John Adams: Reply to Abigail Adams’s “Remember the Ladies” Letter

The correspondence between John and Abigail Adams lasted almost four decades—years that were among the most important in American history. These letters give historians a unique perspective on the American Revolution and the evolution of American political philosophy. Between the early 1770s and the end of his term as president in 1801, Adams was caught up in the political life of the nation. During that time Adams was often away from home, traveling from York and finally to the District of Columbia during his presidency. He left the management of his farm, his estate, and his children in Abigail’s capable hands, and he shared with her his ideas about the future of the United States, regarding her as both a wise adviser and a trusted confidante. More than eleven hundred letters the couple sent to each other have been preserved in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Late in March 1776, Abigail sent her husband a chatty letter asking for news about the war and about the progress of the movement toward independence, which Adams had been discussing with her since the previous summer. In the process, she introduced a radical idea: that women as well as men should have a voice in the government of the new republic that her husband and his colleagues were creating. She urged her husband to “remember the ladies” in reimagining the political future of the United States. Women, she pointed out, were under the legal control of their husbands or fathers throughout the country. In many places they were not even allowed to own property in their own names. At the same time, women were playing a significant role in supporting the Revolution by nursing wounded and sick soldiers, preparing meals for them, and carrying messages for the Continental army’s command staff. If women continued to be denied basic rights, Abigail warned, they might be pushed into having a revolution of their own.

John Adams’s reply shows his innate political—and social—conservatism. He compares Abigail’s warning to the kind of unrest noted among Indians, slaves, children, apprentices, and college students and accuses her of being “saucy.” He then dismisses her grievances, stating that the laws she complained about were only theoretical (which they were not—unmarried women had some rights to own property, but married women surrendered their property and their identities to their husbands upon marriage). In an attempt to be funny, Adams suggests that his wife’s remarks come from the British government and are meant to weaken the Revolution as a whole.

There is some evidence that this disagreement hurt both John and Abigail. Both turned to others to vent their feelings—Abigail to her friend and fellow patriot Mercy Otis Warren and John to a judge in Massachusetts named James Sullivan. Abigail complained that her husband seemed unwilling to share the benefits of the Revolution with all the people who worked to support it. For his part, John feared that extending rights to women would lead to the destruction of social distinctions and mob rule—in other words, the destruction of the republic he and his colleagues were struggling so hard to build.