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

Impact

Abigail Adams never expected her letters to her husband to become public. In fact, the “remember the ladies” letter of March 1776 was not published until 1876, one hundred years after its original composition and more than half a century after Abigail's death. Many scholars have seen Abigail as a retiring figure, overshadowed by her much more bombastic husband. Since perhaps 1980, however, a much different view of Abigail has emerged: proto-feminist, abolitionist, revolutionary. Each of these interpretations is partly true, but both make the mistake of taking Abigail out of the context of her times, making her on one hand a housewife or on the other an activist.

The immediate impact of Abigail's request on its intended audience—her husband—was negative. In his response, in a letter dated April 14, 1776, John Adams suggested that the idea of revolution had infected all classes of society, including slaves, apprentices, Indians, and students, but his wife's letter was the first indication that women also saw the oncoming revolution as a chance to gain freedoms for themselves. He countered with the argument that women were, in fact, already running the world, and he called Abigail “saucy” for bringing up the subject.

Although Abigail and John Adams treated the subject of women's rights lightly in their letters to each other, they both took the subject very seriously. In a letter addressed to her close friend Mercy Otis Warren dated April 27, 1776, Abigail summarized the exchange between herself and her husband. She suggested Mrs. Warren join her in petitioning Congress for protection of the rights of women within marriage. For his part, John Adams addressed the issue in a letter to James Sullivan, a Massachusetts state court judge, at the end of May 1776, in a way that showed he took the legal status of women very seriously.

Abigail Adams continually revisited the question of women's rights in her correspondence. Her writings suggest that, while women might have a passive role in public affairs, their strengths were in the domestic sphere and there they should have unchallenged authority. In a 1780 letter to her cousin John Thaxter, she applauded high society women who tried to raise money to buy shirts and stockings for the Continental army. Public spirit, she said, “lives in the Bosoms of the Fair Daughters of America.” In 1794, she told Massachusetts Senator George Cabot that any American women who expressed political opinions was subjected to “a subtle Stigma upon the character.” She was perhaps most explicit, however, in a letter to her sister Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody in 1799, during her husband's tenure as president of the United States. She enclosed with the letter a book that she had been reading to her niece, which implied that women were inferior to men. “I will never consent to have our sex considered in an inferiour point of light,” Abigail told her sister. “If man is Lord, woman is Lordess. That is what I contend.”