Tocqueville

According to Tocqueville, the Americans make their women 'equal' by protecting and assuming they (women) are virtuous and give them separate roles in life*. He says that men should be heads of households and do physical labor and politics and business, but women are equal because they do housework and nothing else. He also describes in detail how American women are equal because they are virtuous and American men keep them that way because it makes them morally equal. He says that on the contrary, Europeans don't respect women's virtue (he talks about rape cases here) and that in Europe men easily are influenced by women while women like to pretend to be weak. (At least, I think that's what he says. That whole paragraph confused me).

*Something odd I thought of while writing this- when I was writing that sentence, I almost wrote and so they make them separate but equal and then I realized that that was the reasoning stated behind segregation practices way back when. So. I just found that interesting.