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96 C H A P T E R F O U R ^& THE VOYAGE OF LIFE AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY Antebellum Americans, as they migrated farther west or moved to cities in search of new opportunities, consumed a vast array of advice on how to navigate the voyage of life. Much of this literature was directed at men making their way in an expanding labor market, but some of it was written by and for women. Lydia Sigourney, a popular writer known as the “sweet singer of Hartford,” rose to prominence with Letters to Young Ladies (1833), then later in life turned to writing for the elderly. Her 1854 collection of poems and essays, Past Meridian, which went through multiple printings, suggested that the key to a healthy and productive old age was to remain industrious and to deepen religious faith. For women, she advised cultivating intellectual faculties and recognizing the “beauty of age.” Yet she did not ally herself with the women’s rights movement, for she, like most Americans, believed that women could develop their capacities without demanding the same opportunities as their white male peers.1 Speakers at women’s rights conventions could not have disagreed with her more. They contended that women, black or white, could develop their full potential over the course of life only if they broke through the boundaries of woman’s prescribed “sphere” and the barriers imposed by racial prejudice to demand an equal opportunity to pursue their own ambitions . In speech after speech, they challenged the spatial metaphors of separate spheres for the sexes and segregation for the races with a temporal idea of maturation.2 This insistence that a woman’s growth necessitated The Voyage of Life and Equal Opportunity / 97 going beyond any fixed “sphere” was what, more than anything, marked women’s rights activists as radical. On most other issues they agreed with more moderate reformers who also wanted to expand women’s opportunities for intellectual development and moral leadership. Critics often seized on the demands for woman suffrage and black suffrage as the most outrageous proposals, but these goals were but one aspect of women’s rights activists’ broader demand that every individual be freed from perpetual dependence in order to chart his or her own course through life from young adulthood to old age.3 Speakers at women’s rights conventions linked their demand for individual development over the course of life to their more specific proposal that age twenty-one become a transition to full citizenship for all Americans . The first strategy emphasized chronological age. The second focused on maturation within adulthood, which activists understood as the longest stage of human life, beginning at age twenty-one and then spanning through midlife into old age.4 Like other Americans during this period, women’s rights activists viewed the stages of later life as depending more on functional capacity than on chronological age. Once a person passed twenty-one, aging became a gradual process with recognizable stages but no agreed-upon chronological transitions.5 What galvanized women’s rights activists was not the use of chronological age to define the rights and duties of older Americans but the way that law and public opinion shaped the course of life differently for men and women, black and white. In particular, they argued that young white men generally expected that hard work and moderate habits would lead to a peak of achievement in middle age and comfort in old age. Individuals might fail, to be sure, but the cultural ideal was progress and individual development.6 For those who were not white or male, these activists argued , the prospect was quite different. Activists insisted that free women, black or white, could secure neither economic security nor spiritual satisfaction in later life so long as young girls were told that youthful beauty and the choice of a marriage partner were the keys to their future happiness . Free black men and women, meanwhile, could not pursue their own ambitions because of racial discrimination, while the enslaved could neither improve their lives nor choose their own marriage partners. Black and white women’s rights activists developed their understanding of life’s voyage through debate and mutual influence. They strongly agreed that all human beings should be given an equal opportunity to chart their own course. What they did not agree on, however, was how to best achieve this goal. Some believed that the priority of the women’s [3.137.171.121] Project...

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