If I were asked… to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [the Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.

Alexis de Tocqueville made this observation in the course of his 1831–1832 journey through the United States, later published as the two-volume Democracy in America (1835, 1840). In the section where he discusses “manners” (mœurs)—the habits, family life, and moral customs that he believed undergird political institutions—Tocqueville contrasts American domestic arrangements with European ones. He argues that the education and social position of American women, and the way marriage and family life were structured in the young republic, contributed decisively to social stability and civic character. The remark reflects his broader thesis that America’s success depended as much on culture and morals as on laws or geography.

The line condenses Tocqueville’s claim that a nation’s strength is rooted in everyday social practices, not merely in constitutions or economic resources. By attributing American “prosperity and growing strength” to the “superiority” of women, he is praising what he saw as women’s education, moral authority, and influence within the family—forces he believed shaped men’s discipline, ambition, and respect for social order. The statement is also revealingly paternalistic: Tocqueville admires women’s power chiefly in the domestic and moral sphere, not as equal participants in public life. As a result, the quote can be read both as a tribute to women’s formative social role and as evidence of 19th‑century gender ideology framing that role as separate from politics.