Dearest Friend A Life Of Abigail Adams Sparknotes

Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams is a New York Times bestselling biography, written by Lynne Withey. The contents of the book mainly revolved around the life of Abigail Adams, who became the most influential woman in Revolutionary America. This happened in large part due to being the wife of patriot John Adams, the nation's influential second president. A blurb on the back cover of the book describes their marriage as “an Eleanor and Franklin for the eighteenth century with one important difference: Their marriage worked.” Abigail kept the farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, bore six children, including two daughters who did not live, and maintained an interest in politics and current events. John Adams had spent years traveling, first

The reader is able to read these excerpts, and is able to capture the public and private sides of Abigail Adams, who was both an advocate of slavery emancipation and a flourishing feminist, who had advised her husband to “Remember the Ladies” while he outlined the laws of their new country. It seemed like she and John truly achieved a unity in their marriage that many married couples only dream of. I really loved learning how deep their respect was, as well as their love and need for each other. It was

Women also primarily learned from their mothers of all the responsibilities “that a competent eighteenth-century woman” should accept as her own (3). This would explain why “Abigail did not herself aspire to anything more than being a good wife and mother, but Abigail still believed women should be better educated (45–46). In Abigail’s mind, there was nothing wrong with being both. In this way Abigail Adams was a “prisoner of the times” (xiii). She could do little more than educate herself and her female relatives privately without harming her or her husband’s reputation. Withey characterizes Abigail Adams as having a deep sense of public duty. Abigail, as well as John Adams, spent the better part of ten years, separated, while John was in Congress. Withey concludes from this that the couple must have believed that “their own happiness was less important than the public good” (115). During John’s absences, Abigail’s time was taken up with caring for her children and the farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, alone. She spent a large portion of time writing her concerns down as letters to John and other friends and relatives. Most of her political life took place in these letters. She advised those she wrote to on politics, she wrote about the American Revolution and what was to become of the government if the colonists won, among multiple other topics. An