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

In her expertly written study The Struggle for Equal Adulthood, historian Corinne Field argues that the women and black men who involved themselves with women’s rights between the American Revolution and Reconstruction used the idea of what she calls “equal adulthood” to claim full rights for themselves. When these activists errantly turned to hierarchical constructions of maturity during Reconstruction, they failed to wrest from white men sole claim to full personhood. Field successfully offers a “fresh interpretation of familiar feminist thinkers” like Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass by looking through the new lens of age studies. While prominent eighteenth-century political philosophers articulated the centrality of manhood for independence and civic participation, they made no such claims for women. Between the Revolution and Reconstruction, “advocates for women’s rights fought the persistent association of women with children, protested the praise lavished on girlish beauty rather than on female wisdom, and demanded the right to develop their talents as they aged” (2). Equal Adulthood is the story of how activists fought for women’s rights by claiming that mature women should not be treated like girls.

Field’s book is an innovative intellectual and cultural history of the relationship between rights, sex, race, and age. She argues that her work accomplishes three things: 1) it returns African American activists to their rightful place in the women’s rights movement, 2) it contests the utility of separate sphere ideology, and 3) it demonstrates that the antebellum gender and race-neutral focus on adulthood proved more effective than the divisiveness of “hierarchies of maturity” developed in the wake of the Fourteenth Amendment (4). Field’s first claim is problematic. She deserves credit for demonstrating the intellectual bridge that a universal claim to adulthood provided between black and women’s rights activism, but she is not the first to return black voices to the women’s rights movement. (See, for instance, Martha Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007]; A. Kristen Foster, “’We Are Men!’: Frederick Douglass and the Fault Lines of Gendered Citizenship,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1 [June 2011]: 143–75; and Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol [New York: W. W. Norton, 1997].) And while Field successfully demonstrates the inadequacy of separate sphere ideology in conversations about maturity and rights, arguing that gendered age discrimination was equally pernicious in the private and civic lives of women, she places herself most clearly in conversation with works on women’s rights from Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle and Ellen Carol DuBois’s Feminism and Suffrage to Lori Ginzberg’s Untidy Origins. In so doing, she broadens the study of women’s rights by looking at nineteenth-century gendered culture as a whole. In the end, she asserts that the infantilization of adult women for the pleasure of men remained the taproot of discrimination.

The Struggle for Equal Adulthood makes an important contribution to our understanding of why American women met assertions of their civic inadequacy with claims that they be recognized as fully formed adults. Field begins her work by establishing the political thought of John Locke, William Blackstone, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the brick and mortar of gendered theories of citizenship. Men, they argued, would outgrow their fathers’ authority, but female dependence remained pleasing and necessary to male independence. Next Field explores the work of Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Wollstonecraft, all of whom “believed that a fundamental barrier to sexual equality was the lack of any clear transition between dependent girlhood and independent womanhood” (23). While Wheatley’s inclusion here claims too much for the poet, noticeably absent in this discussion is Judith Sargent Murray, who must...