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Doc of the Day: Abigail Adams’s Letter to John Adams
03/31/10
On March 31, 1776—just a few months before the Declaration of Independence was signed—future first lady Abigail Adams composed a famous letter to her husband, John Adams, encouraging him to make women’s rights a cornerstone of the fledgling United States government.
Abigail and John Adams kept up a lively correspondence whenever the demands of the Revolutionary War era forced them to live apart. Their letters—many of which have been preserved as historical documents—frequently feature intellectual arguments on political topics of the day. In her often-quoted 1776 letter, Abigail Adams exhorts her husband to press the Continental Congress to expand the rights granted to women in the new nation. “In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors,” she wrote. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.”
Abigail Adams believed that women should not be legally subservient to their husbands. She wanted American women to have equal educational opportunities and property rights to those enjoyed by men. Her arguments failed to sway John Adams, however, whose reply betrayed an unwillingness to upset the existing social order. “As to your extraordinary code of laws,” he wrote back, “I cannot but laugh.”
Read ABIGAIL ADAMS’S LETTER TO JOHN ADAMS