Abigail Adams and "Remember the Ladies"
In 1776, as the men of the Continental Congress debated independence and imagined a new nation, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, and asked him to do something radical:“remember the ladies.” In that same letter, she warned against giving husbands “such unlimited power” and wrote, “all men would be tyrants if they could.” Abigail Adams did not have a podium. She had a voice. She was not signing a founding document. She was writing from home, from the margins of official power — and yet she saw with startling clarity what the architects of the nation were building, and who they were leaving out. She understood that if a country was going to be born in the language of liberty while ignoring women, that contradiction would not disappear. It would harden into law, custom, marriage, property, politics, and everyday life. Her warning came at the beginning. The consequences are still with us. www.masshis.org Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov
