observations of slavery led him to the conclusion that slavery’s weakening effect on the social bonds of the American people would cause the Union to fail. Liescke, Joel. ‘‘Race and Democracy.’’ PS: Political Science and Politics 32, no. 2 (1999): 217–24. Liescke defends Tocqueville’s account of race in America as useful for making sense of contemporary issues of race in the country. Liescke dissects Tocqueville’s understanding of the complexities of race, focusing, first, on Tocqueville’s view of the failure of the different races to assimilate and the large black population as the greatest threat to the new republic; second, on the lessons learned from the expulsion of the Indians; third, on the threat that slavery posed to whites and the republic; and finally, on how Tocqueville’s analysis can be used to better explain racial issues today.

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Mancini, Matthew. ‘‘Political Economy and Cultural Theory in Tocqueville’s Abolitionism.’’ Slavery and Abolition 10, no. 2 (1989): 151–71. Using Tocqueville’s political career and his stance on slavery in the French colonies as source material, Mancini argues that Tocqueville chose to use economic rather than moral arguments for the abolition of slavery. Mancini analyzes Tocqueville’s economic arguments for the abolition of slavery and for the methods of a successful transition out of a system of slavery, illuminating their flaws and limitations. Pitts, Jennifer. Introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Looking at Tocqueville’s writings on empire and slavery in conjunction with Democracy in America, Pitts concludes that Tocqueville saw imperialism as an essential element in liberalism in Europe and America. She thus challenges readings of Democracy in America that suggest that Tocqueville was anti-imperialist. She argues that while Tocqueville often viewed the treatment of slaves and American Indians by European settlers as deplorable, he understood these groups as destined to remain outside the democratic order and admired the settlers in their expansionist movement. Pope, Whitney. Alexis de Tocqueville: His Social and Political Theory. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1986. Pope maintains that while Tocqueville recognized some influence of race on human behavior, he generally limited or denied the impact of race by rejecting deterministic explanations in favor of explanations based on social factors. Resh, Richard W. ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville and the Negro: Democracy in America Reconsidered.’’ Journal of Negro History 48, no. 4 (1963): 251–59. Resh attacks Tocqueville’s depictions of the American Negro, particularly in regard to his observations on slavery. Resh contends that by ignoring the human part of the problem of slavery, Tocqueville fails to recognize the personal suffering and tragedy of the institution of slavery. In addition to this failing, Resh also calls into question the accuracy of Tocqueville’s analysis of the economic consequences of slavery. Resh discusses Tocqueville’s views in relation to other visitors of his time period who wrote on slavery in America. Richardson, William D. ‘‘The Possibility of Harmony Between the Races: An Inquiry into the Thought of Jefferson, Tocqueville, Lincoln, and Melville.’’ Ph.D diss., State University of New York, Buffalo, 1979. Richardson examines how Jefferson, Tocqueville, Lincoln, and Melville approach and attempt to answer the questions that underlie the possibility of racial harmony, arguing that Tocqueville’s discussion of race relations in America can be seen as both a complement to and elaboration on Jefferson’s views. He illuminates the major distinction between the two as their disagreement on the possibility of solving the race problem: Jefferson argued for emancipation and expatriation, and Tocqueville rejected this proposed solution, showing more pessimism about resolving the problem that race posed to the nation. ———. ‘‘Racial Equality in America.’’ In Interpreting Democracy in America, ed. Ken Masugi. Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991. Richardson provides an analysis of Tocqueville’s discussion of racial issues, with background on Tocqueville’s indirect argument with Count de Buffon. Richardson posits that Tocqueville’s discussion of the existence of distinct racial groups in America focuses on the

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practical consequences for the country, and that Tocqueville was not confident in the existence of a reliable solution to the problem of race in America. Schleifer, James T. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Schleifer’s historical background to the writing of Democracy in America traces the intellectual development of Tocqueville’s views on slavery. Schleifer traces Tocqueville’s rejections of determinism and climate as explanations of the differences between the North and the South and his embrace of social factors (especially slavery) as better explanations. Schleifer also points to portions of unpublished drafts of the 1840 edition that challenge the commitment of Tocqueville to determinism. Schneck, Stephen Frederick. ‘‘Habits of the Head: Tocqueville’s America and Jazz.’’ Political Theory 17, no. 4 (1989): 638–62. Schneck presents Tocqueville’s ‘‘new science’’ of politics as an extension of Foucaultian relations of power within a regime of truth. Schneck describes Tocqueville’s treatment of the ‘‘other’’ (nonwhite) races as regimes apart from the people of his America. This gap between racial regimes is founded in nature for Tocqueville and cannot be ‘‘normalized’’ by his science of democracy. Their inclusion in Tocqueville’s interpretation of America speaks to their importance for relations of power and their firm position within the regime of truth. Schneck also points to the family and women as cultivators of ‘‘habits of the heart,’’ which, for Tocqueville, are one of three levels of constraint that order and overcome his dystopia of ambiguity in politics. Shapiro, Michael J.—see Family. Smith, Rogers M. ‘‘Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America.’’ American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 549–66. Smith presents ascriptive hierarchies as a distinct tradition within American politics as he challenges the Tocquevillian conception of America as rooted in a tradition of egalitarian and free ideas. Smith contends that Tocqueville and his adherents provide a too narrow narrative of the ‘‘liberal, democratic republic.’’ Smith claims that Tocqueville does not recognize ascriptive systems of inequality in America— such as those based on gender, race, citizenship, and religion—but rather focuses on the absence of aristocratic, hereditary, and monarchical systems in America. Smith, Rogers M.—see Gender. Stokes, Curtis. ‘‘Tocqueville and the Problem of Racial Inequality.’’ Journal of Negro History 75 (Winter–Spring 1990): 1–15. Stokes holds that, for Tocqueville, racism and liberalism are almost indistinguishable, even given the centrality of equality within his political theory. Stokes discusses what he calls ‘‘Tocquevillean duality,’’ or the idea that ever increasing equality coincides with permanent racial inequality. Stokes maintains that this duality reflects both Tocqueville’s own racism and the limits of liberalism in responding to the problem of racial inequality. Stone, John, and Mennell, Stephen. Introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy, Revolution, and Society: Selected Writings, ed. John Stone and Stephen Mennell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Positioning him as a precursor to pluralist theories of democracy, Stone and Mennell argue that Tocqueville’s moral opposition to historical determinism also applied to his views on race relations, such that he rejected the possibility of hierarchical rankings of the races. They claim that Tocqueville viewed racial hierarchy as a form of aristocracy that was destined to crumble through the forces of democracy and egalitarianism. Stone and Mennell identify in Tocqueville’s works an understanding of people’s inability

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to identify with those of a different race. Tocqueville saw this lack of sympathy as playing a part in the perpetuation of slavery in America as well as in issues of class and race in France. Strong, Robert A. ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville and the Abolition of Slavery.’’ Slavery and Abolition 8, no. 2 (1987): 204–15. In looking at Tocqueville’s report on the abolition of slavery in the French colonies and Democracy in America, Strong points out two seemingly opposing strains of thought on the possibilities of abolition. On the one hand, Tocqueville is enthusiastic about abolition in the French colonies; on the other hand, he is pessimistic about the possibilities for abolition in America. In both cases, Tocqueville is especially cautious regarding the dangers of transitioning from slavery to freedom. Strong claims that Tocqueville understood the abolition of American slavery as problematic because of deep-seated racism that went far beyond the practice of slavery. This view leads to an almost completely wrong prediction about American slavery. Turner, Jack.—see Gender. Wach, Joachim. ‘‘The Role of Religion in the Social Philosophy of Alexis De Tocqueville.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 7, no. 1 (1946): 74–90. Wach presents Tocqueville’s views on race as founded on a profound belief in the brotherhood of man. Pointing to Tocqueville’s understanding of differences between races, Wach claims that he would not consider them to be unalterable, and that these ‘‘variations’’ are caused by differences in climate, nourishment, and mode of life. Wolin, Sheldon S. Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Wolin argues that Tocqueville’s presentation of slavery and racism in America calls into question the use of the term democracy to describe the United States as a whole. According to Wolin, Tocqueville was faced with the challenge of how to treat the ‘‘other’’ two races—as anomalies or as deep manifestations of forces within society. Tocqueville attributes the atrocities of slavery and the treatment of the Indians as particular to America, and not to democracy in general. This allows Tocqueville to question the stability and future of the Union. Zeitlin, Irving M. Liberty, Equality, and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. Zeitlin defends Tocqueville’s views on racial inequality as evidence of his humanism, given that he rejects racism and perceives the dehumanization in slavery. Zeitlin identifies Tocqueville’s antideterminist argument regarding the inequality of the races as founded on social factors. Zetterbaum, Marvin. Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967. Zetterbaum discusses the role that race and slavery plays in Tocqueville’s argument concerning the inevitability of equality. He argues that Tocqueville recognizes that racial discrimination in America is grounded not only on law, but also on the visible, physical differences provided by nature. Even though nature aids the formation of this aristocracy based on physical differences, Zetterbaum argues that Tocqueville finds it to be unnatural and unjust, as are all aristocracies.

Other Resources Christine Alice Corcos’s collection of primary and secondary resources on Tocqueville (http://faculty.law.lsu.edu/ccorcos/resume/tocqueind.htm) covers a range of topics. Of

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particular interest to the scope of my bibliography is her ‘‘Human Rights, Slavery, and Race Relations’’ bibliography (http://faculty.law.lsu/ccorcos/resume/slavery.htm). The University of Virginia’s American Studies Department has created an excellent Web site (http://xroads.virginia.edu/⬃hyper/detoc/home.html) that provides extensive information on the historical, sociological, and intellectual context surrounding Democracy in America.

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Contributors

JOCELYN M. BORYCZKA is an assistant professor of politics and the director of peace and justice studies at Fairfield University, where she teaches feminist political theory; contemporary and modern political theory; and the politics of race, class, and gender. Her research interests are in feminist ethics, conceptual history, the politics of virtue and vice, and women’s social movements. Her publications include ‘‘The Virtues of Vice: The Lowell Mill Girl Debate and Contemporary Feminist Ethics,’’ in Feminist Theory (April 2006), and a book in preparation, ‘‘Beyond Virtue and Vice: Towards a Democratic Feminist Ethics.’’ EILEEN HUNT BOTTING is the Rolfs Associate Professor of Political Science and the director of the gender studies program at the University of Notre Dame. Her work on the history of feminist political thought, American political thought, and Enlightenment political thought has appeared in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, American Behavioral Scientist, Review of Politics, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her book, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family, was published by the State University of New York Press in 2006. RICHARD BOYD is an associate professor of government at Georgetown University. Previously he taught at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Deep Springs College. He is author of Uncivil Society: The Perils of Pluralism and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), as well as journal articles and book chapters on various thinkers and themes in classical liberalism. He is completing a book-length manuscript titled ‘‘Membership and Belonging: On the Boundaries of Liberal Political Theory.’’ CHRISTINE CAREY completed her MA in political science at the University of Michigan and is currently working on a Master’s degree in archives and records management at UM’s School of Information. She coauthored with Eileen Hunt Botting the article ‘‘Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates,’’ which appeared in the October 2004 issue of the American Journal of Political Science. Upon finishing her degree, she hopes to work as an archivist in collections focusing on the history of the women’s rights movement in the United States. BARBARA CRUIKSHANK teaches political theory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects

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(Cornell University Press, 1999). Her current research is on reform and transformations in what counts as politics, conducted under the working title ‘‘neopolitics.’’ LAURA JANARA is an assistant professor in the political science department at the University of British Columbia. Her book Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America won the 2003 Best First Book Award from the Foundations of Political Theory organized section of the American Political Science Association. Professor Janara has also published essays on Tocqueville and capitalism and Tocqueville and race and on Machiavelli. MATTHEW HOLBREICH is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to serving as an editorial assistant for Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville, he helped edit Tocqueville’s American correspondence for Jeremy Jennings and Aurelian Craiutu’s forthcoming volume on Tocqueville and America after the 1840 Democracy. He received his BA in international relations, summa cum laude, from Tufts University. JILL LOCKE is associate professor of political science and chair of the department at Gustavus Adolphus College. She spent the 2006–7 and 2007–8 academic years at Tulane University, where she was a faculty fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs and visiting associate professor of political science. Professor Locke has published essays on the relationship between democratic politics and sexual morality, and is writing a book on the place of shame in democratic citizenship. KATHLEEN S. SULLIVAN is an assistant professor of political science at Ohio University. She is the author of Constitutional Context: Women and Rights Discourse in NineteenthCentury America (Johns Hopkins Press, 2007). ALVIN B. TILLERY JR. is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University. His research interests are in the fields of American political thought and American political development. He is currently working on a project with Eileen Hunt Botting on intersectionality in the history of American political thought. LISA PACE VETTER has taught ancient, modern, contemporary, and feminist political theory at American University, where she is a visiting scholar of Government. Vetter is the author of ‘‘Women’s Work’’ as Political Art: Weaving and Dialectical Politics in Homer, Aristophanes, and Plato (Lexington Books, 2005). Her articles and reviews have appeared in Political Theory, Perspectives on Political Science, Review of Politics, and Review of Metaphysics. Vetter’s next major research project is on political theory and the origins of American feminism. DANA VILLA is Packey Dee Professor of Political Theory at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Public Freedom (Princeton, 2008), Socratic Citizenship (Princeton, 2001), Politics, Philosophy, Terror (Princeton, 1999), and Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, 1996). He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (2001). He is currently working on a manuscript entitled ‘‘Teachers of the People: Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, Marx, and Mill.’’ CHERYL B. WELCH is visiting professor and director of undergraduate studies in government at Harvard University and professor of political science at Simmons College. She

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has published many articles on nineteenth-century French and British liberalism and is the author of two books: Liberty and Utility: The French Ideologues and the Transformation of Liberalism and De Tocqueville. She is also the coeditor of Critical Issues in Social Thought and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville. DELBA WINTHROP was a lecturer at Harvard Extension School and director of Harvard University’s Program on Constitutional Government for many years. She received her BA from Cornell University in 1967 and her doctorate from Harvard in 1974. Her dissertation, ‘‘Aristotle: Democracy in Political Science,’’ won the 1975 Leo Strauss Award from the American Political Science Association. Winthrop also taught at the University of Virginia, Duke University, and Colorado College. With Harvey Mansfield she coedited and cotranslated a new edition of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (2000). She also wrote several articles about Tocqueville, Aristotle, and Solzhenitsyn.

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Index

abolitionism: Martineau’s discussion of, 168, 176n.34; Tocqueville’s views on, 266–67 absolute monarchy, collective individualism and, 84–88 Adams, Abigail, 108–9, 132 Adams, John, 108–9, 130 Adams, John Quincy, 10, 143–46; Jackson and, 128–34; presidency of, 127 Adams, Louisa (Johnson), 130–32 administrative despotism, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 89–93, 144–46, 298–99 adulterous wife, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 105–7 African antiquity, black ethnology and, 258 agonistic feminism, Tocqueville and, 95–96 Aid to Families of Dependent Children (afdc), 320–21 Alexander (Pope), 75 Algeria, French colonization of, 226–28, 242–43 Allen, Barbara, 175n.31, 340–41 Allen, Richard, 256 Allgor, Catherine 148n, 42, 51, 57, 73 ambition, democracy and, 187–94, 195n.21, 197n.32 ancien re´gime: collective individualism and, 81–88; Tocqueville on demise of, 125–26 Anderson, Bonnie, 121 Anglo-Americans, Tocqueville and, 3, 120–22, 212–13, 239–40 Anthony, Susan B., 109 Antoine, Agne`s, 343 Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble to the Colored Citizens of the World, But in

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Particular and very Expressly to those of the United States of America, An, 258–59 Arendt, Hannah, 17n.26, 72–73, 76 aristocracy: American version of, 128–34, 143– 46, 149n.108; bourgeoisie and, 77–81; collective individualism and, 84–88; family hierarchy and, 282; imperialism and, 244– 46, 251n.64; ‘‘manly’’ independence and, 90–93; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 47–48, 50–57, 97n.21, 125–26, 146n.6, 196n.27. See also monarchy ‘‘aristocratic-republican’’ ideology, 10 Aristotle, 88 arranged marriage, Tocqueville’s critique of, 115–22 associational principle, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 93–96, 188–94, 291–99 Atanassow, Ewa, 241, 252nn.76, 98 atomization of individual, Tocqueville’s discussion and, 77–81, 85–88 Autobiography (Martineau), 176n.36 autonomy, Wollstonecraft and Tocqueville on, 116–19 Baer, Judith A., 343 Balzac, Honore´ de, 234, 250n.44 Basch, Norma, 134, 147nn.18, 33, 52–53, 55 Bay, Mia, 258, 261, 276n.32 Beard, Mary Ritter, 202–3, 218, 220 Beaumont, Gustave de., 44n.60, 106–7, 128 160–63, 269, 315 Becker, Mary, 203–4 Beecher, Catharine, 4, 16n.18, 120, 153–55, 167, 171, 338

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Index

Bell, Derrick, 280n.117 Benoıˆt, Jean-Louis, 29, 43n.48 Bentham, Jeremy, 110 Be´rube´, Michael, viii bigamy, accusations against Jackson of, 133–35, 139–41 black American writers: ethnology research by, 256–65; whiteness studies in context of, 254–55 Black Reconstruction, 263–64, 268, 273 Black Sheep, 250n.44 Blackwell, Henry, 139 Blake, William, 27–28 Bloom, Allan, 2, 68n.7, 338 Boas, Franz, 262–64, 269 Boesche, Roger, 341 bon et tendre meńage, 37–40 Bonetto, Gerald M., 345 bon meńage, Tocqueville’s concept of, 24–28, 37–40 Borgia, Cesare, 75 Born to Command: King Andrew the First, 137–38 Boryczka, Jocelyn, 12–13, 281–302 Boston Female Anti-slavery Society, 168 Botting, Eileen Hunt, 1–15, 99–122, 147n.13, 175n.24 bourgeoisie: collective individualism and, 81–88; empire rhetoric and, 244–46; feminization of, 71–96, 234–37; in France, 240– 44, 250n.44; ‘‘manly’’ independence and, 90–93; Marx and Engels on, 73–76, 86–88; middle class in Democracy in America and, 76–81 Boyd, Richard, 11–12, 225–252 British East India Company, 231, 249n.25 British Empire, Mill’s apology for, 226–34 British Poor Laws, 313–14 brotherhood, Tocqueville’s concept of, 53–57, 154–59, 171–73, 174n.14 Brown, Charles Brockden, 121 Brown, Wendy, 88, 204, 214, 320, 333nn.10, 20 Bruce, John Edward, 261 Bunche, Ralph J., 264 Burke, Edmund, 97n.31, 205, 317–18, 327 Burr, Aaron, 108 Burr, Theodosia, 108–9 Bush, George W., 3, 15n.12, 332n.3, 333n.5 Calhoun, Floride, 136 Calhoun, John, 136–37

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capitalism: as source of democracy, 323–3313; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 310–31 Carey, Christine, 337–51, 175n24 Carey, Matthew, 108 Catholic Church, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 36–37 Chabrol, Ernest de, 30 Chapman, Maria Weston, 267 charity: neoconservative vision of, 322–31; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 312–31 chastity, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 114–22, 289 Childe, Edward Vernon, 45n.90 Childe, Mildred, 45n.90 chivalry, Martineau’s critique of, 168 citizenship: French and American comparisons of, 79–81; gender roles and, 209; habitual attention and, 299–302; ‘‘habitual inattention’’ and, 282–302; Napoleonic Civil Code and, 22; popular sovereignty and, 208; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 76 civic republicanism: class separation and, 81–88; masculinist tradition of, 72–81; neoconservatism and, 329–31 civilizational progress, Mill’s theory of, 230–34 civil society: family structure and, 48–49, 68n.3, 283–84; government and, 322–31; men’s participation in, 291; neoconservative vision of, 316–31; separate spheres paradox and, 299–302; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 3 Civitas (Institute for the Study of Civil Society), 316–31 class politics: American ‘‘aristocracy’’ and, 128– 34, 143–46; charity and, 313–31; collective individualism, 81–88; democracy and, 58– 64, 140–41, 156–57, 185–94, 319–20, 333n.22; Du Bois’s discussion of, 264–65; family structure and, 49–50, 68n.3, 195n.3; feminism and, 250n.36; feminization of bourgeoisie, 71–96; in Germany, 87–88, 97n.20; Jackson’s ascendancy and, 129–34; ‘‘manly’’ independence and, 91–93; monarchy and, 235–37; sexual mores and, 126–27; slavery and, 271–73; welfare reform and, 319–20 claustration, Tocqueville’s theme of, 19–24. See also bon meńage Clay, Henry, 130–31 clergy: ‘‘manly’’ independence and, 90–93; women and, 191–94. See also religion

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Index climatist theory of racial difference, 257, 260, 270, 275n.23 collective individualism, class separation and death of public virtue, 81–88 colonialism: French failures in, 238–40; Mill’s support for, 226–34, 249n.7; nationalism and, 238–40; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 225–48 Colwell, James L., 345 commercialism, Wollstonecraft’s discussion of, 116 communitarianism, Tocqueville and, 331n.3 community,difference and, 216–17 competition, democracy and, 188–94 Comte, Auguste, 35 Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored Race of the United States, The, 260 Condition, The Human, 108–9 Connolly, William, 153–54, 172, 345 consent: Martineau’s discussion of, 166–68, 176n.32; Tocqueville on function of, 162–63 Conservation of the Races, The, 262–63 conservative ideology: separate spheres paradox and, 284; Tocqueville’s influence on, 3, 283– 84, 331n.3 constructionism, Tocqueville’s racial attitudes and, 266–73 contract, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 183–86 Contract with America, 326 Corcos, Christine Alice, 350 Cornish, Samuel, 256–58 Cott, Nancy, 139, 148nn.43, 87–88, 91 Council on Civil Society, 335n.67 counterculture movement, neoconservative reappraisal of, 317–31 Counter-Reconstruction, 261 coverture, common law doctrine of, abstract equality and, 202–4 Craiutu, Aurelian, 216, 345–46 Crania Americana, 259 Crawford, William H., 130–31 critical race theory, 280n.117 Crocker, Hannah Mather, 121 Crouthame, James L., 346 Cruikshank, Barbara, 13, 305–31 culture: gendered political theory and, 89–93; Himmelfarb’s discussion of, 316–31; racial identity and, 261–77; Tocqueville’s legacy in, 307; Wollstonecraft’s impact on, 100– 102. See also counterculture movement

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Darwin, Charles, 261 Davenport, Charles, 262 Declaration of Independence, 139 De la litte´rature, 22 Delany, Martin, 259–61, 269, 277n.47 democracy: ambition and fulfillment in, 184–93; aristocratic sensibilities and, 126, 196n.27; division of labor and, 178–80; feminizing tendencies in, 76–81; French and American comparisons of, 77–81; habitual attention and, 299–302; ‘‘habitual inattention’’ as threat to, 282–302; ideology of equality and, 206–7; Jackson’s presidency and, 139–41; justice and, 178–84; Martineau’s discussion of, 163–66, 172–73; Tocqueville’s critique of, 6–7, 9–15, 50–52, 159–63, 171–73; whiteness studies in context of, 254–55 Democracy Growing Up, 3 Democracy in America: administrative despotism and, 89–93; American aristocracy in, 10, 139–41; bourgeoisie in, 72, 76–81; collective individualism and, 82–88; criticism of Jackon in, 138–41; democracy’s potential in, 53–57, 147n.13; division of labor in, 2, 5–6; domesticity in, 34; equality of sexes criticized in, 99–100; family structure discussed in, 47–67; feminist theory and, 4–15, 120–22; Francocentrism in, 127–28, 147n.13; frontier life described in, 159–61; gender stereotypes in, 200–215; girls and women in, 102–4; institutional analysis, 210–13; male prejudices in, 177–78; modernist theory of racial difference in, 265–73; modern translations of, 2, 15n.2; popular sovereignty discussed in, 207–10; public involvement discussed in, 241; quasi-aristocratic politics, 10; racial difference and race relations in, 254–76; separate spheres paradox in, 284–302; slavery and empire discussed in, 12; women’s role in, 24–28, 37–40, 151–53 democratic reform, Tocqueville’s ambivalence concerning, 305–31 de Stae¨l, Anne Louise Germaine (Madame de Stae¨l), 22–24, 105 De Tocqueville, 3 difference: black ethnology and concepts of, 256–65; equality and, 178–79, 196n.23; feminist theory of, 121–22; modernist the-

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Index

difference (continued) ory of racial difference, 265–73; sociolegal context for, 205–7; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 152–59 dignity, democracy and, 187–94 Discourses (Machiavelli), 74–75 division of labor: abstract equality and, 204–5; gender and, 218, 303n.11; Martineau’s discussion of, 170–71; double burden of moral responsibility and, 286–99; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 2, 5–6, 157–59, 178–84 divorce: changing American attitudes toward, 139–43; Jacksonian presidency and, 133–34 Domestic Manners of the Americans, 165 domestic privacy, as political issue, 134 Douglass, Frederick, 260–61, 277n.47 Drescher, Seymour, 267, 316 Drolet, Michael, 315, 333n.5, 346 Du Bois, W. E. B., 12, 253, 270, 273; black ethnology and influence of, 262–625; essentialism in work of, 269 Eaton, John, 136–37, 144 Eaton, Margaret Timberlake, 135–38, 142–45 Eaton affair, 10, 128, 135–38, 142–44, 149n.84 economic imperative: American men and, 287–88; women and, 187–94 education: of girls, early advocacy of, 102, 104–7, 109, 120–22, 122n.9; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 138–41, 161–63, 172–73, 180–81, 195n.21; Wollstonecraft’s discussion of, 108–10, 119–22 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 320 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 49–50, 68n.13, 88, 341 Emile; or, On Education, 2, 105, 115–16 Engels, Friedrich, 73–76 England, Wollstonecraft’s influence in, 107–10 Enlightenment, 78; ‘‘mission civilizatrice’’ of, 226 equality: abstract theory of, 201–7; American aristocracy threatened by, 129–34, 139–41; atomization and individualism and, 77–81; democracy and, 11, 52–57, 155–59, 185–94, 196n.24, 201–7; European discourse on, 69n.19, 105–7; family structure and, 57–67; feminist theory and, 201–7; freedom and, 199–200, 219–21, 300–302; gender differences in, 161–63; generative theory of, 199, 217–21; individualism as result of, 152–59; marriage and, 61–64, 104–7, 174n.16; pro-

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tofeminism and, 100–101, 121–22; slavery as threat to, 267; social inferiority of women and, 178–94 equal protection doctrine, abstract equality and, 203–4 ‘‘Essay on Algeria,’’ 88, 244–46 Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 266 essentialism: black ethnology and, 269, 273–74; feminist theory and, 213–17 Estates-General, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 83–88 ethnology: black ethnology, 256–65; Tocqueville’s work and, 12; whiteness studies in context of, 254–55 evolutionary theory, black ethnology and, 261–62 experience: gendered political theory and, 89–93; ideology extracted from, 205 ‘‘family resemblance’’: European feminism and, 121–22; Wittgenstein’s concept of, 10; Wollstonecraft/Tocqueville comparisons and, 100–102 family structure: aristocratic hierarchy and, 282; bibliographic sources on, 340–43; counterculture as threat to, 317–18; fathers, sons and brothers in, 53–57, 152–59, 171–73, 174n.14, 282; in French literature, 250n.44; generative theory of equality and, 217–21; individualism and, 152–73; and limits of democracy, 210–13; marriage and sex in, 64–67; Mill’s discussion of, 247–48; neoconservative view of, 283–84; political stability and role of, 235–37; popular sovereignty and, 208–10; postindustrial changes in, 301; radical binary differentiation in, 173n.4; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 47–67, 68nn.7, 9, 159–63, 197n.42 Fassin, Eric, 215–16 February Revolution (France), 242 ‘‘feminisme,’’ historical origins of, 16n.18, 122n.1 feminist theory: bibliographic sources, 343–45; cultural revolution and, 318–31, 332n.7; division of labor and, 184–94; equality vs. freedom in, 219–21; essentialism and, 213–17; freedom and manliness and, 88–93; French vs. American feminism, 215–16; generative theory of equality and, 217–21; historical origins of, 16n.18; labor vs. equal-

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Index ity feminists, 202; liberal citoyennes of French revolution and, 19–41; limits of equality and, 199–221; Mill’s imperialist vision and, 226, 228–34, 247–48, 249n.7; moral responsibility and, 285–99; political reform and role of, 306–31; protofeminism and, 101–22; standpoint theory, 214; Tocqueville’s legacy and, 1–15, 250n.43, 306–31; unintended consequences of, 318–31; welfare reform and, 307–9, 319–31; Wollstonecraft and Tocqueville’s influence on, 120–22 Flaubert, Gustave, 234, 250n.44 Ford, Caroline, 22, 24 France: class separation and, 81–88; democracy in, 126–27; feminization in Old Regime of, 86–88; girls’ education in, 59–60; postrevolutionary mores in, 126–27, 235–37; protofeminism in, 120–22; racial attitudes in, 266–67; Tocqueville’s critique of, 240–44; Wollstonecraft’s influence in, 107–10 Frazier, Mary, 131 Fredrickson, George, 257 freedom: equality and, 199–200, 219–21; manliness and, 88–93; marriage and, 114–22, 138–43, 157–59, 181–82, 288–99; reform and, 309–31 Freedom’s Journal, 256–57 ‘‘free love’’ communal living, emergence of, 139 Freiburg Antrittsrede, 87–88 French, Marilyn, 3 French feminist theory: Psych et Po movement, 215–16; Tocqueville and, 3 French imperialism, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 11–12 French Revolution: bourgeoisie and, 78–81; democratic theory and, 9–15, 97n.31; liberal citoyennes and, 19–21; ‘‘manly’’ independence and, 91–93; Tocqueville’s critique of, 205; Wollstonecraft on, 108 Freud, Sigmund, 264 Friedman, Marilyn, 286 friendship, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 31–33 Frohnen, Bruce, 346 frontier life, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 159–61, 195n.3, 211–13, 218, 287–93 Fugier, Anne Martin, 32 fulfillment, democracy and, 187–94 Fuller, Margaret, 109 Fuller, Timothy, 109

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361

Gardeton, Ce´sar, 108 Garrison, William Lloyd, 168 Gazette de France, La, 82 Geist, Marxian reconstruction of, 73–74 gender issues: bibliographic sources, 338–40; bon meńage of Tocqueville and, 24–26; claustration of women and, 19–24; deficits of liberal politics and, 26–27; democracy and, 57–64, 126–27; in Democracy in America, 49–52; empire theory and, 228–48; essentialism and, 213–17; European discourse on, 69n.19; family structure and, 48–67; feminization of bourgeoisie, 71–96; girls and women in Democracy in America, 102–4; Jackson and Adams presidential politics and, 130–34, 145–46; liberal citoyenne and, 19– 21, 33–40; limits to equality and, 201–21; marriage and, 114–22; mid–nineteenth-century attitudes concerning, 138–41; morality and, 294–99; nationalism and, 238–40; political theory and, 88–93; religion and, 22–24; separate spheres paradox and, 285– 302; subordination of women and, 161–63; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 2–4, 8–15 general ideas: generative theory vs., 207–10; Tocqueville’s distrust of, 205–7 generative theory, equality and, 217–19 Gershman, Sally, 346 Gilligan, Carol, 286 Gingrich, Newt, 3 girls: American vs. European comparisons of, 110–16; conforming pressures on, 295–99; in Democracy in America, 102–4, 119, 210; democracy’s impact on, 57–60, 100–102, 155–59; education of, 59–60, 103–7, 152– 53, 172–73, 195n.21; Wollstonecraft’s influence on treatment of, 108–9 Glazer, Nathan, 346 Gobineau, Arthur de, 266, 268 Goddard, Henry H., 262 Godwin, William, 108, 110 Goldberg, Chad, 333n.5 Goldstein, Leslie Friedman, 176n.32, 343 Gosse, Etienne, 20 Gould, Stephen Jay, 259 government, civil society and, 322–31 Greenberg, Stanley, 271 Grimke´, Angelina, 176nn.34, 39 Grimke´, Sarah, 106, 176nn.34, 39 Guellec, Laurence, 30, 44nn.56, 73 Guizot, Francois, 267

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habitual inattention, democratic citizenship and, 282–302 habitual inattention, Tocqueville’s warning against, 12–13, 298–99 Hall, Basil, 28 Harker, Ann, 109 Hartsock, Nancy, 214 Hartwell, Max, 316–17 Hegel, G. W. F., 49, 334n.31; Weltgeschichte, 73–74 Hersch, Blanche Glassman, 176n.37 Hertz, Neil, 237 Heuer, Jennifer Ngaire, 22, 24 Heymann, Jody, 301 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 13, 316–31, 334n.31 Hirschman, Albert O., 333n.18 Hobbes, Thomas, 77, 80, 85 hommes de lettres, class separation and, 85–88 homogeneity, social bonds created by, 152, 173n.4 Honig, Bonnie, 95–96 How to Observe Morals and Manners, 163–66 Hunt, Lynn, 69n.19, 235

queville and, 2, 8, 138–41; whiteness studies and legacy of, 254–55 Jackson, Rachel Donelson Robards, 10, 133–35, 139–41, 148n.56 Jacobins, 21–24 Janara, Laura, 3, 9–10, 47–67, 173n.4, 174n.16, 269–70, 343–44, 346–47; on Eaton affair, 144; on education of girls, 103–4; on French democracy, 251nn.64, 68; on gendered division of labor, 303n.11; on marriage, 144; on masculine authority, 242; on psychoanalytic theory, 209, 217; on sexual mores, 127 Jardin, Andre´, 237–38 Jefferson, Thomas, 190–91, 257, 270, 275n.18 ‘‘Jefferson Davis as Representative of Civilization,’’ 262 jeopardy thesis, 333n.18 Jones, Absalom, 256 Journal of Negro History, 264 July Monarchy, 23–24, 31, 81, 235–37 Justice, Gender, and the Family, 2 justice, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 185–94, 196n.22

identity politics, 214 Illustrations of Political Economy, 163–66, 175n.26 imperialism: French failures in, 238–40; Mill’s discussion of, 228–34; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 225–26, 234–48 independence, Tocqueville’s ‘‘manly’’ spirit of, 90–93 individualism: class separation and, 81–88; equality and, 77–81, 126, 184–94; Tocqueville’s critique of, 241–44, 292–99 institutional analysis, of Democracy in America, 210–13 intellectual history: black ethnology and, 256–65; modernist theory of racial difference and, 265–73; Tocqueville’s legacy and, 14–15 intendants, 94 international relations, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 227–28, 242–44 Jackson, Andrew: affairs of, 10; Eaton Affair, 135–38; political ascendancy of, 128–34, 145–46; political change in era of, 281–82; sexual mores in presidency of, 127–28; Toc-

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Kale, Steven, 23–24 Kennedy, Randall, 347 Kerber, Linda, 2, 103, 343 Kergorlay, Louis de, 106–7 Kessler, Sanford, 68n.13, 299–302, 344, 347 Kohn, Margaret, 269–70, 347 Kolchin, Peter, 253–54 Koritansky, John, 338, 347 Kramnick, Isaac, 332n.3 Kristol, William, 327, 344 La beˆte humaine, 250n.44 labor feminists, equality feminists and, 202–3 Landes, Joan, 69n.19 La Rochefoucauld, François de, 29 L’Atelier, 82 La vie e´legante ou la formation de Tout-Paris, 32 Lee, Robert E., 45n.90 legal doctrine, abstract equality and, 203–5 Le rouge et le noir, 245 Les femmes politiques, 20 Les mots des femmes (Women’s Worlds), 3 ‘‘Le the`me de la famille et de la femme chez Tocqueville’’ (The Theme of the family and woman in Tocqueville), 2 Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, 176n.39

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Index Leviathan, 77 Lewis, David Levering, 263–64 liberal citoyennes, Tocqueville and liberal paradox of, 9, 19–24, 33–40; 45n.89 liberalism: imperialism and, 226; of Mill, 228– 34, 249n.25; morality threatened by, 317–31 liberal politics, Tocqueville on deficits of, 26–27 Liberty Bell, 267 Liescke, Joel, 347 Locke, Jill, 1–15, 125–46, 333n.22 Locke, John, 88 Losing Ground, 317 Louis-Phillippe (King), 8, 235–36, 240 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 74–75, 80–81, 88, 95 MacKinnon, Catharine, 220–21 Madison, James, 165 majority: Martineau’s discussion of, 165–66, 168–71, 175n.29; Tocqueville on oppression of, 298–99 male family members, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 53–57 Mancini, Matthew, 348 Manent, Pierre, 195n.5, 197n.39, 207–8, 338 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 73–76 manumission laws, 268 marriage: bon meńage of Tocqueville and, 24–33; as contract, 149n.85; equality theory and role of, 203; family structure and role of, 49– 50, 68n.2, 171–73; freedom and, 114–22, 138–43, 157–59, 181–82, 288; French revolutionary reforms concerning, 21–24; frontier life and, 159–61; Jackson’s and Adam’s views on, 131–34; Martineau’s discussion of, 169–70; mid–nineteenth-century attitudes concerning, 138–41; political stability and role of, 235–37; romantic love and, 141–43, 183–84, 195n.21; separate spheres paradox in, 293–99; sex and, 64–67; subordination of women in, 161–63; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 7, 10–11, 28–33, 44n.56, 128–29, 143–46, 161–63, 175n.31; women’s freedom impacted by, 61–64, 104–7, 114–22 Martineau, Harriet, 10–11, 105, 121, 153–59, 174n.21; sympathy and democracy discussed by, 163–66; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 162–63 Marx, Karl, 73–76, 80, 86–88, 94–96, 97n.19; Du Bois and, 264 masculinity (manliness): civic republicanism

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and, 72–81; freedom and, 88–93; imperialism as affirmation of, 226–48; public life connected to, 241–44; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 12 Mason, Priscella, 109 materialism, democracy and, 191–94 Mathie, William, 49, 69n.23, 118–19, 341 Matsumoto, Reiji, 341–42 May, Gita, 338–39 McClintock, Anne, 238 McClure, Kirstie, 220–21 Mehta, Uday S., 226–27, 249n.25 Me´lonio, Françoise, 141 Memoir on Pauperism, 13, 307–31 Mennell, Stephen, 349 ‘‘Mental Traveller, The,’’ 27–28 Meyers, Marvin, 147n.13 Michelet, Jules, 35 Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, 216 Mill, Harriet Taylor, 175n.31 Mill, James, 110 Mill, John Stuart, 122n.3, 171, 175n.31, 195n.5; on empire, 226–34, 246–48, 250n.36; Tocqueville and, 8, 11–12, 48, 103, 107, 109, 226–48 Mink, Gwendolyn, 307, 319–20, 333n.10 Minow, Martha, 204–5 mission civilizatrice: Enlightenment concept of, 226; Mill’s discussion of, 229–34 Mitchell, Joshua, 342 modernist theory of racial difference, 265–73 Molie`re (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 234, 250n.44 monarchy, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 235–37 money, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 96n.10 Monroe, James, 130 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 303n.6 morality: American aristocracy and preservation of, 129–34, 139–41; civil society and, 325–31; counterculture as threat to, 317–18; democracy and, 126–27, 180–94; Jackson’s and Adam’s views on, 131–34; marriage and, 138–43; poverty and, 313–31, 333n.22; sympathy and, 164–66; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 24–25, 41n.21; women as guardians of, 285–99 ‘‘moral suasion’’ argument against slavery, 259 Mormons, Mill’s discussion of, 232–34 Morton, F. L., 68n.13, 342 Morton, Samuel (Dr.), 259–60 motherland (la patrie), nationalism and, 238–40

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Mott, Lucretia, 119, 176n.34 Mottley, Marie, 26, 29–37, 43nn.39, 46–47, 44nn.58, 60, 107, 115 multiple traditions thesis, 13–14 Murray, Charles, 317 Murray, Judith Sargent, 109 ‘‘Mutability of Human Affairs, The,’’ 257 Nana, 250n.44 Napoleonic Civil Code, 9, 132, 143–44; claustration of women and, 21–24; patriarchal structures in, 19–20 Narrative of the Proceedings of Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, 256 nationalism: feminist images of, 237–40; Mill and Tocqueville on, 227–28, 247–48; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 50–51, 244–46 Native Americans: Tocqueville’s discussion of, 54–57, 152–53, 215, 226, 266; Volney’s research on, 279n.97 nature, absence in Tocqueville’s work of, 195n.18 neoconservatives: feminism and, 321–31; Tocqueville’s legacy and, 308–31, 331n.3 New Deal policies, labor feminism and, 203 New Right, emergence of, 323–31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 334n.31; empire rhetoric and, 244–46 Nineteenth Amendment, 202, 300–301 Notes on the State of Virginia, 257, 270, 275n.18 Oeuvres (Tocqueville), 159–61 Okin, Susan Moller, 2, 49, 88, 342 Old Regime and the French Revolution, The, 8, 71–72; administrative despotism and, 89–90; bourgeoisie in, 75–76, 81; class separation and death of public virtue and, 81–88; freedom and manliness in, 89–93 One Nation, Two Cultures, 326 On Liberty, 229–34 Original Stories from Real Life, 108 ‘‘other’’: Martineau’s discussion of, 166–70; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 152–59 other-directedness, language of empire and, 244–46 Ozouf, Mona, 3, 121, 146n.4, 215–16, 339 Paine, Thomas, 108, 110 Parekh, Bhikhu, 226–27 parental authority: imperialism compared with,

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228–34; Mill’s concept of, 227–28, 249n.7; motherland (la patrie) concept and, 239–40 partisan politics, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 190–91, 197n.38 patriarchy: abstract equality and, 204; equality feminism and, 202; Mill’s imperialism and, 226–34, 246–48; motherland (la patrie) concept and, 239–40; in Napoleonic Civil Code, 19–20, 61–64, 104–7; Tocqueville’s acceptance of, 49, 200 patrie, la, 238–40 Pe`re Goriot, 250n.44 ‘‘personal is political,’’ feminist theory and, 6, 17n.26 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (prwora), 307–9, 319–20, 323–24, 331 Peterson, Linda, 175n.26 ‘‘petite cite´ ideále,’’ 34 Philosophical Investigations, 101 Pick, Daniel, 235 Pierson, George W., 162–63 Pitkin, Hanna, 74–75, 88 Pitts, Jennifer, 348 Piven, Frances Fox, 320 pluralism, feminist theory and, 216 Poggi, Gianfranco, 342 ‘‘Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent,’’ 260 politics: black ethnology and role of, 259–65; gendered approach to, 88–93; Mill’s support for colonialism and, 229–34; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 1–8, 291–99; Weber’s discussion of, 87–88; women’s involvement in, 102, 122n.9, 188–94, 241–44, 297–99 polygenesis, theory, 257–58 Pope, Whitney, 348 popular sovereignty, 207–9 positivism, 262 postcolonial theory, Tocqueville’s legacy and, 226–48 poverty: morality and, 326–27; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 310–31 Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 259 Prince, The, 74–75 prison reform, Tocqueville’s discussion, 315–31 privatization, neoconservative embrace of, 322–31 Progressive Era, black ethnology and, 262 Protestantism, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 59–60

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Index

365

protofeminism: historical terminology of, 122n.1; Tocqueville and, 4, 10, 16n.18, 104–7, 118–22; Wittgenstein’s ‘‘family resemblance’’ concept and, 101–2; Wollstonecraft/Tocqueville comparisons of, 99–122 pseudoscientific theory of racial difference, 265–73 Psych et Po feminist movement, 215 psychoanalytic theory, generative theory of equality and, 209 public freedom, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 93–96 public life, Tocqueville’s affirmation of, 241–44, 291–99 public opinion: marriage mores and, 133–35, 139–43, 158–59, 182–83, 295–99; tyranny of, 201; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 116–22, 245–46, 290–91; white backlash movements and, 271–72 public virtue, class separation and, 81–88 Puritanism: democracy and, 195n.17; and ideas, 201; marriage mores and, 138–43, 157–59, 161–63 Putnam, Robert, 3, 324

gender and, 22–24; habitual inattention and, 302n.2; impact on women of, 144–46, 191–94, 293–99. See also clergy repos du guerrier, 46n.93 Republican Party, Tocqueville invoked by, 3, 15n.12, 323–24 Resh, Richard W., 348 ressentiment: feminist theory and, 214; nationalism and, 246 Restoration (Bourbon), 23–24, 31 Retrospect on Western Travel, 153, 163–66 Revolution of 1848, 205 Richardson, William D., 348–49 Rights of Man, 108–9 Robards, Lewis, 10, 133. See also Jackson, Rachel Donelson Robards Robards affair, 10, 133–35, 139–43, 148n.56, 149n.84 romantic love, cultural concept of, 141–43 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on bourgeoisie, 234, 245–46, 250n.44; on marriage, 114–22; Tocqueville and, 2, 4, 49, 68n.7, 80–81, 104–5, 126–27 Russwurm, John, 257–58, 275nn.12, 21–22

Quayle, Dan, 327

Saint-Martin, Fe´licite´ Gue´riot, 121 Saint Simonians, 105 salon culture: Tocqueville and, 32–33, 45n.80, 149n.109; women’s equality and, 23–24 Sand, George, 4–5, 7, 42nn.26, 29, 61, 105 Schleifer, James T., 349 Schneck, Stephen Frederick, 349 Schultz, Vicki, 219–20 Scott, Joan, 332n.7 Second Great Awakening, 131, 144 ‘‘Second Memoir on Pauperism,’’ 311–31 second-wave feminism: neoconservatives and, 308–11; Tocqueville and, 7, 283–84 self-interest, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 53–57, 185–94, 292–99 Seneca Falls Convention, 139 separate spheres paradox: democratic citizenship and, 281–302; habitual attention and, 299– 302; women as moral guardians and, 285–99 sex discrimination doctrine, equality and, 199– 200, 203–4 sexuality: democracy and, 126–27; Eaton affair and American mores concerning, 135–38; Jackson’s and Adams’ views on, 131–34; marriage and, 64–67, 114–22, 289; separate

‘‘Racial Realism,’’ 280n.117 racism: bibliographic sources on, 345–50; black ethnology on, 256–65; Du Bois’s discussion of, 262–63; national purposes and, 215; modernist theory of racial difference and, 265–73; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 7, 12, 17n.31, 54–57, 152–53, 253–76, 275n.10; whiteness studies and, 253–55 radical binary differentiation, homogeneity vs., 173n.4 Radical Christianity, 176n.34 Radical Reconstruction, historiography of, 265 rationality: frontier life and, 289–90; gendered political theory and, 89–93, 161–63 Recollections, 12, 31, 33–40, 205, 251n.60 Reddy, William, 31 reform, Tocqueville’s ambivalence concerning, 308–31, 332n.5 re´gnicole, 22 Reinhardt, Mark, 49, 51, 153 relative poverty, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 310–31 religion: American middle class and, 78–81;

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sexuality (continued) spheres paradox and, 300–302; sexual revolution and, 317–31; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 41n.21, 51–57, 131–34 Shapiro, Michael J., 342 Shiner, L. E., 236 Shogan, Colleen J., 343–44 Siegel, Reva, 203–4 slavery: bibliographic sources on, 345–50; black ethnology research and, 257–65; class politics and, 195n.17; Du Bois’s discussion of, 264; John Quincy Adams’s opposition to, 130–34; Martineau’s discussion of, 168–70; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 12, 55–57, 152, 172, 243–44, 266–73; whiteness studies in context of, 254–55 Smith, Adam, 153, 163–64, 172–73, 323 Smith, James McCune, 259–60, 275n.12 Smith, Rogers, 2, 13, 173n.12, 339, 349 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 275n.23 Snyder, R. Claire, 339 social capital, neoconservative debate on, 324–31 social Darwinism, black ethnology and, 261–62 social identity: Tocqueville’s discussion of, 12, 200–201; whiteness as, 269–73 Society in America, 153–59, 163–70 ‘‘Some Ideas on the Reasons Preventing the French from Having Good Colonies,’’ 238 Souvenirs, 61, 72, 235, 236, 241 sovereignty: administrative despotism and, 89–93; bourgeoisie and, 85–88, 97n.19; popular sovereignty, 207–10; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 53–60 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 109, 119, 202 Stendhal (Henri-Marie Beyle), 234–35, 245 Stevens, Jacqueline, 13–14 Stoffels, Euge`ne, 28 Stokes, Curtis, 349 Stone, John, 349 Stone, Lucy, 139 Strong, Robert, 350 Subjection of Women, 226 suffrage: feminist movement and, 202; Martineau’s discussion of, 170–71, 176nn.36–38 Sullivan, Kathleen, 11, 199–221 Sumner, William Graham, 262 Swetchine, Sophie, 5, 16n.24, 32, 34–37, 45nn.80, 88 sympathy: Adam Smith’s concept of, 153–73;

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Martineau’s discussion of, 163–67, 172–73; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 184–94 Taylor, Harriet, 121 Thayer, Millie, 332n.7 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 163–64 third-wave feminism: experience and, 214–17; freedom vs. equality and, 221 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 107–8 Tillery, Alvin B., Jr., 12 Tocqueville, Alexandrine, 236–37 Tocqueville, Alexis de: political theory and legacy of, 1–8; protofeminism and, 99–122 Tocqueville, Edouard de., 37, 44n.62, 236–37 Tocqueville et la nature de la de´mocratie, 195n.5 ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress,’ ’’ 11 Todorov, Tzvetan, 226 tours device, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 315–16 Treatise on Domestic Economy, A, 120, 153 Trollope, Frances, 165 Tronto, Joan, 286–87, 302 Turner, Jack, 339–40 Unitarianism, 176n.34 Van Buren, Martin, 137, 145–46 Verge, Francine, 2, 340 Vetter, Lisa Pace, 10–11, 151–76 vice, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 281–302 View of the Climate and Soil of the United States, 279n.97 Villa, Dana, 9–10, 71–96, 173n.9 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A, 10, 100– 102, 108–10, 116–19, 166 Virtue, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 281–302 Volney, Constantin-Francois, 279n.97 voluntary associations: democracy and, 188–94, 295–99; neoconservative view of, 324–31 Wach, Joachim, 350 Walker, David, 258–59, 269, 276n.35 War of 1812, 129 Wealth of Nations, 163 Weber, Max, 87–88, 94–96 Weekly Standard, 327 Welch, Cheryl, 3, 7, 9, 19–46, 127, 145n.6, 174nn.13–14, 236, 340 welfare: reform of, 307–9, 318–31; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 310–31

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Index Western canon, feminist interpretation of, vii–ix White Image in the Black Mind, The, 258 whiteness: backlash movements and, 271–72; black ethnology and, 262–65; Du Bois’s commentary on, 264–65; Tocqueville’s discussion of, 12, 253–54, 267–68 white supremacy, Tocqueville’s comments on, 267–69 Williams, Patricia, 220 Winthrop, Delba, 2, 11, 42n.31, 48–49, 118–19, 177–94, 299–302 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10, 100–101 Wolfson, Dorothea Israel, 303n.5, 345 Wolin, Sheldon, 127, 151–52, 273–74, 332n.5, 340, 350 Wollstonecraft, Mary: on education of women, 104–7, 153; international interest in, 107–10; on marriage, 114–22; Martineau and, 166, 175n.30; political impact of, 122n.9; protofeminism and, 99–122, 122n.3; Tocqueville and, 8, 10, 114–22 women: clergy and, 191–94; in Democracy in America, 102–4, 151–53; democratic progress and role of, 177–94; equality issues for, 199–221; European discourse on, 69n.19; family structure and role of, 47–49, 68n.7; feminization of bourgeoisie, 71–96, 235–37;

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individualism and rights of, 152–73; Jackson’s and Adam’s views on, 131–34, 145–46; Martineau’s discussion of, 166–71, 175n.30; as moral guardians, 285–99; political involvement by, 241–44; powers of, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 60–64; Rousseau on role of, 115–22; separate spheres paradox concerning, 284–302; status in French society of, 9; subordination of, 161–63; Tocqueville’s view of, 4–5, 9, 11, 24–26, 37–40, 42nn.26, 29, 43n.40, 137–38, 152–59, 175n.30; Wollstonecraft on rights of, 100–102 Wood, Kristen, 135, 145, 147n.15, 148nn.59– 64, 68 Woodson, Carter G., 264 work ethic, Tocqueville’s discussion of, 289–91 Wright, Frances, 106, 121 Wrongs of Woman; or Maria, the, 107–8 Young, Louise M., 340 Zeitlin, Irving, 350 Zerilli, Linda, 17n.26, 214, 220, 249n.8, 146n.5 Zetterbaum, Marvin, 350 Zola, Emile, 234, 250n.44 Zuckert, Catherine H., 342–43

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Locke.cover

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locke & botting

PHILOSOPHY / POLITICAL SCIENCE / WOMEN’S STUDIES

The volume highlights the expressly normative nature of Tocqueville’s project, thus providing an overdue counterweight to the conventional understanding of Tocquevillean America as an actual place in time and history. By reading Tocqueville alongside the writings of early women’s rights activists, ethnologists, critical race theorists, contemporary feminists, neoconservatives, and his French contemporaries, among others, this book produces a variety of Tocquevilles that unsettles the hegemonic view of his work. Seen as a philosophical source and a political authority for modern democracies since the publication of the twin volumes of Democracy in America (1835/1840), Tocqueville emerges from this collection as a vital interlocutor for democratic theorists confronting the power relations generated by intersections of gender, sexual, racial, class, ethnic, national, and colonial identities. Jill Locke is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department at Gustavus Adolphus College. Eileen Hunt Botting is Rolfs Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame.


This book moves beyond traditional readings of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and his relevance to contemporary democracy by emphasizing the relationship of his life and work to modern feminist thought. Within the resurgence of political interest in Tocqueville during the past two decades, especially in the United States, there has been significant scholarly attention to the place of gender, race, and colonialism in his work. This is the first edited volume to gather together a range of this creative scholarship. It reveals a tidal shift in the reception history of Tocqueville as a result of his serious engagement by feminist, gender, postcolonial, and critical race theorists.

RE-READING THE CANON

ISBN 978-0-271-03403-4

T H E P E N N S Y LVA N I A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S U N I V E R S I T Y PA R K , P E N N S Y LVA N I A W W W. P S U P R E S S . O R G

9 780271 034034

90000

PENN STATE PRESS

R E - R E A D I N G

T H E

C A N O N

FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF alexis de tocqueville EDITED BY jill locke and eileen hunt botting

Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville (Re-Reading the Canon)

Alexis de Tocqueville Edition

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide

Alexis de Tocqueville (Campus Einführungen)

Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Re-Reading the Canon Series)

Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo Machiavelli (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Augustine (Re-Reading the Canon)

Alexis de Tocqueville (Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers, Vol. 7)

Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas

Feminist Interpretations of W.V. Quine

Educating Democracy: Alexis de Tocqueville and Leadership in America

Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised

Alexis

Alexis

Le vocabulaire de Tocqueville

Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Re-Reading the Canon Series)

alexis

Alexis Sorbas

Canon De Muratori (frag)

Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals: From His Times to Ours (American Intellectual Culture)

Christianity and American Democracy (Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures on American Politics)

Rereading Conrad

Rereading Conrad

On Rereading

Alexis Sorbas

Alexis Sorbas

Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville (Re-Reading the Canon)

Alexis de Tocqueville Edition

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide

Alexis de Tocqueville (Campus Einführungen)

Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Re-Reading the Canon Series)

Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo Machiavelli (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Augustine (Re-Reading the Canon)

Alexis de Tocqueville (Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers, Vol. 7)

Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas

Feminist Interpretations of W.V. Quine

Educating Democracy: Alexis de Tocqueville and Leadership in America

Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised

Alexis

Alexis

Le vocabulaire de Tocqueville

Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Re-Reading the Canon Series)

alexis

Alexis Sorbas

Canon De Muratori (frag)

Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals: From His Times to Ours (American Intellectual Culture)

Christianity and American Democracy (Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures on American Politics)

Rereading Conrad

Rereading Conrad

On Rereading

Alexis Sorbas

Alexis Sorbas

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