Abigail Adams

Best known for her correspondence with her husband and the declaration “I desire you would Remember the Ladies,” Abigail Adams served as her husband’s advisor, critic, advocate, and above all, “dearest friend,” from the beginning of their courtship in 1761 until her death in 1818. In between she was both a witness to and an erudite and witty commentator on the American Revolution, French and British society at the end of the eighteenth century, and the presidential administrations of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, as well as the beginning of the political career of her son, John Quincy Adams. “You know my mind is much occupied with the affairs of our Country. if as a Female I may be calld an Idle, I never can be an uninterested Spectator,” she wrote to John Adams in 1793. She wrote over 4,300 letters over the course of her life to over forty correspondents—including Thomas Jefferson, Mercy Otis Warren, James and Dolley Madison, and Martha Washington—covering topics from government, politics, and foreign policy, to women’s rights, abolition, and the latest fashion trends. Editor Edith Gelles says that her “letters provide unusual access to her private life, but they also capture her age—its social conventions, politics, and people—not just in description but in commentary, giving her the status of a domestic—i.e., American—Tocqueville, a writer whose observations and insights shed light on American and Americans of her time.”