Abigail Adams wrote John Adams in 1776 urging revolutionary leaders to “remember the ladies.”
Abigail Adams made the appeal in a March 1776 letter to her husband, John Adams, who was serving in the Continental Congress. She argued that lawmakers should not create unlimited power for husbands and warned that women would not feel bound by laws in which they had no voice or representation.
Her phrase became one of the best-known statements associated with women’s political concerns during the founding era. The letter did not create an immediate constitutional guarantee of women’s voting rights, but it reveals that debates about liberty and representation were being discussed within families as well as in public assemblies.
Abigail Adams later became the second first lady of the United States when John Adams served as president from 1797 to 1801. She is sometimes confused with Martha Washington, the first first lady, or Mercy Otis Warren, another influential woman writer and revolutionary-era political commentator.