make morning calls, or do a
little shopping, is all that can be termed their exercise in the fresh
air; and this, compared to what is needed, is absolutely nothing, and on
some accounts is worse than nothing.[B] In consequence of these, and
other evils, which will be pointed out more at large in the following
pages, the young women of America grow up with such a delicacy of
constitution, that probably eight out of ten become subjects of disease,
either before or as soon as they are called to the responsibilities of
domestic life.

But there is one peculiarity of situation, in regard to American women,
which makes this delicacy of constitution still more disastrous. It is
the liability to the exposures and hardships of a newly-settled country.

One more extract from De Tocqueville will give a view of this part of
the subject, which any one, familiar with Western life, will admire for
its verisimilitude.

"The same strength of purpose which the young wives of America display
in bending themselves, at once, and without repining, to the austere
duties of their new condition, is no less manifest in all the great
trials of their lives. In no country in the world, are private fortunes
more precarious, than in the United States. It is not uncommon for the
same man, in the course of his life, to rise and sink again through all
the grades which lead from opulence to poverty. American women support
these vicissitudes with a calm and unquenchable energy. It would seem
that their desires contract, as easily as they expand, with their
fortunes. The greater part of the adventurers, who migrate, every year,
to people the Western wilds, belong" "to the old Anglo-American race of
the Northern States. Many of these men, who rush so boldly onward in
pursuit of wealth, were already in the enjoyment of a competency in
their own part of the Country. They take their wives along with them,
and make them share the countless perils and privations, which always
attend the commencement of these expeditions. I have often met, even on
the verge of the wilderness, with young women, who, after having been
brought up amid all the comforts of the large towns of New England, had
passed, almost without any intermediate stage, from the wealthy abode of
their parents, to a comfortless hovel in a forest. Fever, solitude, and
a tedious life, had not broken the springs of their courage. Their
features were impaired and faded, but their looks were firm: they