Abigail Adams: The Letter They Did Not Publish

On March thirty-first, seventeen seventy-six, Abigail Adams sat down in the house in Braintree, which is now Quincy, and wrote to her husband John. He was in Philadelphia, a delegate to the Continental Congress, in the middle of the work that would produce the Declaration of Independence and the architecture of American government. She wrote to him regularly. He wrote back. The correspondence between them, now housed in the Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, is one of the most intimate and revealing documentary records of the founding generation.

In the March thirty-first letter, she asked him to remember the ladies. Her exact words: remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. She continued: if particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

John Adams replied with condescension and laughter. He told her the letter had amused him. He said that men were the masters in theory and that softening this reality was impractical politics. He moved on to other subjects. The exchange took place in a private letter. It was not published in her lifetime.

The founding moment of American liberty, produced by men meeting six hundred miles away from where Abigail Adams was managing their household, raising their children, and running their farm, contained the explicit exclusion of women, documented in her own handwriting and his, and filed away for a century.

She was right. He was wrong. He won. The letter survived.