Abigail Adams: “Remember the Ladies” Letter to John Adams

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Abigail's letter to John written on March 31, 1776, sometimes referred to simply by its most famous phrase, “Remember the ladies,” is the most celebrated in her entire correspondence. Half its length is devoted to her reaction to news already familiar to John—the Revolutionary conflict in Virginia—and to fresher news that he was just beginning to hear of the evacuation of Boston by the British army on March 17. The most distinctive passages, however, are Abigail's argument that America's struggle for liberty from Britain was incompatible with its retention of racial slavery; her feeling of relief that Britain has finally left Massachusetts in peace; and, above all, her extended passage on the severely restricted rights of women within marriage.

Abigail's ringing defense of women, extending from the sentence, “I long to hear that you have declared an independency,” to the letter's end, has sometimes been misunderstood. She was not arguing for equal electoral rights—for the suffrage—for all or, indeed, any women, even though in the passage “we … will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation,” she seems to assume that women deserve this right. She is instead tackling the greatest obstacle to independence for women in eighteenth-century America: the powerful legal tradition of denying women control over their own property or even their own persons within marriage.

Abigail's model for a civilized marriage was her own marriage, in which she felt that John was not her “master”—which he was under the law—but her “friend.” However, because so many husbands preferred inflicting emotional and even physical abuse to accepting this “more tender and endearing” role, she called for vigorous legal action. The new nation should legislate marital equality. Elsewhere in her correspondence Abigail stated her conviction that a woman's proper place was in the home but that home must be for her a place of honor and security. Nineteenth-century America did see the rise of a suffrage movement; but long before women's suffrage became a reality, women began to achieve in law what Abigail had envisioned: the first foundations of equality in marriage, the control of their own property and respect for their security.

John Adams's humorous but dismissive reply to Abigail's appeal for sensitivity to the rights of women in his letter of April 14, 1776, disappointed Abigail, who complained of it to her good friend and a highly accomplished woman author, Mercy Otis Warren. But John's unresponsiveness did not dampen Abigail's concern for the role of women in American culture and society. In June 1778 she wrote a long letter to John, who was then in Paris, in which she responded to her husband's praise of French ladies by lamenting the limited and circumscribed education of women in America. For Abigail, education was the solution to the low status of American women, both within marriage and in the larger society.