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c h a p t e r 3 Child Readers of the Novel the Problem of Childish Citizenship let me advise you to consider this turn of life, to be as dangerous as any you may survive, for most are apt to be so enamoured with Freedom, that they forget the Dangers which accompany it, and often by their Haste and Precipitation, lose the main Chance; and to rid themselves of a gentle submission, forfeit true Freedom, and become perpetual slaves of Penury and Wretchedness. A Companion for the young People of north America,  Well may it be said that men are but children of a larger growth. William Maclay on Congress,  Because the affectionate citizenship of children was important in creating an entire population of citizens who understood the law as representative of their power, the child came to symbolize the (limited) liberty of citizens. yet in locke’s Two Treatises the child was also the foil to the citizen, necessary to mark his emancipation from childish constraint. this argument too found its way into early American political culture. As the nation sought to establish its own institutions, Americans developed an ambivalent attitude toward the child, who came to represent both the ideal citizen and the citizen’s other. While the idea of a social contract simultaneously excluded children from legal citizenship and gave way to imaginary ideals based on children’s citizenship, competing strains in literary and legal discourse in the postrevolutionary era pushed back against both of these developments. the early national government, controlled by Federalists, was much more apprehensive of the idea of natural freedom than locke and Paine were, creating suspicion about the child as an imaginary model of the citizen. Ironically, given that politicians such as George Washington were hailed as the patriarchs of the new nation, Federalists used metaphors of childhood to describe perceived threats to citizen-  Imaginary Citizens ship, which were often characterized as too literal readings of the notions of natural equality and popular sovereignty. John Adams argued that the equality of citizens should be limited by the so-called natural inequalities of property, class, gender, and ability, which justified the emergence of a “natural aristocracy” composed of privileged adult men.1 to support this view meant stifling the voices of other groups that might imagine themselves as citizens and suggesting that imaginary citizenship was not legitimate. His famous letter to his wife denying her petition for women’s rights specifically associates their broader bids for citizenship with the protests of children. When Abigail radically suggested that women would “not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation,” John lumped women’s potential insurrection with childish rebellion: “We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. that Children and Apprentices were disobedient and that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent . . . But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented.”2 though John goes on to teasingly suggest that men are really “subjects” of women, Abigail perceives that John insists on retaining an absolute power over wives despite the liberating language of the revolution. the idea of the child citizen thus appears in the letter to infantilize the concepts of full equality and the right to dissent. that dissent was childish had a particular role in stifling women’s bids for a political voice. under a patriarchal government, women were subject to male rule, but they were not thought to be more childish than anyone else. Infantilization as a form of domination affecting specific groups rather than all political subjects was tied to the emergence of childhood as a special category for persons who were unable to participate in their own governance. the contrast between the idea that all individuals must consent to be governed and men’s desire to limit power on the basis of gender meant that women came to be seen as infantile even in their adulthood. the new politics assigned to childhood had a particular effect for women, but the association of further revolution with childhood also had an effect on the citizenship of all adults, since it could serve to stifle dissent. such images of children peaked during the French revolution. using “childishness” as a pejorative, the Federalists attempted to differentiate their version of citizenship from what they saw as the puerile celebrations of natural equality and freedom developing elsewhere. At the same...

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