Age and the Construction of Gendered and Raced Citizenship in the United States

Abstract

Abstract Focusing on the United States, Field and Syrett argue that the supposed universality of chronological age masks the processes through which legislators and government officials relied upon age to reinforce inequalities rooted in coverture and chattel slavery. Two case studies reveal how bureaucratic and legislative age requirements functioned in tandem to deny equal citizenship to women and formerly enslaved people. During the Civil War, Congress passed legislation to grant age-based Civil War pensions for minor children that appeared neutral in law but came to be administered in ways that denied equal benefits to the families of black Civil War soldiers on the grounds that they lacked adequate proof of age. State governments, meanwhile, continued to pass laws that differentiated between men and women in the realm of legal majority, using chronological age as a means to shore up gender inequality even as women gained new rights and opportunities. Recent conflicts over voter identification laws and age determination for child migrants reveal that chronological age remains a contested category through which government officials can deny equal treatment under the law by defining the criteria for what counts as adequate proof of age. Cracks in the modern regime of government-issued birth certificates reveal that age remains what it has always been: not a neutral fact, but a vector of power through which government officials and ordinary people construct and contest the boundaries of citizenship.