Any Woman Is a Lady

The National Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Fund for Adult Education presents Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Charge your glasses, gentlemen, for the thirteenth and final toast, whose sentiments are time honored and traditional.

I give you the fair sex, always entitled to our protection. Good day, thanks! Yes! Albany, New York. July 4, 1831. How true that if you want to understand American manners and American society, you must first understand the situation of the American woman.

Any woman is a lady. A study in American manners. Item 5 in the series Democracy in America. Prepared by the division of general education of New York University, under the direction of George Croast, American Historian, a series designed to bring to life the America of 1831, as recorded by Alexis de Tocqueville, and so to illuminate the image of democracy itself.

A study in American manners, any woman is a lady. No more, and I had not been in America long before we noticed that the first and most intense This passion that is produced by equality is the love of that same equality.

Indeed, everybody has remarked that now, in 1831, and especially in our native France, this passion for equality is everyday gaining ground in the human heart. But the principle may be established in civil society without prevailing in the political world.

In America there is a good deal of both, and the signs of both are to be found everywhere in society. One class one price. But the best cars are of course reserved for ladies and folks with them.

The roughest character understands that a lady, and I need hardly tell Frenchman that any woman is a lady, has an absolute right to the front seat of the show, the head of the table, the best cabin and so forth.