John Adams to Abigail Adams, Philadelphia, April 14, 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.”

As to your extraordinary Code of Laws. I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government everywhere. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colleges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented. This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I won’t blot it out.

Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. . . . Rather than give up this, which would completely subject Us to the Despotism of the Petticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight.

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