RAISING GIRLS IN THE UNITED STATES
THERE has never been a free society without mores, and as I said in the first part of this work, it is woman who makes mores. To my way of thinking, therefore, anything that influences the condition of women, their habits, and their opinions is of great political interest.
In nearly all Protestant nations, girls are far more mistresses of their actions than is the case among Catholic peoples.
They are still more independent in Protestant countries like England, which have preserved or acquired the right to govern themselves. Liberty then works its way into the family through political habits and religious beliefs.
In the United States, Protestant doctrine combines with a very liberal constitution and a very democratic social state, and nowhere is a girl more quickly or completely left to herself.
Long before the young American woman reaches marriageable age, she begins little by little to be set free from her mother’s tutelage. Before her childhood has quite ended, she is already thinking for herself, speaking freely, and acting on her own. The great spectacle of the world is set constantly before her. Rather than being hidden from her view, more and more of it is revealed to her as time goes by, and she is taught to consider it with a steady and tranquil eye. Thus the vices and perils that society presents soon become apparent to her. She sees them clearly, judges them without illusion, and confronts them without fear. For she is full of confidence in her own strength, and her confidence seems to be shared by everyone around her.
Hence one should almost never expect to find in an American girl the virginal innocence amid nascent desires or the naïve and ingenuous graces that generally accompany the European girl’s passage from childhood to youth. It is rare for an American girl of any age to exhibit childish timidity or ignorance. Like the European girl, she wants to please, but she knows precisely how much she is willing to give up in order to do so. If she does not surrender to evil, at least she knows what it is. She has pure mores rather than a chaste mind.
I have often been surprised and almost frightened by the singular skill and pleasing audacity with which young American girls marshal thoughts and words while deftly negotiating the shoals of a sprightly conversation. A philosopher might well stumble a hundred times along the narrow path these girls travel without incident or difficulty.
Indeed, it is easy to see that even in the independence of early youth, the American girl never entirely relinquishes her self-control. She enjoys all allowed pleasures without giving herself up to any of them, and her reason never lets go of the reins, though at times its grip on them may seem rather loose.
In France, where our opinions and tastes are still a strange mix combining vestiges of all the ages of the past, we often give women a timid, sheltered, almost cloistered upbringing, and then we suddenly abandon them, without guidance or assistance, to the disorders that are inseparable from democratic society.
Americans are more consistent.
They realized the inevitability in a democracy of a high degree of individual independence, of youthful impatience, ill-controlled desires, changing customs, frequently uncertain or impotent public opinion, weak paternal authority, and challenges to marital domination.
Given this state of affairs, they judged that there was little likelihood of preventing a woman from experiencing the most tyrannical passions of the human heart and that a safer course would be to teach her the art of combating those passions herself. Since they could not ensure that a woman’s virtue would not be frequently imperiled, they wanted her to be able to defend that virtue and for that relied more on the free effort of her will than on shaky or ruined safeguards. Rather than encourage her to distrust herself, they therefore sought constantly to increase her confidence in her own strength. Being both unable and unwilling to keep a girl in a state of complete and perpetual ignorance, they hastened to equip her with precocious knowledge in all areas. Far from hiding the world’s corruptions from her, they wanted her to see them from the first and practice fleeing them on her own, and they chose to protect her decency rather than respect her innocence all too thoroughly.
Although the Americans are a highly religious people, they did not rely on religion alone to defend a woman’s virtue; they sought to arm her reason. They adopted the same method in this as in many other circumstances. First they made incredible efforts to ensure that individual independence would regulate itself, and only after reaching the ultimate limit of human strength did they at last invoke the aid of religion.
I am aware that such an upbringing is not without danger. I am also aware that it tends to develop judgment at the expense of imagination, and to make women respectable and cold rather than tender wives and amiable companions of men. Although society is more tranquil and better regulated as a result, private life often has fewer charms. But these are secondary ills, which ought to be braved for the sake of a greater interest. At this point no choice remains: a democratic upbringing is necessary to protect women from the perils with which the institutions and mores of democracy surround them.