Share This Page
Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville
384 pages | 6 x 9 | 2008
ISBN 978-0-271-03402-7 | cloth: $75.00 sh
ISBN 978-0-271-03403-4 | paper: $35.00 sh
This book moves beyond traditional readings of Alexis De Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his relevance to contemporary democracy by emphasizing the relationship of his life and work to modern feminist thought. Within the resurgence of political interest in Tocqueville during the past two decades, especially in the United States, there has been significant scholarly attention to the place of gender, race, and colonialism in his work. This is the first edited volume to gather together a range of this creative scholarship. It reveals a tidal shift in the reception history of Tocqueville as a result of his serious engagement by feminist, gender, postcolonial, and critical race theorists.
The volume highlights the expressly normative nature of Tocqueville's project, thus providing an overdue counterweight to the conventional understanding of Tocquevillean America as an actual place in time and history. By reading Tocqueville alongside the writings of early women's rights activists, ethnologists, critical race theorists, contemporary feminists, neoconservatives, and his French contemporaries, among others, this book produces a variety of Tocquevilles that unsettles the hegemonic view of his work.
Seen as a philosophical source and a political authority for modern democracies since the publication of the twin volumes of Democracy in America (1835/1840), Tocqueville emerges from this collection as a vital interlocutor for democratic theorists confronting the power relations generated by intersections of gender, sexual, racial, class, ethnic, national, and colonial identities.
Jill Locke is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department at Gustavus Adolphus College.
Eileen Hunt Botting is Rolfs Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: To Tocqueville and Beyond
By Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting
1 Beyond the Bon Ménage: Tocqueville and the Paradox of Liberal Citoyennes
By Cheryl B. Welch
2 Democracy's Family Values
By Laura Janara
3 Tocqueville and the Feminization of the Bourgeoisie
By Dana Villa
4 A Family Resemblance: Tocqueville and Wollstonecraftian Protofeminism
By Eileen Hunt Botting
5 Aristocratic Mourning: Tocqueville, John Quincy Adams, and the Affairs of Andrew Jackson
By Jill Locke
6 Sympathy, Equality, and Consent: Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau on Women and Democracy in America
By Lisa Pace Vetter
7 Tocqueville's American Woman and “The True Conception of Democratic Progress”
By Delba Winthrop
8 Toward a Generative Theory of Equality
By Kathleen S. Sullivan
9 Imperial Fathers and Favorite Sons: J. S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Nineteenth-Century Visions of Empire
By Richard Boyd
10 Tocqueville, Black Writers, and American Ethnology: Rethinking the Foundations of Whiteness Studies
By Alvin B. Tillery Jr.
11 The Separate Spheres Paradox: Habitual Inattention and Democratic Citizenship
By Jocelyn M. Boryczka
12 Tocqueville's Authority: Feminism and Reform “Between Government and Civil Society”
By Barbara Cruikshank
Annotated Bibliography on Alexis de Tocqueville and Gender, Feminism, and Race
By Christine Carey
Contributors
Index