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

To the discussion of belonging and exclusion in the United States, Corinne Field brings a new perspective that considers childhood as a construct deployed by adults for social and political purposes. Using an intellectual history approach that relies on the published writings of leading figures, she argues that women’s and black rights activists in the antebellum North found in the idea of “equal adulthood” — the equal recognition of all people at age twenty-one as mature adults — the foundation for a broad range of reforms in public and private life and an effective, if temporary, basis for cross-racial and cross-class cooperation. Joined by their shared categorization as children and exclusion from full citizenship at the hands of white men, a diverse group of women and black men used equal adulthood to claim the political rights, economic independence, marital equality, familial authority, and sexual autonomy that white men claimed for themselves.

As revolutionary-era political leaders made white male maturation, predicated on the perpetual immaturity and dependence of women and African Americans, the basis of republican citizenship, Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women were capable of individual maturation and adult citizenship. Antebellum activists echoed and developed their ideas, as suffrage for white males at age twenty-one made full citizenship a normative life stage, which made chronological age and individual maturation central to discussions of political belonging. As evangelical reformers postulated “separate spheres” of activity for women, radical activists such as Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton defined womanhood temporally rather than spatially, arguing that female maturation required rejecting separate spheres, understanding motherhood as a life stage preparatory to public power, and replacing fear of middle and old age with a pursuit of ongoing development. Frederick Douglass, meanwhile, brought a sharp age consciousness to his autobiography, observing that slaveowners kept slaves ignorant of their ages to avoid empowering them with notions of individual development, and honing in on twenty-one as a decisive transition to manhood and freedom for white boys and — through the timing of his escape — for himself. Unlike Nancy Isenberg in Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 1998), Field does not directly interrogate abolitionism’s impact on antebellum feminism, but she contributes to that inquiry by arguing that Stanton incorporated Douglass’ emphasis on the political significance of age twenty-one and worked with him to build a coalition to define equal citizenship. From a different standpoint highlighting protections rather than rights, Harriet Jacobs used chronological age to delineate and defend the sexual purity of girlhood and garner northern sympathy for female slaves. The unifying power of such tactics was evident in the women’s rights conventions of the 1840s and 1850s as activists with disparate goals — political participation, higher education, meaningful work, higher wages, and married women’s property rights — claimed in common that all Americans should be equally free at age twenty-one to pursue their ambitions. They thereby “placed themselves at the forefront of age consciousness in American culture” (78).

Late in the antebellum period, black activists Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Harper began challenging notions of racial hierarchy suggested by craniometry and polygenesis. Such ideas would destroy the interracial “equal adulthood” alliance. Despite the 1866 formation of the American Equal Rights Association — the alliance’s high point — debate over the Reconstruction amendments aggravated racial tensions as the shared focus on age twenty-one gave way to competing and often race-based measures of maturity. Stanton, outraged over women’s continued exclusion and classification with children, began appealing to racial hierarchy (along with Comte’s theory of human development) in her quest for rights for privileged white women — a “fateful” (133) sacrifice of interracial collaboration that alienated Douglass, radical Republicans, and many other former allies. This split the movement into Stanton...