The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America

3 Chronological Age and Equal Rights

77 C H A P T E R T H R E E ^& CHRONOLOGICAL AGE AND EQUAL RIGHTS Between 1848 and 1861, women’s rights activists organized a series of local, state, and national conventions at which they raised a broad range of demands, including women’s right to vote and run for office, to pursue equal educational and occupational opportunities, to control their property and persons within marriage, and to live by a single standard of sexual morality applicable to both sexes.1 Organizers modeled these conventions on the national female antislavery conventions held between 1837 and 1839 and the constitutional and political party conventions ongoing throughout the nation, but whereas the former relied on women’s power of moral suasion and the latter enforced men’s monopoly on electoral power, women’s rights organizers sought a means by which women could intervene directly in political debate.2 This engagement with formal politics focused women’s rights activists’ attention on age qualifications in law, especially age twenty-one as a nearly universal transition to political rights and contractual freedom for white males.3 For example, at the first national women’s rights convention, held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, convention organizer Abby Price observed that conviction for a crime or chronological age were the “only limits ” on white men’s right to vote or run for office. “Are women,” she asked, “to be regarded as criminals, or are they all minors?”4 Price demanded that state governments grant suffrage to women as to men at age twenty-one. Speakers at these conventions also noted that white men celebrated their 78 / Chronological Age and Equal Rights right to sign contracts at twenty-one, while slaves and wives lacked the right to contract at all, and free blacks and women faced discrimination in the labor market that severely constrained their ability to achieve adult independence.5 Other women’s rights activists, meanwhile, focused on the obverse side of twenty-one, urging legislators to better protect young girls from sexual exploitation by older men, and particularly to raise the age of consent for marriage to twenty-one, thus bringing it into line with other forms of contract.6 Women’s rights activists thus used chronological age to draw a sharp line between dependent girlhood and independent womanhood. This was not their only, or even their most important, demand, but the need to distinguish between girls and women on the basis of chronological age surfaced with surprising frequency. Further, as activists struggled to sum up their various goals—for political participation, higher education, meaningful work, freedom within marriage, and personal fulfillment—they repeatedly fell back upon the general claim that all Americans should be free at age twenty-one to pursue their own ambitions over the course of life. Speakers at women’s rights conventions thus placed themselves at the forefront of age consciousness in American culture. In the 1840s and 1850s, some educational reformers, physicians, and advice writers were also using chronological age to establish age-graded common schools, pediatric medicine, and children’s literature.7 Women’s rights activists, however , critiqued many of these other age-based reforms, noting that they tended to cultivate independence in young white males while encouraging perpetual dependence for black males and all females. Women’s rights advocates, in contrast, promoted the distinctly egalitarian idea that all human beings matured according to a similar schedule and that state governments should apply age qualifications equally to all. In particular, they insisted that black men and all women should be recognized as adult citizens at age twenty-one, just like their white male peers.8 This struggle for equal adulthood appealed to activists from various backgrounds with differing political priorities. Women’s rights conventions were organized and controlled by educated white married women between the ages of thirty and sixty. Most were the wives or daughters of prosperous farmers, merchants, or professionals.9 Almost all were abolitionists , though not all of them believed that black people could or should become the political and social equals of whites.10 Despite the narrowmindedness of some privileged white women, women’s rights conventions brought together a broad range of radical reformers, male and female, black and white, young and old, in no small part because leaders expressed Chronological Age and Equal Rights / 79 a deep commitment to freeing all Americans at age twenty-one to develop their full capacities...