The Struggle for Equal Adulthood

Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America

Corinne T. Field

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781469618142
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469618159
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In the fight for equality, early feminists often cited the infantilization of women and men of color as a method used to keep them out of power. Corinne T. Field argues that attaining adulthood — and the associated political rights, economic opportunities, and sexual power that come with it — became a common goal for both white and African American feminists between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The idea that black men and all women were more like children than adult white men proved difficult to overcome, however, and continued to serve as a foundation for racial and sexual inequality for generations.

In detailing the connections between the struggle for equality and concepts of adulthood, Field provides an essential historical context for understanding the dilemmas black and white women still face in America today, from “glass ceilings” and debates over welfare dependency to a culture obsessed with youth and beauty. Drawn from a fascinating past, this book tells the history of how maturity, gender, and race collided, and how those affected came together to fight against injustice.

CHAPTER ONE: ADULT INDEPENDENCE AND THE LIMITS OF REVOLUTION

The crisis of the American Revolution irrevocably altered the rhetorical, legal, and social significance of white male maturation by turning dependent subjects into republican citizens and in the process raising new issues about who could claim liberty and on what terms.¹ Patriot leaders generally agreed that only propertied adult men were fully capable of governing themselves, but public officials could not impose this view without struggle as the disruptions of war enabled young people, women, servants, and slaves to assert both practical and ideological claims to individual freedom.²

The argument that females could also become adult citizens stood out most clearly in the writings of three very different women: Abigail Adams, wife and mother of American presidents; Phillis Wheatley, renowned slave poet; and Mary Wollstonecraft, London radical and champion of women’s rights. What united these women across class, racial, and national divides was not a shared political movement but a shared insight—that women needed to gain greater recognition as mature adults. Separately and from their very different vantage points, they argued that white men used their status as independent adults to claim political rights, economic opportunities, family authority, and sexual power while classifying women and black people as perpetual minors. Further, though each woman chose a very different method of promoting claims for female maturity—Adams wrote private letters, Wheatley published poems, and Wollstonecraft intervened in a pamphlet war over the significance of the French Revolution—all faced a very similar reaction from conservative critics who trivialized them by comparing women to children or by arguing that females could not make a transition to adulthood on the same terms as white males.³

Adams, Wheatley, and Wollstonecraft believed that a fundamental barrier to sexual equality was the lack of any clear transition between dependent girlhood and independent womanhood. “Females,” Wollstonecraft wrote, “are made women of when they are mere children, and brought back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart for ever.”⁴ Wollstonecraft agreed with eighteenth-century moralists who argued that women should exert their influence in families, churches, and civil society, but she insisted that they could not do so as long as they retained a childlike dependence on the authority of husbands, ministers, and public opinion. “If women be ever allowed to walk without leading-strings,” Wollstonecraft contended, they must be “taught to respect themselves as rational creatures.”⁵ Adams agreed that women had to develop the mature ability to reason for themselves and expressed outrage at those who would class adult women with children.⁶ Wheatley, meanwhile, urged patriots to recognize that human beings held in perpetual slavery were also rational creatures with a desire for liberty. She reminded her readers that all human beings were “lovely copies of the Maker’s plan” and that those who grew up in slavery also developed “love of Freedom.”⁷

This focus on individual maturation is striking, given that historians investigating the significance of gender in eighteenth-century Europe and America have employed spatial metaphors to analyze the separation of politics, family, and civil society. Historians have noted that though women did not gain political rights during this period, they substantially increased their influence in families and civil society.⁸ Adams’s, Wheatley’s, and Wollstonecraft’s main concern was not with spheres, however, but with individual development over the course of life. Only by teaching females to develop mature virtue, they argued, could women claim a positive influence on families, religion, commercial relations, politics, and civil society. Further, each saw distinctions between childhood and adulthood as a political issue. Adams sought to reform the laws of marriage. Wheatley hoped that the abolition of slavery would enable Africans to develop their full potential. Wollstonecraft explicitly defined female maturity as a problem of “rights.”⁹ These women challenged the underlying logic of a democratic political theory that linked liberty to white male maturity while categorizing women and nonwhites as perpetual minors. Their arguments were important to the history of feminism because their focus on maturation linked white men’s political and economic opportunities to their private authority and sexual power. By treating females and nonwhites as perpetual children, these women argued, white men trivialized black men and all women’s aspirations for freedom in public as well as in private life.

ABIGAIL ADAMS AND THE MATURITY OF LADIES

To justify American independence, patriots promoted an analogy between the maturation of sons and the growth of Britain’s colonies.¹⁰ These propagandists asserted that just as sons naturally outgrew parental authority, so the colonies had outgrown dependence on the Crown. Thomas Paine, the greatest master of this rhetoric, wrote in his best-selling pamphlet Common Sense (1776) that just because America had prospered under the Crown did not mean the colonies should remain perpetually dependent: “We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty.”¹¹ In 1777 he compared the attitude of Britain to that of “a covetous guardian” who “for twenty years” had been enriching himself on the estate of a ward about to turn twenty-one. Paine reduced the entire debate over independence to one question: “To know whether it be the interest of this continent to be independent, we need only to ask this easy, simple question: Is it the interest of a man to be a boy all his life?”¹² This question worked as political propaganda because the answer was obvious to so many Americans who had come to believe that adult white men with property could not be justly subject to others without their consent. The colonies were prosperous, no longer relying on Britain for material support, so to subject them further was a form of tyranny. That Britain was commonly referred to as the “mother country” only intensified this argument, for if grown sons might consult their fathers, they certainly did not obey their mothers.¹³

Watching the revolutionary crisis unfold, Abigail Adams and Phillis Wheatley both realized, each in her own way, that the struggle for American independence raised new questions about the link between maturity and liberty. Each was concerned with private as well as public aspirations, but their particular circumstances could not have been more different. Adams, born in 1744 southeast of Boston, was the daughter of a minister and wife of a lawyer. She enjoyed social prominence and relative prosperity. Wheatley was chattel property, captured on the coast of West Africa (most likely in the area between present-day Gambia and Ghana), brought to Boston on a slave ship in 1761, and purchased by pious Congregationalist merchant John Wheatley to work as a house slave for his wife, Susanna. As a Wheatley relative later recalled, the girl cost only a “trifle” because she was sick and very young—she had just lost her front baby teeth. The Wheatleys named her Phillis, after the slave ship on which she arrived, and put her to work.¹⁴

What Adams and Wheatley shared were intellectual ambition and the talent to become, in very different ways, among the most accomplished women in the colonies. Neither received a formal education. Abigail was typical of middle-class girls in eighteenth-century America and Britain who lacked opportunities for schooling but gained unprecedented access to books. Because Protestant families put a particular value on female literacy for purposes of reading the Bible, even poor families often owned a copy of the scriptures. In addition, with the rise of commercial publishing, more families were able to purchase substantial libraries, and increasing numbers of parents came to see their daughters’ literacy as a mark of respectability. Like most American girls, Abigail read British authors: among her favorites were Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Richardson. In her teens, she learned French. When she married John in 1764, she gained both an admiring husband and a large library stocked with Scottish moral philosophy, English social critics, and Whig political theory. Corresponding regularly with some of the most educated men in the colonies—her cousin Isaac Smith as he prepared for Harvard, the autodidact Richard Cranch, who courted her sister Mary, and, of course, her suitor and then husband John—Abigail aspired to both learn from and teach men.¹⁵

Few slaves gained access to the books that were so readily available to Abigail. Phillis had the luck, if one can call it that, of being purchased by devout Congregationalists who supported evangelical efforts to spread the Gospel among Indians and Africans. When they noticed that Phillis was rapidly deciphering the family Bible, they made the unusual decision of allowing their teenage daughter Mary to tutor her. In a letter printed as an introduction to the first edition of Wheatley’s collected poems, her master, John Wheatley, emphasized Phillis’s precocity: “Phillis was brought from Africa to America, in the Year 1761, between Seven and Eight Years of age. Without any Assistance from School Education, and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time . . . [could read] the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her. . . . WRITING . . . she learnt in so short a Time . . . and has made some Progress in [Latin].”¹⁶ Wheatley thus pioneered what would remain the most likely—if extremely narrow—path to slave literacy: using evidence of remarkable talent to win the sympathy of pious whites.¹⁷

Wheatley became one of the few American slaves to read the same books as Adams. Though Adams likely read more political tracts and Wheatley more evangelical publications, they shared a British literary culture that emphasized intellectual refinement, particularly the cultivation of sensibility, which both women understood as the obligation to refine reason and affection as a means of better apprehending virtue.¹⁸ The two women also shared a deep interest in revolutionary politics and a location at the center of early conflicts between American patriots and British officials. The Boston Massacre of 1770 occurred down the street from Wheatley’s front door (she wrote a poem about it), and Adams’s husband defended the British soldiers to prove they could receive a fair trail. Both attended the religious revivals led by the British evangelist George Whitefield in the fall of 1770, though Adams remained moderate in her Congregationalist faith while Wheatley was more ardently evangelical. Further, as these religious and political developments unfolded, quite literally on their doorsteps, both women aimed to shape the course of events through their writing.¹⁹

In her correspondence with her husband and other leading patriots, Adams raised the issue of whether American independence would offer wives greater freedom within marriage. In the spring of 1776 John was serving as a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia and Abigail was managing the family farm in Braintree, southeast of Boston. On 31 March she wrote to her husband in a flush of optimism that the British had finally evacuated and left local residents free to “sit under our own vine and eat the good of the land.” Her mind, it seems, then wandered to the laws of marriage that ensured “our own vine” would belong to her husband, despite the investment of her labor in maintaining it. She wrote: “By the way, in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.”²⁰ Appropriating a phrase that John himself had used to begin an unpublished essay on the colonies’ struggle, she wrote: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” And finally, tongue in cheek, she threatened that “the Ladies . . . are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”²¹ Adams thus subtly, humorously, demanded that adult white women from propertied families—“Ladies”—be able to enjoy the same liberty that men like her husband wer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Struggle for Equal Adulthood
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PROLOGUE: LIBERTY AND MATURITY IN ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT
• CHAPTER ONE: ADULT INDEPENDENCE AND THE LIMITS OF REVOLUTION
• CHAPTER TWO: DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP AS A STAGE OF LIFE
• CHAPTER THREE: CHRONOLOGICAL AGE AND EQUAL RIGHTS
• CHAPTER FOUR: THE VOYAGE OF LIFE AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
• CHAPTER FIVE: COMPETING MEASURES OF MATURE CITIZENSHIP
• CHAPTER SIX: PERPETUAL MINORITY AND THE FAILURE OF RECONSTRUCTION
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX