Notes
175 NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Fuller, Woman, 176; Capper, Margaret Fuller, vol. 2. 2. Fuller, Woman, 31, 33. 3. Leach, True Love. To date, the history of childhood and old age has received greater attention than the history of adulthood. See, for example, Mintz, Huck’s Raft; Marten, Children in Colonial America, Children and Youth in a New Nation, and Children and Youth during the Civil War Era; Forman-Brunell and Paris, Girls’ History; Premo, Winter Friends; Achenbaum, Old Age; and Fischer, Growing Old. 4. Stansell posits a distinction between “the politics of the mothers and the politics of the daughters.” Feminist Promise, xv. I argue that nineteenth-century activists believed that mothers and daughters shared an interest in promoting female maturation over the course of life. Further, as Heineman points out, when talking about “mothers ” it is important to distinguish between the older mothers of adult progeny and the younger mothers of small children. Heineman, “Whose Mothers?” 5. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (hereafter cited as VRW), 74; Harper, “Aunt Chloe,” in Brighter Coming Day, 196–208; [Stanton], “Editorial Correspondence ,” Revolution, 20 August 1868. 6. Brewer, By Birth or Consent. 7. On the intersections between what we today call sexism and ageism, see Sontag, “Double Standard”; Lorde, “Age, Race, Class”; Banner, In Full Flower; Friedan, Fountain of Age; Gullette, Declining to Decline; Rupp, “Is Feminism the Province?”; Calastani and Slevin, Age Matters; and Marshall, “Aging.” 8. Many scholars have answered these questions by analyzing the links between public and private, for example, Kerber, No Constitutional Right; Norton, Founding Mothers; and Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity. I contend that Americans justified women’s subordination in families, government, and workplaces by arguing that males outgrew childish dependence while females did not. 9. Recent histories analyzing life stages under slavery include Schwartz, Born in Bondage; and Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters and Topsy-Turvy. 10. Newman argues in White Women’s Rights that white women’s rights activists’ ideas and strategies were fundamentally racist. While I agree with this analysis, I show that white activists were nonetheless profoundly influenced by black people’s ideas about adulthood. On the contributions of African Americans to women’s rights activism , see, for example, Parker, Articulating Rights; M. Jones, All Bound Up; Sklar, Women’s Rights; and Painter, Sojourner Truth. 176 / Notes to Pages 4–7 11. Kelley, Learning to Stand; Branson, Fiery Frenchified Dames; Schloesser, Fair Sex; Goodman, Becoming a Woman. 12. Some historians assert that the American women’s rights movement was characterized by egalitarian influences, periodically sacrificed to racist expediency, as influentially argued by Kraditor, Ideas, and largely accepted by DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage. More recently, historians, including DuBois herself, have generally accepted Newman’s argument that racism and elitism were fundamental. DuBois, Woman Suffrage ; Sneider, Suffragists; M. Mitchell, “‘Lower Orders.’” 13. Historians have explored how Americans used the dependence of children to understand the nature and limits of democracy. Sanchez-Eppler, Dependent States; Levander, Cradle of Liberty. 14. Hewitt, “Seneca Falls.” 15. I chose to focus on many of the white foremothers who appear in Stanton, Anthony , and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage (hereafter cited as HWS), vol. 1. In expanding my frame, I owe much to Flexner, Century of Struggle, though to her credit, she pays greater attention to educators and trade unionists whose ideas about adulthood were too distinct to appear in this book. On black men and women in the suffrage movement, I drew upon Terborg-Penn, African American Women; and Gordon and Collier-Thomas, African American Women. 16. Many studies of adulthood take a male model for granted; see, for example, Modell, Furstenberg, and Hershberg, “Social Change”; and Winsborough, “Changes in the Transition.” On the exclusion of women from the history of aging, see Feinson, “Where Are the Women?”; H. Smith, “‘Age’”; and Maynes, “Age as a Category.” 17. Latin writers distinguished between pueritia (childhood), adolescentia (adolescence ), juventus (mature adulthood, the prime of life), and senectus (old age). Dove, Perfect Age, 14–17; Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “youth” and “man,” http:// dictionary.oed.com (hereafter cited as OED Online). 18. Like the English word “adolescence,” which had been in use since the fifteenth century, “adult” derived from the Latin adolescere and connoted a process of growing to maturity. OED Online, s.v. “adult,” “adulthood,” and “adolescence”; Brewer, By Birth or Consent; and chap. 1 in this volume. 19. OED Online, s.v. “manhood.” 20. Modern social scientists carefully distinguish between life stages (phases of human...
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