Key figures: Abigail Adams, John Adams
Summary
Abigail Adams (1744–1818) was the wife of John Adams and, from Braintree, Massachusetts, his most trusted political correspondent throughout the Continental Congress’s deliberations in 1776. On March 31, 1776, while John was in Philadelphia helping steer the colonies toward independence, Abigail wrote him a letter urging that the “new code of laws” the Congress would eventually need to draft should “Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors,” warning that women were “determined to foment a rebelion” if their interests were ignored. The letter is among the earliest documented American appeals connecting the rhetoric of revolutionary liberty to the legal status of women.
John Adams’s reply of April 14, 1776, treated the request dismissively, writing “I cannot but laugh” at her “extraordinary Code of Laws” and grouping women’s grievances with those of children, apprentices, and enslaved people as symptoms of wartime disorder rather than legitimate claims, before assuring her that men would not relinquish their “Masculine systems.” Abigail pressed the point again in a follow-up letter of May 7, 1776, but the exchange produced no change in policy. The correspondence survives because Abigail Adams was a prolific and effective letter-writer whose extensive wartime papers, including this exchange, became a primary source for understanding domestic political life during the Revolution.
The March 31 Letter and John’s Reply
Writing from the family farm in Braintree, Abigail told John that she “long[ed] to hear that you have declared an independency” and asked that in drafting new laws he “not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,” reasoning that “all Men would be tyrants if they could.” She argued that women should not be bound by laws in which they had “no voice, or Representation” — deliberately echoing the “no taxation without representation” language of the broader independence movement. John’s April 14 reply joked that her letter was “the first intimation that another tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented,” and closed by insisting “we know better than to repeal our masculine systems,” dismissing the substance of her appeal even as he treated it as good-natured banter between spouses.
Coverture and the Legal Status of Women
Abigail Adams’s letter addressed the doctrine of coverture, under which a married woman’s legal identity was subsumed into her husband’s: she could not independently own property, sign contracts, or vote, and had few recourses against an abusive or negligent husband. Her request that the new United States “be more generous” to women than English common law had been reflected an awareness, unusual for the time, that the legal architecture of the new republic was being actively decided in 1776 and could in principle have been written differently.
Farm Management and Wartime Correspondence
Beyond this single exchange, Abigail Adams ran the family farm and household in Braintree throughout the war years while John served in Congress and later as a diplomat abroad, managing crops, livestock, and finances, educating the couple’s children, and coping with wartime inflation that multiplied the cost of goods many times over between 1776 and 1779. Her extensive wartime letters to John — discussing politics, military movements, and family affairs — made her one of the best-documented women’s voices of the Revolutionary period and a significant, informal advisor to a future president.
Significance
The 1776 “Remember the Ladies” exchange is regarded as an early landmark in the history of American women’s rights advocacy, notable for tying the case for women’s legal standing directly to the language and logic of the Declaration of Independence being drafted that same year. Although it produced no immediate legal change, the letter has been widely taught and cited as evidence that arguments for women’s equality were present, if marginalized, from the founding of the United States. Abigail Adams later became the second First Lady of the United States as wife of President John Adams and the mother of President John Quincy Adams, and her Revolutionary-era correspondence remains a primary historical source on domestic and political life in 1776.