Abigail Adams to John Adams, Braintree [Mass.], March 31, 1776

Background: Some American women were fired by the possibilities of the revolution, among them Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, a Boston lawyer who was attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Abigail Adams read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and agreed with its plea for independence.  She wrote to her husband, raising the question of revising laws that affected the status of women. John Adams’s response, despite its bantering tone, shows the fears of elite patriots that subordinate people of all sorts were throwing off their deference to their social “betters.”

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 hand 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 in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.

Source: L. H. Butterfield and Wendell D. Garrett, eds., Adams Family Correspondence, Vol. 1 (1963).