Abigail Adams wrote John Adams in 1776 urging him to “remember the ladies.”
In a March 31, 1776 letter, Abigail Adams asked her husband and other lawmakers to consider women when creating new laws and warned against giving husbands unchecked authority. Her appeal came while the colonies were debating independence and the shape of new governments. John Adams replied humorously, but the exchange became an important example of women’s political thinking during the founding era.
Abigail Adams was not a delegate to the Continental Congress and did not receive voting rights through the Revolution. She later became the second first lady of the United States and the mother of President John Quincy Adams. Her surviving correspondence provides unusually detailed evidence about household, economic, political, and wartime life in the revolutionary period.