“Remember the Ladies”: Abigail Adams's letter, 250 years on

The key passage, word for word

Abigail Adams wrote from the family farm at Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts. The letter was begun on 31 March and finished on 5 April 1776. The famous passage comes about halfway through, after news of Boston and their house there. The spelling is hers, as transcribed by the Adams Papers editors:

She goes on: “That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute”, but wise men give up “the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend”. She asks Congress to put it out of the power of “the vicious and the Lawless” to treat women “with cruelty and indignity with impunity”, and notes that sensible men “abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex”.

What she was asking for, and why

Her request is easy to misread as a demand for the vote. Mostly it is about marriage law. Under the English common law the colonies used, a married woman was covered by her husband's legal identity, a rule called coverture. William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) put it plainly: in law, husband and wife were one person. A wife could not own property in her own name, make contracts, keep her wages or sue, and a husband could use physical “correction”. When she writes about “unlimited power” and “cruelty and indignity”, this is what she means.

She does borrow the Revolution's own language, though. “No voice, or Representation” is the colonists' complaint against Parliament (no taxation without representation) turned on the men making it. That is why the letter still lands: she uses the logic of 1776 against its limits.

The same letter makes a parallel point about slavery. Asking about Virginia, she writes that she has sometimes thought “the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs”. She had made the same argument in a letter of 22 September 1774.

John Adams's reply of 14 April 1776

John answered two weeks later from Philadelphia. After news of Virginia's defences and Boston, he turns to her “Code of Laws”:

He adds: “Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.” Men, he claims, have “only the Name of Masters”, and in practice “We are the subjects”. The tone is teasing, not angry, and the couple's letters are full of affectionate sparring. The answer is still a firm no, and it lumps women in with every group that 1776 left out.

A month later, on 26 May 1776, John made the same argument seriously in a letter to the Massachusetts politician James Sullivan. If the rules about who could vote were opened up, he warned, there would be no end to the claims: women, young men and men without property would all demand a voice.

How Abigail Adams answered back

She did not let it go. On 27 April she wrote to her friend Mercy Otis Warren, the playwright and historian, describing John's teasing reply to her list of female grievances and joking that the two of them might petition Congress. On 7 May she wrote to John again:

She then warns him that arbitrary power, like most very hard things, is easily broken. Her later letters return to one practical theme above all: education. On 14 August 1776 she asked what could be said of daughters, “who every day experience the want of it”, and argued that a nation that wanted heroes and statesmen needed learned women to raise them.

What the letter changed, and what it did not

In law, nothing changed in 1776. Congress wrote no national code of family law; marriage law stayed with the states, and coverture lasted for generations. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which John Adams drafted, gave the vote to men with property only.

What the letter did change was the record. It is the clearest surviving evidence that a woman at the centre of the Revolution saw its contradiction about women while it was happening, not in hindsight. It also shows its limits: it was a private letter, not a public campaign, and it spoke for women of her own class. Historians such as Woody Holton have stressed that Abigail Adams was also a shrewd investor who kept money of her own in defiance of coverture, which suggests she meant every word.

Using the letter in class

• Read both letters in full, not just the quoted lines. Students note what else each letter discusses (smallpox, Virginia, the house in Boston) and how much space each writer gives to women's rights.
• Tone hunt: mark every joke in John's reply and every warning in Abigail's letters. Is he serious? Is she?
• Translate the stakes: list what a married woman could not do under coverture in 1776, then match each to a later law in the table above.
• Write John's better reply: students draft the answer he could have given in 1776, using only ideas available then.
• Interview by voice: students can ask an AI recreation of Abigail Adams about the letter and then put John's side to John Adams on Yuga. The recreations are built from the couple's letters but they are not the real people and can be wrong, so quote the letters themselves in written work.
• Carry the argument forward: the Yuga debate on equal rights in 1869, between Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, shows the next generation arguing over who gets the vote first.

For more on Abigail Adams see our questions to ask Abigail Adams, and for the rest of her 1776, America 250: what the founders did in 1776.