Tocqueville writes about the downside of American women (the same ones he praises to high heaven in Democracy in America; okay, okay--not without hints that there are reservations in his praise): "I have not heard of a single person hanged or drowned anywhere in the Union since the Declaration of Independence." This is an insult: there isn't really love in the strict sense in America, the kind that you drown or hang yourself over. Tocqueville attributes this to the repressed flirtatiousness of married American women. He says that families in America work out of you ask "nothing of one’s wife other than to make tea and raise one’s children, which, as everyone knows, is the most fundamental of the duties of marriage."


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