Role of Women

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Different authors have different approaches to the same issue. In this paper I will contrast and compare how the authors Alexis De Tocqueville, Holly Dover, and Christina Hoff Sommers, tackle the myth of the role of women in society and what the role of women should be according to them. De Tocqueville

De Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who came to America to study the American penal system. Coming from a European society he was struck by the way Americans understood the equality of the sexes. He published his book Democracy in America in 1835, which is from where our excerpt came from.

De Tocqueville seems very impressed with the fact that American women are capable of performing the same duties as men but do not choose to because they rather maintain their natural place in society. American women are just as capable as men in understanding politics and other important affairs, but choose not to occupy themselves with such matter, so they spend more time in preserving their natural beauty and their natural place in society without being forced to. He also seems pleased by the fact that the women take pride in “bending themselves to the yoke”.

He seems to be very content with American men as well who, unlike European men, do not flatter their women constantly and boast themselves to be women’s slaves but instead, show the appreciation of their women through their actions. European men on the other hand are all talk. De Tocquville says in his closing argument that even though American women are extremely dependent on the men, he has never seen any women occupy a loftier position. He attributes America’s superiority to the superiority of her women.

Another way of looking at the roles we assume in society is that they are “socially constructed”. Holly Devor brings this view to our attention in an essay. Being a professor of sociology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, she is an expert in the field. She uses a more scientific approach, as compared to De Tocquville, to the argument about the role of men and women in society. She believes that we learn how to live our lives according to our gender at a very young age. According to research, by the age of five years old, children may be able to accurately recognize their own gender and the genders of the people around them; however, they will often do that on the basis of role information, such as hairstyle and clothing, rather than physical attributes such as genitals.

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