Abigail Adams

Abigail Smith was born on November 22, 1744, in Weymouth, Massachusetts, the daughter of the Reverend William Smith, a Congregational minister. New England schools then admitted only boys, and she always regretted that she had no formal education; but her father let her read freely in his large library, a cousin shared his books as he prepared for Harvard, and her brother-in-law taught her French. In 1764, at twenty, she married John Adams, a young Harvard-trained lawyer, and moved to his farm in Braintree. Their children included Abigail (“Nabby”), John Quincy, Charles, and Thomas; a daughter, Susanna, died in infancy. In Boston their circle included Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Joseph Warren, and in 1770 the couple faced their first crisis when John risked his career to defend the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre.

When John went to the Continental Congress in 1774, and then to Europe as a diplomat from 1778, Abigail stayed in Braintree and served as what the National Women’s History Museum calls a “deputy husband.” She managed the farm through wartime shortages, made investment decisions that increased the family’s wealth — trading war bonds and importing European goods for sale — and even bought land her husband opposed. She described the war around Boston in vivid letters and watched the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. In her famous letter of March 31, 1776, she urged him to “Remember the Ladies” in the new code of laws: “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”

After the war she joined John in Europe, where he served as the first American minister to Great Britain, and in 1789 she moved with him to Philadelphia when he became vice president, hosting weekly dinners that mixed politics and society. When he became president in 1797 he wrote to her, “I never wanted your Advice and assistance more in my life.” Unlike the reserved Martha Washington, she was an outspoken First Lady — receiving official guests, lobbying for his policies through correspondence and at social events, and planting favorable stories in the press.

Adams argued that women should have a voice in the laws that governed them, warning that otherwise they would “foment a Rebellion.” Living under coverture, which gave a married woman no legal identity apart from her husband, she called for protection of women’s property and, above all, education: “If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women.” She believed mothers had a political role in raising virtuous citizens. She also condemned slavery, doubting that “the passion for Liberty” could be “Eaquelly Strong” in those who deprived others of theirs.

Adams’s feminism had limits by modern standards: her vision of women’s public role centered on “Republican Motherhood” — educated mothers raising virtuous citizens. As First Lady she vigorously defended her husband’s positions, including the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

After John Adams lost the election of 1800, the couple retired to Massachusetts, where Abigail surrounded herself with family, read voraciously, and corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, James and Dolley Madison, and others. She died on October 28, 1818. Her grandson Charles Francis Adams published her letters in 1848, and they offer rare insight into the social and political life of the Revolutionary era. The phrase “Remember the Ladies” has made her an icon of women’s history.