She told her husband, while he was drafting the laws of a new nation, to remember the ladies. He wrote back that he could not but laugh. The nation took one hundred and forty-four years to stop laughing.
Abigail Smith was born on the eleventh of November 1744 in Weymouth, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister and a mother from one of the oldest political families in the colony, and she received no formal education because girls of her class and period did not, and she taught herself instead, working through her father's library with the specific hunger of a child who has understood that the books are the only door available to her and that she had better open it herself.
She read Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and theology and political philosophy and history, and she emerged from the parsonage in Weymouth with a mind that had no business being confined to a parsonage in Weymouth, and no other place to go.
She met John Adams when she was fifteen. She married him at nineteen and moved to his farm in Braintree and began the life the century had designed for her: children, housekeeping, the farm, the accounts, the endless management of everything that required managing while the person nominally in charge of it was somewhere else.
She was good at all of it. She was good at everything she was asked to do, which sounds like praise and is also a precise description of a cage.
John began to leave in 1774. He left for Philadelphia as a delegate to the Continental Congress and came back and left again and went to Paris and went to London and was gone for years at a time, years in which the revolution and the republic absorbed him so completely that the letters he and Abigail exchanged were the primary texture of their marriage.
She managed the farm alone. She speculated in land and government bonds and kept the family solvent when many of their contemporaries were not. She inoculated the children against smallpox herself in 1776, a decision that required nerve and medical knowledge and the willingness to be wrong in a way that could not be undone, and she made it alone because there was no one else to make it. She did all of this and wrote him letters.
There are more than eleven hundred of them surviving, and they are the most complete portrait of a founding mind that the period produced, written by a woman who apologised in them for her spelling and punctuation because she had taught herself and knew the gaps, and who could not see that the prose between the misspellings was more alive and more precise and more clear-eyed than anything her correspondents were producing in their official documents.
She wrote him everything: the farm, the war, the children, the money, her mind. She wrote her political opinions with the directness of a woman who knew they would go no further than the letter and could therefore be honest. My pen, she told him once, is always freer than my tongue. She knew exactly why. A pen in a room alone costs nothing. A tongue in a room with men was another matter entirely.
On the thirty-first of March 1776, with the revolution at its hinge and John in Philadelphia assembling the framework of a new country, she wrote him the letter. In the new code of laws which it will be necessary to make, she said, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. All men would be tyrants if they could.
She was not asking for the vote. She was asking for legal protection from the men who owned women under coverture, the most basic acknowledgement that the women of the new republic were persons rather than property. She asked for it carefully, with the precise calibration of a woman who knew the language available to her and knew its limits.
John wrote back on the fourteenth of April. I cannot but laugh, he said. He compared her request to the restlessness of children, apprentices, Indians and Negroes, the other groups grown difficult under the loosening pressures of revolution. He called her saucy. He said they knew better than to repeal their masculine systems.
He meant it kindly, which is almost the worst part. He meant it warmly. He loved her. He thought it was a joke between equals, which tells you everything about what he understood and did not understand about what it was to be Abigail Adams.
She wrote again three weeks later. This letter is the one that does not have the warmth of the first, and it does not ask anything. It states.
She said that if women were not considered or represented in the new government, they were determined to foment a rebellion of their own. She said that arbitrary power was like most other things which are very hard and very liable to be broken. She had asked nicely. He had laughed. She had drawn the conclusion that was available to draw. Nothing in the republic changed. Nothing had been done and nothing would be done and she knew it, and she kept writing the letters anyway because the letters were what she had.
The children grew and cost her in the way that children cost their mothers, privately, without record. Her son Charles drank himself to death at thirty. Her daughter Nabby who was her oldest and her closest companion discovered a lump in her breast in 1810. The surgeon came to the house in Quincy in October 1811 and performed the mastectomy in an upstairs room, Nabby strapped into a chair, no anaesthetic, the procedure taking twenty-five minutes. Abigail was in the house while it happened. Nabby recovered. The cancer came back.
She returned to her parents' home in the summer of 1813 and died there in August, forty-seven years old. Abigail wrote that she had been her closest companion and had no other words for it. There were none.
Abigail died on the twenty-eighth of October 1818 at the farm in Quincy, seventy-three years old, in the country she had helped build from inside a farmhouse while her husband's name went onto the documents.
The nineteenth amendment passed in 1920. One hundred and forty-four years after the letter. She had asked for less than the vote and been laughed at, and she had been right about what they would build and right that they would build it without her and right that the record of all of it would be in the letters, all eleven hundred of them, in her own imperfect spelling, in her own hand.
He read them. He loved her. He built the world she warned him about anyway. She was right to the end and it made no difference and she kept writing. That is either the saddest thing about her or the most magnificent, and it is probably both, and she would have found the ambiguity entirely familiar.
