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This chapter explores the ideas and strategies of the organized women's rights and antislavery movements in the 1840s and 1850s, with particular reference to the argument that state governments should apply age qualifications equally to all citizens, regardless of race or sex. It explains how women's rights activists used chronological age to argue that dependent girlhood was different from independent womanhood. It shows how the struggle for equal adulthood emerged within an interracial coalition of women's rights supporters such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ernestine Rose, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Jacobs, and Paulina Wright (later Davis). Finally, the chapter considers the link between women's rights and racial equality by focusing on the views of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.

This chapter is about elderly Americans who fall into the category of older age, those in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. W. Andrew Achenbaum argues that chronological age has become a poor means of identifying the capabilities and needs of this demographic group because there is such variability in old age. Achenbaum begins in colonial America, showing that some older Americans were revered, but others fared poorly if they fell victim to disease, injury, or inability to work. Through the antebellum era, chronological elderliness itself was rarely the reason that older Americans were treated differently from their younger peers. By the turn of the century, however, Americans’ reliance upon chronological age, while by no means forcing people out of the workplace, had come to have greater significance in governing the treatment of elderly Americans. Bureaucratic federal programs like old age relief and pensions played a growing role in designating some workers as elderly. Achenbaum demonstrates that the growing reliance upon specific arbitrary ages for administering programs over the course of the twentieth century provoked a backlash by late in the century. He concludes by arguing that Americans would be wise to evaluate each other based on their functional ages rather than their chronological ages.

This chapter examines how the elimination of property requirements for suffrage redefined full citizenship as a normative stage of life for white men, and how those calling for a more expansive definition of adult citizenship responded to this change. It discusses white manhood suffrage and the domestic slave trade in order to understand the political significance of chronological age in Jacksonian America. It also considers how disenfranchised intellectuals confronted their exclusion from full citizenship, citing the arguments put forward by Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Maria Stewart, and Margaret Fuller. The chapter shows how interracial debates and cooperation between black and white reformers gave rise to the struggle for equal adulthood.

People's age is made manifest in two very different and distinct ways: chronological age (based on one's date of birth), and signs of age evident in one's appearance (based primarily on the sight of one's bodies). Age is made real through chronological records, visual images and the biological state of the body. But age is also evident in social relations and groups and in how social divisions complicate the ways of the world. Getting real about age entails recognising that ageing is constant, complex and slow and that it does make a difference to people's lives and their relations with others. It is through sensitive and imaginative social research that society will gain a better understanding of this conundrum.

This chapter examines the contention by women's rights activists that every individual should be given an equal opportunity to navigate his or her own voyage of life. It considers the temporal idea of maturation and womanhood that challenged the spatial metaphors of separate spheres for the sexes and segregation for the races, as well as the use of chronological age to define the rights and duties of older Americans. More specifically, it analyzes the argument that age twenty-one must become a transition to full citizenship for all Americans. Finally, it discusses the views of Frances Harper and Sojourner Truth regarding the moral maturity of black women.

In her 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller called for equal adulthood—that is, the idea that all human beings, regardless of race or sex, should be able to claim the same rights, opportunities, and respect as they age. From the 1770s to the 1870s, advocates for women's rights demanded the same rights. This book examines various claims to equal adulthood within the context of feminism by focusing on feminist thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Harper, Maria Stewart, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass. It explores chronological age, maturity, and generational relations as represented in popular art, literature, advice books, state constitutional conventions, and the writings of leading political theorists including John Locke, Auguste Comte, and Thomas Jefferson. In addressing issues related to equal adulthood, women's rights activists invoked the fundamental links between maturity, liberty, and equality.

This chapter focuses on the campaign for equal adulthood during the early years of Reconstruction, when women's rights activists demanded equal rights to all adults, and how such movement failed due to leaders' competing and irreconcilable measures of maturity. It begins by considering arguments regarding the relative maturity of black soldiers, white mothers, and freedwomen before turning to the idea of chronological age and how activists transformed positivism into an argument for women's rights. It then discusses the views of three activists who had most thoroughly explored the significance of adulthood in the antebellum period: Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frances Harper. It also examines the debate over the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution between those willing to support the extension of manhood citizenship to African Americans and those who refused to accept the further classification of women with children.

This chapter sheds light on the feelings and actions of the family members of Erik after having been brought back home following a long stay in a hospital and rehabilitation center after his accident. Erik's parents recognized the wide and awkward gap between his chronological age and his social behavior, and undertook several steps to recover his diminished affective expressiveness and fulfill his need for human acceptance. Erik was in the process of transition from one form of existence to another and was passing through developmental stages. The gap between conventional behavior and Erik's sometimes impulsive actions or disconnected thoughts occasionally led to surprising outcomes, but they were consequences of brain injury and not the expressions of playful cunning or creative experimentation. The activities of his family members during the first two or three weeks at home reflected their desire to reintegrate Erik into the intimate family circle and into a wider social community.

This chapter focuses on singers who are considered early bloomers or late bloomers. Chronological age is not a reliable indicator of vocal maturity. A widely held opinion is that the college-age singer is a very young singer, and that serious vocal development lies only in the future. College-age instruction is thus seen as a kind of holding operation until the voice “grows up.” In reality, a large number of professional careers were begun within this very age group. “Protective teaching” is detrimental to true vocal development. There are many ways to produce bad vocalism and undersinging is one of them. The singing voice depends on proper airflow, subglottic pressure, and vocal-fold activity. Females are frequently early bloomers and males late bloomers, although there are exceptions. Both vocal teacher and student have to keep in mind that vocal maturation, chronological age, and professional potential do not always mesh.