New SAT Reading Practice Test 17

Passage 1 is adapted from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2. Originally published in 1840. Passage 2 is adapted from Harriet Taylor Mill, “Enfranchisement of Women.” Originally published in 1851. As United States and European societies grew increasingly democratic during the nineteenth century, debates arose about whether freedoms enjoyed by men should be extended to women as well.

Passage 1
I have shown how democracy destroys or
modifies the different inequalities which originate in
society; but is this all? or does it not ultimately affect
that great inequality of man and woman which has
5 seemed, up to the present day, to be eternally based
in human nature? I believe that the social changes
which bring nearer to the same level the father and
son, the master and servant, and superiors and
inferiors generally speaking, will raise woman and
10 make her more and more the equal of man. But here,
more than ever, I feel the necessity of making myself
clearly understood; for there is no subject on which
the coarse and lawless fancies of our age have taken a
freer range.
15 There are people in Europe who, confounding
together the different characteristics of the sexes,
would make of man and woman beings not only
equal but alike. They would give to both the same
functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant
20 to both the same rights; they would mix them in all
things—their occupations, their pleasures, their
business. It may readily be conceived, that by thus
attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both
are degraded; and from so preposterous a medley of
25 the works of nature nothing could ever result but
weak men and disorderly women.
It is not thus that the Americans understand that
species of democratic equality which may be
established between the sexes. They admit, that as
30 nature has appointed such wide differences between
the physical and moral constitution of man and
woman, her manifest design was to give a distinct
employment to their various faculties; and they hold
that improvement does not consist in making beings
35 so dissimilar do pretty nearly the same things, but in
getting each of them to fulfill their respective tasks in
the best possible manner. The Americans have
applied to the sexes the great principle of political
economy which governs the manufactures of our age,
40 by carefully dividing the duties of man from those of
woman, in order that the great work of society may
be the better carried on.

Passage 2
As society was constituted until the last few
generations, inequality was its very basis; association
45 grounded on equal rights scarcely existed; to be
equals was to be enemies; two persons could hardly
coöperate in anything, or meet in any amicable
relation, without the law’s appointing that one of
them should be the superior of the other.
50 Mankind have outgrown this state, and all things
now tend to substitute, as the general principle of
human relations, a just equality, instead of the
dominion of the strongest. But of all relations, that
between men and women, being the nearest and
55 most intimate, and connected with the greatest
number of strong emotions, was sure to be the last to
throw off the old rule, and receive the new; for,
in proportion to the strength of a feeling is the
tenacity with which it clings to the forms and
60 circumstances with which it has even accidentally
become associated....
. . . The proper sphere for all human beings is the
largest and highest which they are able to attain to.
What this is, cannot be ascertained without complete
65 liberty of choice. . . . Let every occupation be open to
all, without favor or discouragement to any, and
employments will fall into the hands of those men or
women who are found by experience to be most
capable of worthily exercising them. There need be
70 no fear that women will take out of the hands of men
any occupation which men perform better than they.
Each individual will prove his or her capacities, in the
only way in which capacities can be proved,—by
trial; and the world will have the benefit of the best
75 faculties of all its inhabitants. But to interfere
beforehand by an arbitrary limit, and declare that
whatever be the genius, talent, energy, or force of
mind, of an individual of a certain sex or class, those
faculties shall not be exerted, or shall be exerted only
80 in some few of the many modes in which others are
permitted to use theirs, is not only an injustice to the
individual, and a detriment to society, which loses
what it can ill spare, but is also the most effectual way
of providing that, in the sex or class so fettered, the
85 qualities which are not permitted to be exercised
shall not exist.