The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America by Corinne T. Field (review)

In this slim but insightful volume, Corinne Field offers a thought-provoking and original analysis of the “politics of aging” (126) from the American Revolution through Reconstruction. Focusing on a handful of influential thinkers and writers in both the abolitionist and women’s rights movements—Mary Wollstonecraft, Phillis Wheatley, and Abigail Adams in the eighteenth century and Maria Stewart, David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the nineteenth—Field analyzes the “double-edged sword” of equal adulthood (4). These leaders drew upon “a shared print culture” of male European theorists, including John Locke, William Blackstone, and Auguste Comte (52). Their innovation was to insist that African Americans and females could aspire to maturity and thus to citizenship.

Field contends that white women and African Americans found common ground in demanding political rights based on their claims to equal adulthood. Whether asserting, as David Walker did of African American males, “we are men” or denouncing what one writer called women’s “perpetual babyism,” equal adulthood advocates relied upon a shared trope of adulthood as the measure of citizenship (62, 12).

Equal adulthood had two distinct but mutually reinforcing meanings. By arguing that all individuals who achieved adulthood—increasingly defined as age twenty-one—deserved rights, activists promoted a gender-and race-blind method of determining fitness for citizenship. At the same time, however, many of these same activists defined equal adulthood in terms of individuals’ ability to mature throughout life rather than being confined to “perpetual minority” (158). These speakers and writers emphasized that without equal rights, neither women nor African Americans could develop fully as human beings.

Chronological age had wide appeal precisely because it was a standard all could achieve, unlike white manhood. However, the Fourteenth Amendment dramatically changed the political landscape by providing constitutional recognition of adult manhood while denying citizenship to women. In response, “in an effort to promote their own maturity, activists intensified their tendency to infantilize others,” thus dividing the formerly united front of equal adulthood (129).

Although some activists, like Frances Harper, insisted that “we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” by the 1870s most equal adulthood advocates “had adopted competing measures of maturity that positioned some people as more deserving of adult citizenship and others as in need of guardianship” (135, 159). As African American men, white women, and African American women vied for recognition as mature adults and responsible citizens, they promoted their own status by denigrating others. As Field concludes, “Arguments for equal adulthood, when phrased in terms of comparative maturity, were more likely to divide than to unite the disenfranchised” (171).

Field’s analysis of the politics of aging offers a fresh perspective on the creation—and the dissolution—of the abolitionist-feminist coalition. In addition to providing a more in-depth discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of equal rights movements than offered by previous accounts, Field also offers a more diverse cast of characters, with white women, African American women, African American men, and European thinkers all sharing ideas with one another.

While the more easily measured adulthood of chronological age carried greater political significance, some of Field’s most interesting insights deal with the notion of equal adulthood as a lifelong process. For instance, she reveals eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers’ critiques of the valorization—and sexualization—of female youthfulness and the corresponding “contempt for older women” (41). In this context, Field observes that for many women’s rights advocates, “equality for women did not mean following a male-defined career, but it did mean the equal chance to develop over the course of one’s life” (113). As she perceptively notes, defining equality as the right to lifelong development “resolve[s] the paradox of sexual sameness and difference that has been...