Abigail Adams is famous for appealing to her husband, John Adams, during the months prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In correspondences with her husband as he and other leaders were framing a government for the United States, Abigail Adams argued that the laws of the new nation should recognize women as something more than property and protect them from the arbitrary and unrestrained power men held over them.
A two-part lesson from the National Humanities Center’s America in Class investigates concerns about the dangers of unrestrained power during the revolutionary period through four letters, written in 1775 and 1776, by Abigail Adams to her husband, John, and her close friend, Mercy Otis Warren. The lesson presents excerpts of key passages from the letters and poses close-reading questions for students to answer.
The selections include and contextualize the letter in which she makes her famous appeal to her husband to “Remember the Ladies.” The first and second excerpts focus on Abigail Adams’s views of human nature and how it is corrupted by unrestrained power, while the third and fourth discuss what might be done to protect women from that power.
The second correspondent in this lesson, Mercy Otis Warren, was a close friend of Abigail Adams, who, like her, was unusually well educated for a woman of the time. Warren—a poet, writer, and propagandist for the Patriot cause—was the first woman to write a history of the revolution.
This lesson looks at the revolutionary period as a time of questions and uncertainties for women as well as men. The question of power and its use in both broad and narrow contexts was much on peoples’ minds, especially since American political leaders were meeting to form a new government. Abigail Adams’s thoughts provide a distinctive lens through which to look at issues of power, quite different from the more commonly considered perspective of the founders.
An online teacher’s guide includes a background note, text analysis with responses to close-reading questions, access to interactive exercises, and an optional follow-up assignment that extends the lesson. The interactive student’s version, a downloadable PDF, includes the same content but omits the responses to the close-reading questions and the follow-up assignment.