Abigail Adams Letter to John Quincy Adams: Glimpse into Women’s Roles and Rights

Introduction

In the earlier colonial period, women’s role in producing foodstuffs, clothing, and other household items had been absolutely vital. But by the mid-eighteenth century, more ready-made items were available. People were able to buy ready-made cloth, so women no longer had to spend hours a day spinning. Items like candles and soap were also bought ready-made. Although, in some ways, this made life easier for women, it also contributed to a decline in their status since their role as producers had declined in importance.

The Changing Role of Women: From Households to Producers

However, women still helped out in family businesses and often ran them successfully while their husbands were away. Benjamin Franklin, for example, relied on his wife, Deborah Read Franklin, to keep the family’s numerous enterprises going while he was spending years away from home in Europe. And widows often ran businesses after their husbands died. Betsy Ross ran a highly successful upholstery business with her husband, for instance, and after he was killed in the Revolutionary War, she continued to run it successfully until 1827.

Large numbers of poor women worked in domestic service or earned a living by sewing or spinning or by wet-nursing other women’s babies. Women who worked for wages were not generally paid very well. The maximum weekly rate for women in domestic service in New England around the time of the Revolution was the same as the maximum daily rate for male farm laborers (though women servants would most often have got bed and board with the families they worked for, so would be less dependent on their wages for survival). Even women who worked as tailors, one of the few crafts open to them, made only about a third of what men made.

Whatever their station in life, a married woman was considered to be subject to her husband’s authority. Any property she owned belonged automatically to him, and while a husband could divorce his wife for adultery, a wife had no right to divorce her husband. It is these inequalities that Abigail Adams deplored.

Abigail Adams’ Plea for Equality

In the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, resistance to the British was expressed mainly in boycotts of imported products. For the boycotts to work, women would have to step into the breach and provide the cloth and foodstuffs that could no longer be brought in from overseas. The housewives were also the family shoppers, and they were asked to shun all the ‘taxables’ – items that the British imposed levies on. Getting the cooperation of the women was the critical challenge ‘without which is impossible to succeed’ said the South Carolina patriot Christopher Gadsen in 1769.

Southern ladies wore dresses made of homespun cloth to their fancy balls and joined their husbands and fathers in making political toasts and singing patriotic songs. The other women organized spinning bees and were honored for their production of homemade material, which they presented proudly to local officials.

The Struggle for Political Representation

While the men were away fighting, their wives took over running their farms and businesses. ‘We are in no way dispirited here,’ Abigal Adams, who was holding down the fort at the family farm in Massachusetts, wrote to her husband. ‘We possess a spirit that will not be conquered. If our Men are all drawn off, and we should be attacked, you would find a Race of Amazons in America.’ Abigail was sheltering soldiers and refugees from the conflict, and when dysentery struck the area, her home became a hospital. ‘And such is the distress of the neighborhood that I can scarcely find a good person to assist me in looking after the sick,’ she wrote.

One of the era’s most quoted letters was written by Abigail Adams to her husband when the Continental Congress was meeting to draw up the Declaration of Independence. ‘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. . . That your Sex is 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 and impunity? Men of Sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.’

John Adams did not take his wife’s letter seriously, and there was no mention of rights for women in the Declaration of Independence.
After the Revolutionary War, one state, New Jersey, granted the vote to ‘all free inhabitants’ who owned a certain amount of property. That applied to at least a limited number of widows and single women, as well as a few free black residents.

Conclusion

In 1797, during a hard-fought election for the state legislature in Essex County, about seventy-five women turned out to vote. In 1800, a large number of women showed up at the polls, including some who probably didn’t qualify under a strict interpretation of the property requirements. People began to complain and predict dire consequences if the women weren’t curbed. Before you knew it, critics argued, ‘we may shortly expect to see them take the helm – of government.’ After an extremely rowdy election in 1806, when far more votes were cast than there were people qualified to vote, the legislature reformed the electoral law, and the franchise was limited to free white male citizens.

References

1. “Abigail Adams: A Revolutionary American Woman” by Charles W. Akers

2. “Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation” by Cokie Roberts

3. “Abigail Adams: First Lady of Faith and Courage” by Evelyn Witter

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