The Real Story Behind Abigail Adams’ ‘Remember the Ladies’ Letter

In March of 1776, Abigail Adams — who would go on to become the nation’s second first lady — wrote a letter to her husband, John Adams, as he and the other founders were debating independence. She wrote, “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.”

A common contemporary interpretation is that Abigail Adams was advocating for women’s suffrage and rights more broadly. But most historians offer an alternative understanding. They believe that she was condemning husbands who had unchecked power over their wives.

In this episode, host Ari Daniel speaks with historian Cassandra Good about the role of women in revolutionary America, the importance of this letter at the time, and how it has been interpreted since.

A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That” and to listen to past episodes about Smithsonian magazine’s interactive map to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States, the discovery of an enslaved man’s narrative about his fight for freedom, and a baseball field resurrected in a World War II-era Japanese internment camp, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ari Daniel: I want to start in March of 1776 in what was about to become the United States. What was going on in this part of the world?

Cassandra Good: So March 1776, we’re in a lead-up period to the Declaration of Independence.

Daniel: This is Cassandra Good. She’s a historian at Marymount University, where she studies women in early America.

Good: Of course, in March, people don’t know that that’s going to happen, but this is pretty soon after Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which was runaway bestseller and really made the argument for independence, especially making an argument against the king, and was enormously influential. Even though the official war hadn’t really started until after the declaration, there had already been military battles. The British were occupying Boston at this point, until they evacuated from Boston in mid-March. So it is not a full-out war yet. It is not an independent country yet, but things are moving in that direction.

Daniel: It’s brewing.

Good: Yes.

Daniel: So I’m curious if we can zoom in, then, on a particular family at this moment in time, and that’s the Adams family—Abigail Adams and John Adams. What was happening in their household at the time?

Good: So John and Abigail Adams have been married for a little over ten years in 1776, and they have young children at this point. John is in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress. Abigail is back home taking care of the family and the household, which was pretty much going to be their home situation for a lot of their marriage.

Daniel: So it was at this time that Abigail Adams wrote a letter that gets quoted quite frequently now. When was this letter written? And can you read from it, the passage in question?

Good: So this is a letter that Abigail is writing starting on March 31, 1776. And she’s talking about what has been going on in Boston and what’s going to happen with the troops. And then she says:

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And 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 an imitation of the supreme being make use of that power only for our happiness.

Daniel: There is a lot going on there.

Good: Yes. It is just part of a longer letter, and it is part of a conversation going back and forth, and then also a conversation she’s having about this letter with a mutual friend of theirs, Mercy Otis Warren.

Daniel: I love how she starts that section with, “Oh, by the way.”

Good: Yeah, literally, “By the way.”

Daniel: And then launches into that.

From Smithsonian magazine and PRX productions, this is “There’s More To That.” The show that knows how to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. I’m Ari Daniel. In this episode, we examine a letter from 1776 written by Abigail Adams to her husband, John Adams, and we’ll find out what role it played much later on within women’s movements in the United States. Stay tuned.

Daniel: I’m wondering, Cassandra, what’s the popular interpretation of what that passage means?

Good: The really famous part of this is just this phrase: “Remember the ladies.” And I think that when the public hears that or sees that Abigail Adams is saying this in 1776, they assume she’s saying, “Remember women and give us a vote.” Because I think that’s sort of the central sort of feminist demand in American history is that women should have the right to vote. The suffrage movement is so famous. But in fact, it is actually not what she means here. This is not about asking for a vote and it’s something still important for women’s rights, but not in the same political way.

Daniel: To zoom out for a second, can you describe the role of women in the about-to-be United States of America in early 1776?

Good: The late 18th century is a period of transition in standards about marriage and about women’s roles in both the colonies and in Britain. And this is actually a period where we get something called companionate marriage. The idea is that rather than just an economic relationship, which is essentially what marriage had been primarily, where the choice of spouse was about economics, not about being in love, companion of marriage suggests—

Daniel: Dowry.

Good: Yes, dowry and basically the exchange of women from the father to the husband. And it literally happens in a marriage ceremony still, right? That we have that holdover of the woman’s father hands the bride to the husband. That was the property transfer. And we get to this period in the late 18th century where they’re starting to think about romantic love.

I think we assume that romantic love is a human universal, but in fact, this is a cultural set of expectations around love and around our feelings. And so marriage was not supposed to be based on romantic love. The novel is a new form and you get these courtship novels and you get women having to make decisions about the man they’re going to marry based on love. So that is new in this period. When we’re looking at the marriage between Abigail and John Adams, they’re sort of on the cusp of this. And the idea in companionate marriage is that the spouses would be friends. And in fact, they address each other as friend in these letters. And so we can see that there’s a sort of different idea about women in marriage in this period and that there’s more at least emotional parity or egalitarianism, even if they are not legally equal. Because the fact is, even with this rise of romantic love and the idea that a woman was going to get to choose her spouse, the legal forms behind marriage had not changed. So women who get married at this point are considered to be covered legally by their husbands. The term is called coverture. And so they lose their legal identity when they get married. Everything goes through the husband. They can no longer own property in their own name, for instance. Anything that they owned when they get married becomes the husband’s property. Divorce is exceedingly rare, and husbands had a lot of legal power over their wives and their wives’ bodies. And that is the backdrop for a woman like Abigail to understand women’s place in society.

Daniel: And in that context, what was the role of women in the American Revolution at that moment?

Good: We might think, “Okay, they have no legal identity. What are they supposed to do in this revolution?” But in fact, even in the lead up to the revolution in what we call the imperial crisis, where you have all the taxes coming down from Parliament and then protests and boycotts, women are very involved in those protests and boycotts. And not just in terms of what they’re buying or going out into the street, they’re also publishing things. There are newspaper articles by and about women, urging them to take part in boycotts or protests. They have to choose a side. And there are women who, even if their husbands decide to side with Great Britain to be a loyalist, that the woman sometimes stayed as a patriot. So women do have an important role here.

And then once the war starts, their role is at several levels. So you have some women like Abigail who are having to take care of the household and basically the family economy when the husband is away, whether it’s fighting the war or being in the Continental Congress. You have other women that are actually going along with the troops. These are usually poor women. They are following their husbands because they really can’t sustain their family without the husband at home. And these women then do things like cooking and cleaning for the troops. There are also women prostitutes along with the troops. There are female nurses that are getting officially paid by the Army, although paid much less than men, got paid to be nurses. So you have women both on the homefront and the sort of battlefront, although obviously they’re not lining up as soldiers with guns. They still have a role close to the battle lines in some cases.

Daniel: And to be clear, you’re referring to white women during this period, not to enslaved women or Native American women.

Good: Yeah. I should always qualify that because the situation is definitely different based on race, although we do know that there were some free Black women that were also going along with troops at various points in the war. But for the most part, most African Americans in the colonies at this point are still enslaved. And so you have both men and women who are enslaved, in some cases, taking advantage of offers from the British to liberate them if those people can make it to British lines. So we know that there are many, many people that do that, including people enslaved at Mount Vernon, under George Washington, at Monticello under Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately, things don’t usually turn out well for people who make it to the British. They sometimes end up getting returned to their enslavers.

In other cases, they are dying of disease cause the British are holding them on boats in harbors and the conditions are bad. And then the ones that make it out of the country, say to Nova Scotia, the conditions there are very bad. So yeah, unfortunately, it’s a lot of bad options. And then with Native American women, Native people, depending on the group, some of them side with the British, some side with the Americans. There are Native people who join the Patriot forces, Native men, and there are Native women who play some kind of home-front role. And for instance, there are petitions from Native women who supplied troops at some point and are trying to get paid back by the government. So we have those little shreds of evidence there as well.

Daniel: And what was Abigail Adams up to at this point?

Good: Abigail is running the Adams household while John Adams is away, and she’s doing that for a very long time. To the point that if you look at the correspondence over the years between them and the family economic records, she seems to be very good and possibly better than John Adams at running a household. And she’s also entrepreneurial. So during the war, there’s a shortage of sewing needles, and she manages to buy them in bulk and then sell them for a profit. So she is a savvy businesswoman in a way.

Daniel: Can you describe who Abigail Adams was as a person? What was she like?

Good: Abigail Adams, I think, would have been a fun person to get to know in the 18th century. Just the sense from her letters you get is that she is witty and can be sarcastic, has a sense of humor. She is pretty well read. She does not have a formal education, but she grew up reading a lot and clearly keeps up with literature throughout the rest of her life. She also seems to have very good political instincts. In fact, when John Adams is president, there are people that think she probably has better political instincts than he does. And you get the sense too from her correspondence, not just with John Adams, but with other men that she was friends with, like Thomas Jefferson, that she really could be anybody’s intellectual match.

Daniel: She seems to have been really outspoken, independent.

Good: Well, I guess the question here is whether we mean outspoken privately or publicly, because she’s not publicly going out and talking about women’s rights or ideas like she expresses in her private correspondence. And in fact, that would have been very radical for a woman to have done at that point.

Daniel: So how, then, did she fit into the political scene?

Good: If we look at the role that elite white women are playing in this time period during the American Revolution in the Colonies, she is probably a little more on the knowledgeable and engaged side, in part just because of what her husband is doing and the amount of information she’s getting from him. She also was keeping up with newspapers and writing with other men that are giving her information. So she’s certainly better informed than a lot of women in this period. But as I mentioned before, a lot of women were involved in the lead-up to the war and the imperial crisis and protests and boycotts and fundraising efforts. So it is not abnormal that she would be interested in, engaged in and keeping up with politics.

Daniel: So I want to go back to that letter that we started with, and I’m wondering what impact that letter had at the time.

Good: Pretty much minimal impact, because this was not a public letter. This was a letter to her husband. And John Adams wrote back sort of joking as if she had been joking and she didn’t really mean it. Although we know that he says in another letter to somebody else, imagine if we gave the vote to women, that would be crazy and it would be crazy to give the vote to any number of people, even though she’s not even directly asking him for the vote. She’s asking for good treatment of women by their husbands in law, but because she says the ladies might rebel and we’re not going to hold ourselves bound by laws in which we have no voice or representation, I think he can read a more radical suggestion into that. And he’s completely dismissive of not just that radical part, the whole conversation, he’s dismissive. And she’s annoyed by this. And then he says to another man he’s writing with later, “Yeah, there’s no way we would do that.”

Daniel: Can you tell me then, Cassandra, what your interpretation is; what historians tend to understand this letter to be speaking about and how it differs from perhaps a more popular reading of it?

Good: I think initially historians who saw this letter, which the Adams’ correspondence started to be published long after she had died, so just in terms of impact of the letter, it’s not that anybody at the time knew she had said this beyond anybody that she told. But when historians looked at this letter, especially male historians who didn’t necessarily know as much about gender, they just read this as, “Oh, she’s kidding. This whole thing is a joke.” But then when we started to see more women trained in women’s history, reading this in the context of what they knew about women’s roles and more of what the conversation was at the time, I’d say for the past 25 years or so, most historians have looked at this letter and said, “Yes, she is talking about rights within marriage.” Her specific ask here in “Remember the ladies” is protect women’s rights legally within marriages so that they cannot be abused by their husbands. That’s the direct ask.

Daniel: Meaning make sure they are able to retain some access to property or what exactly?

Good: I don’t think she’s specifically asking for property rights. There will be a campaign later on for married women’s property rights starting in the 1830s and ’40s, but that’s obviously a long time after this. This is more just the fact is that husbands could physically or sexually abuse wives with, as she says, impunity, pretty much. They had a legal right to. And so it’s more just protecting their bodily safety and protecting them from being abused.

Daniel: How did John Adams treat Abigail as her husband?

Good: I think they had a pretty good marriage from what we can tell from these letters. And we’re lucky that they were separated as much as they were because that’s why we have so many letters, and also that they did not have these letters destroyed as many other married couples did. George and Martha Washington, we have two or three letters that survive and …

Daniel: That’s it? Really?

Good: That’s all we have to go on. And in fact, we know that Martha Washington, on her deathbed, asked that all of her correspondence with George Washington be burned.

Daniel: Whoa.

Good: And it was probably her granddaughter, Nelly, who burned all that correspondence. There were a couple letters found in the back of a desk drawer years later, but otherwise the only Martha Washington letters we have surviving are letters to other people, not to her husband.

Daniel: Why did she ask for them to be burned?

Good: That was pretty normal at the time. I mean, Thomas Jefferson, we also have no correspondence between him and his wife. That was also presumably destroyed. James Monroe and his wife, Elizabeth, no correspondence. And in fact, no letters from her to other people either, pretty much. So it was pretty common for people, especially who had lived in the public eye and knew that people were going to be interested in them, they didn’t necessarily want a record surviving of their most intimate relationships.

Daniel: So why are Abigail Adams’ letters an exception? How did they survive?

Good: Clearly, this family saved many more letters than most families did. There are just reams of letters from the entire Adams family and they also had a continuous family line of descendants that could preserve these things, but it would seem that Abigail and John Adams did not have a desire to have these letters destroyed, or they probably would have been.

Daniel: Why do you think this interpretation of the letter being about women’s suffrage has emerged?

Good: I think there’s two things there. One is that when we think about women’s history and politics in America, overwhelmingly we’re thinking about voting and voting rights. And we assume that that is the way to access political power. And often, we also assume that before women could vote, they just didn’t have political power. And that’s not true. In fact, women had varying levels of political power long before they got the vote in 1920, but women aren’t even starting to fight for the vote until 1848. This is not something even that we see in private correspondence, women saying all women should get the right to vote. Because this isn’t a time—the early American setting and the British setting—these are not settings where everybody can vote. White men with property can vote. And so there are plenty of people that can’t vote. I think John Adams, part of his response to the idea even of saying it would be crazy to let women vote is he’s saying, “Who else, then, would we have to have vote?” Because it’s just not thinkable to have universal suffrage like we have in the 21st century.

Daniel: Right.

Good: I think that the other issue is that in our 21st century world where women look back and would like to see a heroine, I think people want it to mean, “Yes, she is a radical and she can see the future that women are going to ask for the right to vote.” And I think it’s also hard for us to imagine that they wouldn’t have been asking for that at the time of a revolution of all men are created equal, of these ideas about liberty and equality. And yet, the most radical so-called feminist writing at the time was women should get an equal education to men. That was a radical statement at the time.

Daniel: Wow. Do we know if John Adams eventually was moved by this letter or others like it from his wife to change any of his policies or to influence the Constitutional Convention?

Good: There’s no evidence that this letter influenced John Adams to do anything in particular other than annoy his wife in his reply. Their son, John Quincy Adams, is different on these things and actually does support expanding suffrage to more people. And he speaks more in favor of women’s rights, especially after the presidency when he becomes a congressman. He is a fervent abolitionist and he is trying to present petitions signed by women against slavery. So maybe she influences her son, but it does not appear that there’s any effect on John Adams. And this is much before the Constitution, but even when they do sit down to write this code of laws, in all of the extensive records of the Constitutional Convention, there is zero discussion of women’s rights. It’s not even like somebody brings it up and they say no. It does not come up.

And the Constitution doesn’t say men. It says persons, but it’s a common language choice at the time. It’s not like, “Oh, let’s leave the door open for women.” But the first instance of [the word] “male” getting in the Constitution happens in the Reconstruction amendments at the time that women are asking for the vote. So that’s where we first get male in the Constitution, is in the 14th Amendment.

Daniel: In order to exclude women.

Good: Moreso in the 15th in order to exclude women. But yeah, during the Constitutional Convention, women’s rights are not on anybody’s radar.

Daniel: Cassandra says the letter didn’t enter the public sphere until Adams’ grandson published it in a volume of letters in the mid-19th century.

Good: But if we’re looking at the first professionally done by historians with editorial apparatus like footnotes, not until 1963. It was published as part of the Adams Family Papers correspondence as a presidential history editing project. And this is around the time that pretty much all the presidential papers, projects from the founding era are starting up.

Daniel: Do you know whether, when it did surface and did come to public light, whether it might have influenced the women’s movement, women’s suffrage and thinking later on?

Good: So, interestingly, there hasn’t really been scholarship on this before, I think in part because gender historians who have looked at this letter didn’t see it as a suffrage thing. But I went back through early texts and was able to discover that not that long after it was published by her grandson in 1875, there’s a History of Woman Suffrage, which is a multivolume edition that’s a history of the movement up to that point that is published in the 1880s. And this is from the very first generation of suffrage advocates, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. And they do talk about historical examples of women asking for various rights, particularly in England and then also in America. And, actually, they have an extended quote from this letter in that volume. And after the quote, they say, “Again and again did Mrs. Adams urge the establishment of an independency and the limitation of man’s power over woman, declaring all arbitrary power dangerous and tending to revolution.”

So they see this quote and they understand that she is asking about treatment of women by their husbands. They get that that’s what this is about. And then they go on to talk about how she also advocated for women’s education. Certainly the women’s rights movement in the 19th century was about more than voting, and in the 20th century as well. So in fact, people like Stanton and Anthony would have been advocating also for women’s rights as wives. And so it’s not so surprising given that that was a big part of their advocacy, that they understood that that’s what she was talking about.

Daniel: Do you think that this letter has any resonance in the present moment?

Good: I think that this letter is coming up a fair amount in the present moment because of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, people thinking a lot more about 1776. And also, I’d say that certainly in this semiquincentennial 250th moment versus the bicentennial in 1976, there’s a lot more people who want to know what people other than white men were doing and thinking during the revolution. And so I think if we’re looking for an emblem of what somebody who’s not a white man was doing at this time, this is a pretty catchy phrase: remember the ladies.

Daniel: And speaking of the 250th anniversary of the United States, how do you think as a historian we should be considering our founding mothers?

Good: First of all, I hope people are paying attention to founding mothers in general and not just founding fathers. I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to push people to realize that men and women of the founding generation are involved in the founding of this country and the development of a democratic republic, that women are integral to telling this story. So I do hope that people realize that this is a story that involves a lot of different people, including women. And I think this is a good moment for people to look back at the ideals of the founding generation, to look back at the actual language of the Declaration of Independence, because that has been the guide star for a few centuries of movements for rights in this country, not just in this country, in other countries, too. These ideals from the revolution have been enormously meaningful to people around the world, and we should be proud of that.

Daniel: Cassandra, thank you so much for bringing this moment in America’s history to life for us and, in particular, for sketching out Abigail Adams in such detail. I really appreciate it.

Good: Thanks for the conversation.

Daniel: To read more about Abigail Adams and her letter, “Remember the Ladies,” you can visit the link in our show notes. On the next episode of “There’s More to That,” we’ll travel to high elevations in the Pacific Northwest and zoom our lens in on the Cascade red fox. We’ll talk to a conservationist and a photojournalist about what’s threatening this subspecies, and what they’re doing about it.

If you like this show, please consider leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show, and we’d be grateful.

“There’s More to That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX productions.

From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Ali Budner, Cleo Levin, Genevieve Sponsler, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. I’m Ari Daniel. Thanks for listening.

Daniel: Cassandra, what got you into this particular arena of history? Was there something personal about it?

Good: I had always been interested in history. I had Samantha, the American Girl doll. I thought the Victorian period was interesting and had pretty clothes. That was basically, as a kid, the way I thought about it. And I did volunteer work at my local historical society in high school, and they handed me a volume of a woman’s diary to start transcribing because her husband had kept a dozen volumes of diaries during his life in the 19th century. And those had been transcribed and published years ago. But at the point that I came there in the year 2000, nobody had transcribed the wife’s diaries. And so that was my very first exposure to doing women’s history, was sitting there and trying to read this woman’s diary, which, when I couldn’t understand something on a day in her diary, I would look at her husband’s diary from the same day to see what was going on. And ended up for my senior project in high school in 2001 doing a traveling exhibit for our local historical society comparing the two diaries. I was pretty much hooked from then.