ABSTRACT
In spite of their severe circumscription, women were delegated a great moral responsibility by American men. Yet it does not seem that religion or morality (the terms are very close together in meaning in Democracy) could have prevailed in the unpredictable outside world. Tocqueville had large reservations about the strength of spiritual breakwaters against the tides of materialism, physical and philosophical. He did not meet a single American “whose imagination did not possess itself by anticipation of those good things that fate still obstinately withheld from him.” He presented the American democrat pursuing them obsessively to the end of his days.1
