In the book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville writes about all of his experiences and thoughts about American Democracy and Society. In book two part three chapter 12, Tocqueville discusses the sexual equality in America and compares it to the way that Europe looks at sexual equality. These two views are very different from each other; one focuses more on the sexes being complementary while the other focuses on the sexes being the same. In 1996 F. Carolyn Graglia wrote an essay called The Breaking of the “Women’s Pact”. Her essay focused on how feminism had changed from the time she was going through school in the 1940s and the 1960s. Some of Tocqueville’s opinions about how the American’s viewed sexual equality opinions were almost …show more content…
This essay starts by explaining how when Carolyn was in seventh grade she had decided that she wanted to be a lawyer, and she had fear about making this decision. This fear stemmed not from her being a women, but from rising above her current societal situation. Carolyn graduated from law school and practiced law until 1959 to raise her family at home. Ever since that day in seventh grade until she left her firm, her aspirations were never put into question. The reason her aspirations of being a lawyer were never put into question is because of the way that America looked at women and the “Women’s Pact”. The “Women’s Pact” was a term that Carolyn came up with to describe the way that women had treated each other prior to the big feminism movement. “The Women’s Pact recognized that women generally fell into three groups. Those who fell into the first are unable or unwilling to marry, or are profoundly afraid of childbirth…the second group will marry and often bear children but…pursue careers…the third group will choose marriage as their primary career” (Graglia p.2, internet copy). Carolyn goes on to say that the pact between these groups would let members of each group live peacefully and would not be attacked by other women. This pact was broken in the 1960s when feminists loudly proclaimed their disdain of domesticity and contempt for house wives; the only way that women who lived at home could get approval from the other women was by abandoning the domestic life to become part of the workforce (Graglia p.2, internet copy). The big argument for feminists making this argument was because it put working women at a competitive disadvantage when compared to men. This is because when the wife and the husband have to work while they have children; either the husband or the wife has to work shorter hours in order to take care of the children and thus, specifically the husband