Remember the Ladies
Background
In the spring of 1776 John Adams was in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress, arguing for independence. Abigail was at home on the farm in Braintree, running the household, raising four children and sending him the news: the British had just left Boston, spring was coming, and for the first time in months it felt safe to plant.
Most of her long letter of March 31 is that kind of news. In the middle of it she turned to the new country John was helping to invent — and wrote the most quoted lines of her life.
John answered on April 14: “As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh.” It took the country until 1920 to give women the vote. She was right early.
The passage
Braintree
March 31, 1776
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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 favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, 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 immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness.
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The spelling is Abigail’s own. The whole letter, with her news from home and a sad postscript from April 5, is in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Family Papers, alongside the original in her hand.