Abigail Adams Asked Her Husband to ‘Remember the Ladies’ as He Drafted America’s Laws. Here’s What She Really Meant

As John Adams lobbied in Philadelphia for American independence, his wife, Abigail, was consumed with questions. She filled pages with them, often complaining when John didn’t answer fully or quickly enough.

“What code of laws will be established?” she wrote to him from their home in Braintree, Massachusetts, in November 1775. “Who shall frame these laws? Who will give them force and energy?” Five months later, as members of the Second Continental Congress dragged their feet on separation from Britain, she wondered, “Shall we not be despised by foreign powers for hesitating so long?”

In her letters, Abigail kept her husband abreast of the siege of Boston, vividly describing “the rattling of the windows, the jar of the house and the continual roar of 24-pounders.” She read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and asked how the seminal pamphlet had been received in Congress. “She prided herself on navigating the most important intellectual currents of her era,” biographer Woody Holton writes in Abigail Adams: A Life. “To an extent that does not seem unusual today but that would have astonished her grandmother, Abigail liked to think about her thoughts.”

Fortunately, John also liked his wife’s inclination for reflection. In a teasing letter dated to 1764, the year they married, he wrote that her “habit of reading, writing and thinking” caused her to slouch. He also chided her for sitting too often with her legs crossed, which “springs I fear from the former source vizt. too much thinking. These things ought not to be!”

By early 1776, John and Abigail both had a lot on their minds. They longed to speak freely about the creation of a new nation, which was looking more plausible every day. “Is there no way for two friendly souls to converse together although the bodies are 400 miles off?” John wrote. “Yes, by letter. But I want a better communication. I want to hear you think or to see your thoughts.”

On March 31, Abigail committed her thoughts to paper in a letter that would come to define her legacy. After relaying her worries regarding military strategy and her hopes that Congress was nearing a decision, she added a request framed as an afterthought. “By the way,” she wrote, “in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies.”

What Abigail was asking

Abigail’s letter is still widely celebrated 250 years after it was written. History lovers can purchase “Remember the Ladies” picture books, T-shirts, mugs, stickers, candles, prints, serving trays and cutting boards. “It’s the first thing people usually think of when they think of Abigail,” says Sara Georgini, the series editor for the Papers of John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society. “​​As she writes, there’s this backdrop of impending war, but also the promise of republican creation.”

The letter reached mainstream American audiences in the mid-20th century, when the historical society began publishing correspondence, speeches, diaries and other papers connected to the Adams family. Georgini says that the musical 1776 (which draws on the letters), America’s bicentennial, and the women’s movement in the 1960s and ’70s also contributed to the buzz around the letter, which reads:

By the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. 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. That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex. Regard us then as beings placed by providence under your protection and in imitation of the supreme being make use of that power only for our happiness.

Do audiences today understand Abigail’s open-ended request? What exactly was she urging her husband to do? “I don’t think she would have a specific laundry list,” Georgini says. “She would certainly be thinking—like any 18th-century person would be—about progress and the human condition and what a revolution can do for individual rights.”

Some modern readers are convinced that they know exactly what Abigail was requesting. A 2007 children’s book, for instance, features a photo of the letter with “remember the ladies” circled in thick purple. “Abigail wrote that women should have the right to vote,” the description states. “Abigail’s ideas helped change the United States government. Women now have the same rights as men.”

Scholars don’t share this interpretation, although many casual readers find their way to it on their own. “I do think that people today read things into this letter that aren’t there,” says Cassandra Good, a historian at Marymount University. Abigail wrote her letter 72 years before the Seneca Falls Convention, which sparked the women’s suffrage movement in America, and 144 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment. “She’s not explicitly saying women should have a vote,” Good says. “That is just such a radical idea at this point that it is almost unthinkable.”

In the 18th century, voting was typically restricted to white men who owned property, although the law varied from state to state. Even Mary Wollstonecraft, the British women’s rights activist who published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, was generally focused on causes such as equal education. The question of voting rights for women surfaced only in niche cases, as when two Virginia residents remarked in separate correspondence that their status as widowed taxpayers should grant them the right to electoral representation. Later, for a brief period between 1790 and 1807, New Jersey law allowed a small group of unmarried women who owned property to cast ballots in the state.

The most specific ask in Abigail’s appeal is “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.” During this period, the practice of coverture dictated that married women had no legal identity; instead, the law viewed them as their husbands’ dependents. As such, Abigail was likely referring to “protection for women within marriage,” Good says. “She means men as husbands could be tyrants over their wives.”

John and Abigail’s marriage

When John was 24, his friend Richard Cranch started courting a young woman named Mary Smith. The two men called on Mary at home, where they also happened to meet her 15-year-old sister, Abigail.

At first, John casually dismissed the Smith family, writing in his diary that the father was a “crafty, designing man” whose daughters were “not fond, not frank, not candid.” In the 18th century, “candid” meant something closer to “nonjudgmental,” and he found the sisters “too blunt,” Holton writes. “Apparently John considered Abigail insufficiently candid because she could not resist teasing him about some of his foibles.”

With time, however, teasing became the foundation of a deep bond. John and Abigail exchanged more than 30 letters during their courtship, developing a witty rapport that was thoughtful, flirtatious and quite funny. Sometimes, Abigail found that this banter was easier in letters. “I wonder I write to you with so little restraint, for as a critic I fear you more than any other person on earth,” she wrote six months before they married. “Do you approve of that speech? Don’t you think me a courageous being? Courage is a laudable, a glorious virtue in your sex, why not in mine? (For my part, I think you ought to applaud me for mine.)”

John and Abigail’s life together was characterized by an inexhaustible urge for conversation that lasted for half a century. More than 1,000 of their letters survive. This kind of companionship was something of a novelty at the time, when marriage was often viewed as more of an economic institution. “The idea that husbands and wives should be friends—that is new,” Good says. “And I think that John and Abigail’s marriage does represent that more than many other marriages.”

As the American Revolution intensified, John and Abigail spent long stretches apart. “I want to hear much oftener from you than I do,” Abigail wrote in April 1776. John made a similar request several months later. “It is some time since I received any letter from you,” he wrote. “You must write me every week by the post. If it is but a few lines, it gives me many spirits.” When Abigail, alone during a smallpox epidemic in Boston, decided to inoculate herself and her children, John worried from afar, though his letters never lacked for wit. “How are you all this morning?” he wrote. “By this time, you are well acquainted with the smallpox. Pray, how do you like it?”

A calculated request

In the “Remember the Ladies” letter, Abigail introduced her appeal with a breezy “by the way” before inserting “an element of humor” to “temper her plea,” Holton writes. Her threat to foment a rebellion “was of course farcical,” the biographer adds, “but it allowed Abigail to slip in the serious observation that male patriots prohibited their wives from exercising the very right to self-government that now stood at the center of their own dispute with Parliament.”

Humor wasn’t the only strategy that Abigail used to make her point. Although the line “Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could” originated with the English writer Daniel Defoe, Abigail might have borrowed it directly from John, who used it in an unpublished 1763 essay. She knew that he would be “flattered, not furious, to see his own words used against him,” Holton writes.

The historian Elaine Crane has published extensively on Abigail’s tendency to use language from outside sources, almost always without attribution. In particular, Crane flags these lines from the famous letter:

That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.

In the original manuscript, Crane notes, “the ink pales in color perceptively” with these lines, suggesting that Abigail paused just before adding them. Perhaps that’s because she was leafing through a copy of The History of Emily Montague, a 1769 epistolary novel that includes a suspiciously familiar passage:

That we are generally tyrannical, I am obliged to own, but such of us as know how to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.

During Abigail’s lifetime, “the line between artistic adaptation and thievish adoption was thin,” Crane writes. Her husband was “not likely to realize that she had lifted the quotation word for word—nor would he have cared.” After all, John relied heavily on unattributed quotations even in published works, usually “to save himself time,” as Holton writes. Abigail turned to other authors’ words most often “whenever she skated near the limits of propriety,” Holton adds.

Abigail received no formal education, but as the daughter of a clergyman, she had access to her father’s sprawling libraries, and she made her way through works of literature, history, government, philosophy and theology. John and Abigail’s letters are full of playful references to famous works, and they regularly used literary pen names like Diana, Portia and Lysander. “This was just kind of the lingua franca of the day,” Georgini says. “They’re incredibly well read—and eager to show it off.”

John’s reply

Had Abigail hoped for a serious response to her “Remember the Ladies” letter, removed from the trappings of banter? If so, John’s reply, dated April 14, 1776, expressed only incredulous amusement. “As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh,” he wrote. “We know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects.”

Georgini says this kind of playful sparring is characteristic of John and Abigail’s correspondence. “She’ll pitch an idea, and he’ll bat it down. He’ll pitch an idea, and she’ll bat it down,” the historian says. “This goes back and forth quite a bit, and he replies substantively to a lot of her other queries.” Abigail appears to have wanted a substantive reply to this particular query, too. On April 27, she wrote to a friend, the writer Mercy Otis Warren, relaying John’s response to her request. “He is very saucy to me in return for a list of female grievances which I transmitted to him,” she wrote. “I think I will get you to join me in a petition to Congress.”

Abigail didn’t reply to John until May 7. “I have not felt in a humor to entertain you,” she wrote. “If I had taken up my pen perhaps some unbecoming invective might have fallen from it.” She added, “I cannot say that I think you very generous to the ladies.”

As far as we know, Abigail never attempted to mount a defense against her husband’s line of reasoning. But we shouldn’t try to “measure the depth of Adams’ frustration by her reluctance to engage in serious sparring with her husband,” Crane writes. “She might have realized that John’s willingness to entertain her ideas had limits—which she was rapidly approaching.”

Even though John never provided Abigail with a serious reply, he touched on the subject in an intriguing letter to the Massachusetts lawyer James Sullivan a few weeks later. “It was almost as if Adams was responding to her through his letter to Sullivan,” Crane argues. “Despite the witticisms with which John responded to Abigail’s overture, he did, in fact, have serious misgivings about extending the political base to women. It was far easier to explain all this to James Sullivan than to his wife.”

In the letter, John posed the question “Whence arises the right of the men to govern women without their consent?” He compared women to other disenfranchised groups, such as men who didn’t own property and were “too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own.” Any effort to expand political representation would inspire every woman, child and “man who has not a farthing” to “demand an equal voice with any other.”

The letter’s legacy

More than 20 years later, when John was halfway through his presidency, he made a controversial diplomatic appointment. Abigail was ill at the time, and critics quipped that she would’ve talked him out of it if she’d been by his side. “Oh how they lament Mrs. Adams’ absence! She is a good counselor! If she had been here, [William Vans] Murray would never have been named, nor his mission instituted,” John wrote to his wife in 1799. “This ought to gratify your vanity enough to cure you.”

Did John remember the ladies? He treated Abigail as a trusted adviser and “one-woman cabinet,” Georgini says. “There is a very public reliance on women’s advice, counsel and intellect that I think is a cornerstone to understanding him.” He did not, however, try to limit the power of tyrannical husbands in America’s new code of laws. The consequences of coverture have never fully disappeared.

Abigail’s legacy is nuanced. She didn’t change the institution of marriage, but she demonstrated how women could wield power within its constraints. During John’s long absences, she ran their estate alone and made financial decisions without his approval. She respected her husband but never heeded him unquestioningly. For instance, John disliked “Common Sense” (he later called it a “poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass”), but Abigail was impressed by Paine’s pamphlet and made her approval known. When she inoculated the family against smallpox, she didn’t tell her husband until after the fact. “She finds and minds loopholes wherever she can,” Georgini says. “She finds a way to own property. She finds a way to sell goods. She finds a way to make sure that she’s legally present in documents.”

John and Abigail’s correspondence provides a riveting window into these negotiations. But even though historians have thousands of manuscript pages at their disposal, these cover only a fraction of a 54-year marriage. What about the missives that didn’t survive or the conversations they had in between letters?

“I would love to go back in time and eavesdrop on the Adamses’ kitchen table,” says Georgini, who imagines the “Remember the Ladies” letter as part of a conversation repeated many times before. When writing on other subjects, Abigail tended to self-edit as she worked through her thoughts. “She crosses out words. She scribbles in new ones. She edits. She second-guesses,” Georgini says. “When you get to that very famous paragraph, where she petitions John and his fellow lawmakers, her pen never slips.”