Corinne T. Field
Comment: Fails WP:NAUTHOR Sulfurboy (talk) 23:46, 24 August 2026 (UTC)
Corinne T. Field is an American historian whose research concerns the history of gender, race, age, and citizenship in the United States. She is a lecturer in the Corcoran Department of History and the Women, Gender, Sexuality Program at the University of Virginia.[1] Field is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (2014) and co-editor, with Nicholas L. Syrett, of Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (2015).[2]
Education and career
Field received a PhD in American history from Columbia University.[2] She subsequently taught history and women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Virginia.[1]
Field was a Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her research there examined generational conflict within the American women's suffrage movement, including the relationship between ideas about age, the emergence of evolutionary social science, Jim Crow laws, and debates concerning veterans of the American Civil War.[2]
Field co-founded the History of Black Girlhood Network, a scholarly network concerned with the history of Black girls, and in 2017 co-organized the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference at the University of Virginia.[2]
Works
Historian Patrick J. Ryan has described Field's research as showing how nineteenth-century feminists and abolitionists employed ideas of maturity when making claims about political rights, while also showing that claims to adulthood could reinforce existing racial and gender hierarchies.[3]
The Struggle for Equal Adulthood
Field's first monograph, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014.[1]
Field argues that ideas about adulthood were central to political inequality in the antebellum United States; while white men could expect to acquire the rights and privileges associated with adult citizenship as they matured, women and African Americans were frequently represented as permanently childlike and consequently dependent.[4]
The book considers figures including Mary Wollstonecraft, Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass. Field uses ideas about adulthood to examine common elements in Black people's rights and women's rights, including demands for citizenship as well as the racial and gender conflicts that divided reformers.[4]
In The American Historical Review, historian Faye E. Dudden noted Field's use of age to move beyond the established historiographical emphasis on separate public and private spheres, although she argued that some aspects of age discrimination received insufficient development. She nevertheless characterized the book as a strongly argued and insightful contribution.[4]
A review in The Journal of American History similarly identified "equal adulthood" as a new analytical framework for the history of the early women's rights movement. The reviewer noted that Field's approach highlights the role of African-American intellectuals in the development of women's rights thought and provides a means of examining collaboration and conflict among nineteenth-century reformers beyond the traditional separate-spheres framework.[5]
Writing in Commonplace, Jane Fiegen Green argued that the book demonstrates the usefulness of age as a category of historical analysis alongside race, gender, class, and disability. Green highlighted Field's argument that political conceptions of maturity helped determine access to citizenship and enabled political leaders to reconcile the rhetoric of democratic equality with the exclusion of large sections of the population.[6]
David Doddington reviewed the book in Gender & History in 2017.[7]
Field's approach has also received criticism in subsequent scholarship. In a 2022 survey of the modern historiography of childhood, Laura Tisdall cited The Struggle for Equal Adulthood as an example of scholarship demonstrating how women and Black Americans sought recognition as adults, but argued that the work does not interrogate the adult–child distinction to the same extent when it is applied to people categorized as underage.[8]
Age in America
With historian Nicholas L. Syrett, Field edited Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present, published by New York University Press in 2015.[2] The collection examines chronological age as a category of analysis in American history and considers how age has interacted with race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.
Field contributed the chapter "If You Have the Right to Vote at 21 Years, Then I Have: Age and Equal Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century United States", which examines the relationship between chronological age and political citizenship.
Black girlhood
Field has also researched the history of Black girlhood. She co-founded the History of Black Girlhood Network and, with historian LaKisha Michelle Simmons, organized the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference at the University of Virginia in 2017.[2]
Field and Simmons subsequently co-edited The Global History of Black Girlhood, published by the University of Illinois Press. The collection examines Black girlhood in different historical periods and geographical settings.
Selected works
Books
- Field, Corinne T. (2014). The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-4696-1814-2. Search this book on
- Field, Corinne T.; Syrett, Nicholas L., eds. (2015). Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present. New York: New York University Press. Search this book on
- Field, Corinne T.; Simmons, LaKisha Michelle (eds.). The Global History of Black Girlhood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Search this book on
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "The Struggle for Equal Adulthood". University of North Carolina Press. Retrieved August 25, 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 "Corinne T. Field". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Retrieved August 25, 2026.
- ↑ Ryan, Patrick J. (December 13, 2019). "The Struggle for Equal Adulthood". Society for the History of Children and Youth. Retrieved August 25, 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Dudden, Faye E. (2015). "The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America". The American Historical Review. 120 (4): 1490–1491. doi:10.1093/ahr/120.4.1490.
- ↑ "The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America". The Journal of American History. 102 (1): 251. 2015. doi:10.1093/jahist/jav289.
- ↑ Green, Jane Fiegen. "Who's Mature Enough to Govern?". Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life. Retrieved August 25, 2026.
- ↑ Doddington, David (2017). "Corinne T. Field, The struggle for equal adulthood: gender, race, age, and the fight for citizenship in antebellum America". Gender & History. 29 (1): 217–219. doi:10.1111/1468-0424.12263.
- ↑ Tisdall, Laura (2022). "State of the Field: The Modern History of Childhood". History. doi:10.1111/1468-229X.13318.
This article "Corinne T. Field" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Corinne T. Field. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
