Abigail Adams The Daughter Of A Massachusetts Minister

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Abigail Adams was, as Withey describes her, a "maddeningly contradictory" individual who defied conventional gender norms during her time, waged fierce rhetorical political battles against what she viewed to be British oppression of the colonies, and was unmistakably at the heart of the changing social and political realities of revolutionary America. One of the proto-feminists in the United States, Abigail Adams also championed similar civil rights causes such as the emancipation of slavery, but like most in her time, often seemed to straddle the fence on both of these contentious issues. With one foot in one world and one in another, Abigail Adams did defy definitions and deserves to be remembered as Withey portrays her: as a quintessential American who held simultaneously conservative and progressive views. As a woman, Abigail Adams could scarce enter the world of politics but alongside her husband she expressed her opinions passionately and often with little reserve. Like most other women in her time, she accepted her subordinate role and "had always established her own identity through her husband's achievements," (267). Nevertheless, Abigail Adams capitalized boldly on her husband's notoriety and power to become a personal advisor, friend, and confidante. The relationship between Abigail and John Adams might have therefore been unique for the times, as the couple cultivated a relatively egalitarian marriage. Lynne Withey thus portrays Abigail Adams in a strong light, exposing both her weaknesses and her strengths. Where history textbooks often gloss over the achievements and significance of female role models in American history, books like Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams picks up.

Like most standard biographies, Dearest Friend progresses through Abigail Adams' life chronologically. The first chapter, "A Minister's Daughter," details Adams' childhood, but like any good historian Withey also places Adams' early life into an historical context, offering background information on the Massachusetts town in which Adams was raised.

Abigail Adams married John Adams on October 25, 1764. John Adams was a lawyer at the time and was away most of the time. Soon after, John Adams worked his way up serving   time in Congress to becoming   vice president and then to be president of the United State.   They had six children, but one died after a year and one that was stillborn.   Abigail Adams had the responsibility of raising and teaching her children, plus working on the farm.

Abigail was self-taught at home by her parents. During those days women weren't allowed to go to school. She felt embarrassed   about her writing skills because she couldn't spell and didn't use proper punctuation in letters she wrote. John Adams was dating Abigail during this time and he found it interesting that Abigail would read and write. So when he would go visit her, he would take her books and she enjoyed reading and learned more than ever before. Abigail felt that it wasn't fare that her brothers were able   to go to school and get an education.   Education for a women would only get in the way of marriage and family.

During the time of their marriage, John Adams was always away from home because of serving time in congress. Abigail wrote all the time to her husband which formed a bonded relationship between them.   John in return would keep   Abigail informed about all the politics he was facing. She soon became very educated with the legal system and was very resourceful by helping her husband with the difficult problems he was facing during his time in congress.   John Adams would always listen to Abigail's opinions well, because she always knew what she was talking about. You can say, Abigail was always right on everything.

Abigail Adams was concerned about women being better educated. She began to question what was the legal and political position of women in society. Abigail was a very strong supporter of women's rights.

Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president of the United States, was never a leader of any kind during her lifetime, except in the circle of her devoted family. But a generation after her death, Americans began to see her as a paragon of domestic patriotism during the Revolution. By the late nineteenth century she was widely regarded as one of America's finest letter writers. In the late twentieth century she took on a new role as a feminist heroine, and her current reputation--as a fully engaged patriotic wife and mother, as an accomplished literary correspondent, and as a powerful voice for all women in the pre-modern era stands higher than ever.

Nearly every brushstroke in this striking portrait would have astonished Abigail Adams, although perhaps not her admiring husband, John. Born Abigail Smith in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in November 1744, to the town's leading pastor, the Reverend William Smith, and the well-born Elizabeth Quincy, she was raised in a modest but comfortable home. Although her parents were not wealthy, her father's profession and her mother's prominent family placed her squarely in the small upper-middle class of eastern Massachusetts's largely rural, agrarian society. Like nearly all eighteenth-century colonial women, Abigail was not schooled outside her home, but as the daughter of a learned minister with a large personal library, she was not only fully literate but relatively well read by her teens in literature and history, and she continued her reading in her lawyer husband's large library for more than two decades after her marriage.

Raised to be a dutiful wife and devoted mother, Abigail took on both roles without complaint or regret during her twenties and remained her husband's strongest supporter and closest confidant through every victory and defeat in his long career, until her death. Yet quietly, in her private letters to John, to her sisters, and to a few close friends, she gradually became an effective critic of eighteenth-century American society and particularly of the role that married women were forced to play in that traditional world. It was this critique, fused with a strong pride in New England's social virtues, that brought her letters to the attention of nineteenth- century American readers, both men and women, and commanded an even higher regard from twentieth-century women as they sought to recover an American past from which they could take both pleasure and instruction.

The course of Adams's life was fairly straightforward. A few facts are of the first importance in understanding her letters. In October 1764, just before her twentieth birthday, she married John Adams, an aspiring young Harvard educated lawyer nine years her senior, and moved about five miles to neighboring Braintree, Massachusetts, the hometown of both her husband and her mother. She and John had four children who reached adulthood: Abigail (1765), John Quincy (1767), Charles (1770), and Thomas Boylston (1772). Adams lived mostly in Braintree, with shorter stays in Boston, until her voyage to Europe in 1784 to join her diplomat husband in France and then in England; and after their return in 1788, she resided seasonally in New York and Philadelphia and briefly in Washington, again to accompany John during his vice presidency and presidency, before their long retirement in Quincy (formerly Braintree), Massachusetts. She died there in October 1818, shortly before her seventy-fourth birthday, survived by her husband and her sons John Quincy (later the sixth president of the United States) and Thomas Boylston.

However, in Chapter Seven, "A Woman's Sacrifice," Withey offers evidence that Abigail Adams indeed suffered considerably during John's long absences, domestically and abroad in Europe. The biographer notes, "They both believed that they endured their personal misery for the sake of their country's cause, that their own happiness was less important than the public good (115). The fierce determination of John Adams and his self-sacrifices were paralleled equally by his wife's, although her psychological achievements are less quantifiable than John's political ones. Abigail Adams also watched their son John Quincy follow in his father's footsteps, as John took his son with him often on his trips including trips abroad. Watching her sons leave intensified Abigail's depression and Withey describes how Abigail became sometimes overly involved in the personal affairs of her daughter and later, her grandchildren. Like many women of her time, Abigail Adams had no outlet for her ambitions or talents. Forced to stay at home and be out of the fray, forced to submit her will to her husband's, the only arena in which Abigail felt remotely important was in the domestic arena.