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CHAPTER XII.
HOW THE AMERICANS UNDERSTAND THE EQUALITY OF THE SEXES.
I have shown how democracy destroys or modifies the different
inequalities which originate in society: but is this all? or does it
not ultimately affect that great inequality of man and woman
which has seemed, up to the present day, to be eternally based in
human nature? I believe that the social changes which bring
nearer to the same level the father and son, the master and
servant, and superiors and inferiors generally speaking, will raise
woman and make her more and more the equal of man. But here,
more than ever, I feel the necessity of making myself clearly
understood; for there is no subject on which the coarse and lawless
fancies of our age have taken a freer range.
There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make of man and woman beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights: they would mix them in all things—their occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may readily be conceived, that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded; and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature, nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.
It is not thus that the Americans understand that species of democratic equality which may be established between the sexes. They admit, that as nature has appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral constitutions of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a distinct employment to their various faculties; and they hold that improvement does not consist in making beings so dissimilar do pretty nearly the same things, but in getting each of them to fulfil their respective tasks in the best possible
