Description
Adulthood is an historical category that has been as important as gender, race and class in defining rights and opportunities. Democratic political ideals are connected to individual life course ideals, shown by how white men used their status as adults to justify prerogatives in politics, the work force, the family and sexual relations. African American and woman's rights activists, in turn, recognized that equality depended upon gaining respect for the maturity of black men and all women. The gender and racial politics of adulthood are traced from Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792) to debates over social security in the United States in the 1930s. Wollstonecraft argued that men infantilized women to maintain economic, political and sexual power, an argument taken up by later generations of activists. As antebellum state governments in the U.S. used chronological age to define universal, white manhood suffrage, woman's rights activists responded by promoting female maturity as proof of civic capacity. African American's, meanwhile, warned that normative definitions of maturity justified the denial of rights to the poor and oppressed. By the turn of the twentieth century, the campaign for protective labor legislation, the development of feminism, and the structuring of Social Security all contributed to the idea that some exceptional women and black men could pursue a course of life similar to their white male peers, while most remained childlike dependents throughout their lives. Fall 2009, Academic Year 2010-2011
