Democracy in America: In Two Volumes

Chapter 10.a How the Young Girl Is Found Again in the Features of the Wife

1048 s4s4s4s4s4 c h a p t e r 1 0a How the Young Girl Is Found Again in the Features of the Wife In America, the independence of the woman becomes irretrievably lost amid the bonds of marriage. If the young girl is less restrained there than anywhere else, the wife submits to the most strict obligations. The one makes the paternal home a place of liberty and pleasure, the other lives in the house of her husband as in a cloister.b These two conditions so different are perhaps not so contrary as you suppose, and it is natural that American women pass by the one in order to reach the other. Religious peoples and industrial nations have a particularlyseriousidea of marriage. The first consider the regularity of the life of a woman as the best guarantee and the most certain sign of the purity of her morals. The others see in it the sure proof of the order and the prosperity of the house. The Americans form at the very same time a Puritan nation and a commercial people; so their religious beliefs, as well as their industrial habits, a. The American woman makes the house of her parents a place of liberty and pleasure . She leads a monastic life in the house of her husband. These two conditions so different are less contrary than you imagine. American women pass naturally by the one in order to reach the other. It is in the independence of their first youth and in the manly education that they then received that they have acquired the experience, the power over themselves and the(illegibleword)withwhichtheysubmitwithouthesitationandwithoutcomplaint to the exigencies of the marriage state (YTC, CVf, p. 43). b. To the side, in a first version: “An analogous spectacle is seen in England, with this difference nonetheless that the younggirlthereislessfreeandthewomanlessconstrained than in the United States.” the young girl and the wife 1049 lead them to require from the woman an abnegation of herself and a continual sacrifice of her pleasures to her business, which it is rare to ask of her in Europe. Thus, an inexorable public opinion reigns in the United States that carefully encloses the woman in the small circle of domestic interests and duties, and that forbids her to go beyond it.c Coming into the world, the young American woman finds thesenotions firmly established; she sees the rules that derive from them; she does not take long to be convinced that she cannot escape one moment from the customs of her contemporaries withoutimmediatelyendangeringhertranquillity , her honor and even her social existence, and in the firmness of her reason and in the manly habits that her education gave her, she finds the energy to submit. You can say that it is from the practice of independence that she drew the courage to endure the sacrifice without struggleandwithoutcomplaint, when the moment has come to impose it on herself. The American woman, moreover, never falls into the bonds of marriage as into a trap set for her simplicity and ignorance. She has been taught in advance what is expected of her, and it is by herself and freely that she puts herself under the yoke. She courageously bears her new condition because she has chosen it. As in America paternal discipline is very lax and the conjugal bond is very strict, it is only with circumspection and with fear that a young girl incurs it. Premature unions are scarcely seen. So American women marry only when their reason is trained and developed; while elsewhere most women begin to train and to develop their reason only in marriage. I am, moreover, very far from believing that this great change that takes place in all the habits of women in the United States, as soon as they are married, must be attributed only to the constraint of publicopinion.Often they impose it on themselves solely by the effort of their will. When the time has arrived to choose a husband, this cold and austere c. “From the momentwhenthe worldbecomescommercial,thehouseholdisnothing more than a house of commerce, a name of a firm. K[ergorlay (ed.)]” (In the rubish of the chapter on the family, Rubish, 2). 1050 the young girl and the wife reason, which the free view of the world has enlightened and strengthened, indicates to the American woman that a light and independent spirit in the bonds of marriage is a...