me 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 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.

In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace
two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes, and to make
them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways which are always
different. American women never manage the outward concerns of the
family, or conduct a business, or take a part in political life; nor are
they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labor of
the fields, or to make any of those laborious exertions which demand
the exertion of physical strength. No families are so poor as to form
an exception to this rule. If on the one hand an American woman cannot
escape from the quiet circle of domestic employments, on the other
hand she is never forced to go beyond it. Hence it is that the women of
America, who often exhibit a masculine strength of understanding and a
manly energy, generally preserve great delicacy of personal appearance
and always retain the manners of women, although they sometimes show
that they have the hearts and minds of men.

Nor have the Americans ever supposed that one consequence of democratic
principles is the subversion of marital power, of the confusion of the
natural authorities in families. They hold that every association must
have a head in order to accomplish it