Womanhood in Tocqueville's Democracy: In Conversation with Sarah Wilford

The Governance Podcast

Alexis de Tocqueville argued that American democracy was rooted in associational life. What role did women play in building this capacity for association? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Dr Sarah Wilford (University of the Andes) sits down with Dr Irena Schneider (King's College London) to discuss how the domestic sphere shapes free societies and stems the tide of democratic despotism. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Dr Sarah Wilford is an assistant professor of politics at the University of the Andes in Santiago. Her research focuses on the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville regarding family, women, and democratic conditions. Other research interests include the relationship between religion and liberty in Tocqueville, womanhood during the nineteenth century, and the use of Tocqueville in later twentieth and twenty-first-century political theory and political science. She received her PhD in Politics from King's College London in 2018.

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00:51: Tocqueville is a very popular writer to turn to nowadays, particularly when we think about modern questions of the loss of associationalism, virtuous citizenship, and community values. But we don't often think about Tocqueville in terms of gender and the domestic sphere. That's where you have been working and I wanted to ask just to get started, how did you get interested in the gender angle on Tocqueville?

3:13: To delve into the details, what exactly is the role of womanhood and the domestic sphere in Tocqueville's work?

07:23: My first reaction is-- you talked about paternal authority and that being a prime element in democratic citizenship, and being the first school of citizenship. What about the mother and womanhood in general? How does that contribute to the raising of virtuous, democratic citizens?

9:30: To delve further into the question of authority, both maternal, paternal, and the domestic sphere, it seems almost like an oxymoron to say that respect for authority leads to more democratic norms and civil society. How does that transition play out in Tocqueville?

11:30: Tocqueville really is seen as a scholar of civil society, of associationalism. We throw around these terms but we're not often very clear by what Tocqueville meant by them. When he observed these things in American society, what was he talking about? What does governance and associationalism mean for Tocqueville in this sense?

17:21: A lot of times, when it comes to Tocqueville, we hear the term, 'the habits of the heart and mind.' A lot of the network that exist within civil society are driven by people's common acceptance or commitment to certain values or beliefs or ideas. That is a kind of glue that ties society together and is generated within the domestic sphere. Can you talk a little more about the habits of the heart and mind that a self-governing citizenry is supposed to have?

21:08: Tocqueville has been used and appropriated by many modern scholars in social science, from thinkers like Robert Putnam to Vincent Ostrom, and others. And they often use Tocqueville to address modern issues or crises of democracy. You've certainly worked a little bit on how they interpreted Tocqueville. What did they get right, and what did they get wrong?

28:04: What is your contribution on these perspectives? Are they hitting the point? Are they being accurately Tocquevillian, or are they misunderstanding parts of his argument?

37:44: I think part of the difficulty in transmitting this more 19th century perspective into the 21st is that society doesn't really look the same as when Tocqueville observed it. You talked a lot about the virtues of a self-governing society in which women take a disproportionate role in bringing up children and transmitting the virtues of citizenship, where religion plays a big role in people's lives that does constrain morality, where there is a tendency to respect authority more, where information and authority are not democratised. We live in a completely different world now. And you might say that women's empowerment is a completely positive achievement and that women shouldn't be spending the majority of their time in the domestic sphere transmitting these virtues to citizens. So there are a lot of tensions in taking the Tocquevillian example and being perfectly Tocquevillian in the 21st century. Should we be Tocquevillian nowadays given that society has completely changed?

44:44: Do you think we're in a period of democratic despotism today?

48:13: In light of this potential that we are living in a period of democratic despotism, we're more secularised, atomised, lonelier; we're lacking a lot of the social ties and mores that existed in the 19th century, especially in urban environments. We lack a lot of those central ingredients of democratic citizenship that Tocqueville was talking about. It seems like an opportune time to go back to the literature and ask, how do we replicate those mechanisms nowadays given that we've lost a lot of it in the process, and throughout history?