Democracy in America: How the Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes 11-5-2010

 Whole libraries could be filled with books on How the Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes.

...It is not thus that the Americans understand that species of democratic equality which may be established between the sexes. They admit, that as nature has appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral constitution of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a distinct employment to their various faculties; and they hold that improvement does not consist in making beings so dissimilar do pretty nearly the same things, but in getting each of them to fulfil their respective tasks in the best possible manner. The Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy which governs the manufactures of our age, by carefully dividing the duties of man from those of woman, in order that the great work of society may be the better carried on.

I can hear howls from any reading that passage. I wonder what some will make of this passage:

 As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.

Which might shock those brought up with images of Elke Sommers, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, and Marlene Dietrich. What are Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn and Meryl Streep, or, even, Susan Sarandon, against the Europeans? What of Marjorie Main? What is Garbo compared to Ma Kettle?