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Library of American Biography
Abigail Adams: An American Woman
While John Adams' career in law kept him away from his wife, Abigail, and their five children for long periods of time, Abigail wrote him hundreds of letters. These vivid and eloquent letters illuminate the daily life of a family during revolutionary Colonial times and speak of the exceptional character of our nation's second First Lady. Abigail Adams: An American Woman is the story of this woman, told by Charles Akers through the vivid legacy of Abigail Adams' letters. She was one of the first to speak up for women's rights, frequently calling on her husband to "remember the ladies" when forming his policies as president.Akers brings to life how Adams resolutely fought from the shadows of her husband's distinguished political career, at the same time developing one of the earliest voices of revolution among women.
Author Biography: Charles W. Akers is professor emeritus of history at Oakland University. In addition to Abigail Adams: An American Woman, he has also published Divine Politician: Samuel Cooper and the American Revolution in Boston and Bo McMillin: Man and Legend (with John W. Carter).
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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About the author
Charles W. Akers
4 books1 followerCharles Wesley Akers was an historian, author, and educator who taught at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan from 1966 until his retirement in 1995. A veteran of the United States Navy, Akers earned his master’s and doctorate degrees from Boston University.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
March 8, 2025
In the summer of 1759, a 24-year-old John Adams accompanied his friend Richard Cranch on a visit to the Smith household in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Cranch was there to visit the family’s eldest daughter Mary, to whom he was engaged. Adams was unimpressed with his friend’s future in-laws, writing disparagingly of his host, the Reverend William Smith, and dismissing the reverend’s three daughters as possessing neither the “fondness, nor this Tenderness” that he discerned in Hannah Quincy, the attractive young women whom he was attempting to woo at that time.
Five years later, Adams returned to that same house to be wed to Mary’s sister, Abigail. Their marriage would endure for over half a century, during which time Adams went from being a rising member of the Massachusetts colonial bar to a member of the Continental Congress, a diplomat for the rebellious states, the first vice president of the United States and George Washington’s successor as president. At every step in his ascent Abigail supported her husband and became his closest and most trusted advisor, all while raising their large family and maintaining their strained finances. Through both her example and her advocacy, as Charles Akers details in his concise account of her life, Adams was not just making her husband’s career possible, she was also seeking to define the role women could play in the new republic, one that she hoped could give greater scope to their capabilities than many of her contemporaries believed possible.
Abigail Adams’s achievements were all the more remarkable given the lack of opportunities available to her. Though raised in a household of bright, literate people, the young Abigail never received a formal education. As Akers makes clear, this made their choice of husbands vital, especially as marriage involved a sacrifice of autonomy and a subordination of interests. Here Abigail proved especially fortunate in her marriage to John, who was not only a man of ability but one who appreciated her formidable intellectual capabilities. Upon their marriage, they settled into the life of a young couple, with Abigail keeping house and raising their growing brood while John managed a thriving legal practice that often took him on the road.
Any hopes for a quiet life were soon disrupted by events. Living in Massachusetts put the Adamses at the heart of the growing tensions between the colony and their mother country. With John at the forefront of colonial activism, Abigail was left to tend to the family. Yet the letters they exchanged frequently – an invaluable resource of which Akers takes full advantage – gave her not just a front-row seat to the formation of the republic, but an opportunity to influence events available to few others. Akers sees through their correspondence a shared mind emerging over time between the two, one that gave Abigail a voice in events through her husband while simultaneously making her John’s most fervent partisan, and one uniquely well-informed to comment on events in her correspondence with others.
These letters, however were a poor substitute for John’s absence, which required Abigail to manage the full range of their family’s affairs while John was away serving the new nation, first in Congress, then abroad. It was not until John was selected as minister to France after independence was granted that Abigail was able to join him in Europe. As the wife of America’s representative to the courts of first Louis XVI, then George III, Abigail sought to define republican womanhood among the titled elites of Europe, an effort in which she especial pride in doing given the limited finances available to her. After four years abroad, the two of them returned home to public acclaim and an opportunity to occupy the second highest office of the land, putting her once more at the heart of her nation’s affairs.
Despite health problems that often kept her at their home in Quincy, over the next twelve years, Abigail Adams became intimately associated with national politics. With John in New York and Philadelphia, much of this was again through the steady stream of letters flowing between the two of them. Abigail’s influence peaked with her husband’s election as president in 1796, which catapulted her to the status of First Lady of the United States. Over the four years that followed, she set a distinctly different example from that of her predecessor, Martha, as she played an active (though still limited) role politically as well as socially. Akers even goes so far as to argue that her husband’s decision for a second term was based primarily upon her enjoyment of her role, only for his hopes for reelection thwarted by Federalist infighting and the nation’s turn towards the Democratic Republicans.
Perhaps surprisingly, Abigail held little bitterness towards Thomas Jefferson, possibly because of the longstanding friendship between the two of them. Her reconciliation with her husband’s political opponent and successor preceded John’s and likely paved the way for the subsequent renewal of the friendship between the two men. As such, it was just another example of the subtle yet significant legacy that Akers describes in his book. The range of her activities and the wealth of sources available in her correspondence is such that his coverage of her life at times can only provide a cursory coverage of her ideas and activities. Because of this his book serves best as an introduction to his fascinating subject, one that delineates the parameters of her many achievements and their enduring imprint upon our country.
Five years later, Adams returned to that same house to be wed to Mary’s sister, Abigail. Their marriage would endure for over half a century, during which time Adams went from being a rising member of the Massachusetts colonial bar to a member of the Continental Congress, a diplomat for the rebellious states, the first vice president of the United States and George Washington’s successor as president. At every step in his ascent Abigail supported her husband and became his closest and most trusted advisor, all while raising their large family and maintaining their strained finances. Through both her example and her advocacy, as Charles Akers details in his concise account of her life, Adams was not just making her husband’s career possible, she was also seeking to define the role women could play in the new republic, one that she hoped could give greater scope to their capabilities than many of her contemporaries believed possible.
Abigail Adams’s achievements were all the more remarkable given the lack of opportunities available to her. Though raised in a household of bright, literate people, the young Abigail never received a formal education. As Akers makes clear, this made their choice of husbands vital, especially as marriage involved a sacrifice of autonomy and a subordination of interests. Here Abigail proved especially fortunate in her marriage to John, who was not only a man of ability but one who appreciated her formidable intellectual capabilities. Upon their marriage, they settled into the life of a young couple, with Abigail keeping house and raising their growing brood while John managed a thriving legal practice that often took him on the road.
Any hopes for a quiet life were soon disrupted by events. Living in Massachusetts put the Adamses at the heart of the growing tensions between the colony and their mother country. With John at the forefront of colonial activism, Abigail was left to tend to the family. Yet the letters they exchanged frequently – an invaluable resource of which Akers takes full advantage – gave her not just a front-row seat to the formation of the republic, but an opportunity to influence events available to few others. Akers sees through their correspondence a shared mind emerging over time between the two, one that gave Abigail a voice in events through her husband while simultaneously making her John’s most fervent partisan, and one uniquely well-informed to comment on events in her correspondence with others.
These letters, however were a poor substitute for John’s absence, which required Abigail to manage the full range of their family’s affairs while John was away serving the new nation, first in Congress, then abroad. It was not until John was selected as minister to France after independence was granted that Abigail was able to join him in Europe. As the wife of America’s representative to the courts of first Louis XVI, then George III, Abigail sought to define republican womanhood among the titled elites of Europe, an effort in which she especial pride in doing given the limited finances available to her. After four years abroad, the two of them returned home to public acclaim and an opportunity to occupy the second highest office of the land, putting her once more at the heart of her nation’s affairs.
Despite health problems that often kept her at their home in Quincy, over the next twelve years, Abigail Adams became intimately associated with national politics. With John in New York and Philadelphia, much of this was again through the steady stream of letters flowing between the two of them. Abigail’s influence peaked with her husband’s election as president in 1796, which catapulted her to the status of First Lady of the United States. Over the four years that followed, she set a distinctly different example from that of her predecessor, Martha, as she played an active (though still limited) role politically as well as socially. Akers even goes so far as to argue that her husband’s decision for a second term was based primarily upon her enjoyment of her role, only for his hopes for reelection thwarted by Federalist infighting and the nation’s turn towards the Democratic Republicans.
Perhaps surprisingly, Abigail held little bitterness towards Thomas Jefferson, possibly because of the longstanding friendship between the two of them. Her reconciliation with her husband’s political opponent and successor preceded John’s and likely paved the way for the subsequent renewal of the friendship between the two men. As such, it was just another example of the subtle yet significant legacy that Akers describes in his book. The range of her activities and the wealth of sources available in her correspondence is such that his coverage of her life at times can only provide a cursory coverage of her ideas and activities. Because of this his book serves best as an introduction to his fascinating subject, one that delineates the parameters of her many achievements and their enduring imprint upon our country.
April 12, 2012
Abigail Adams (1744 – 1818) was the wife of the First Vice President and Second President of the United States, John Adams (1735 -1826), and the mother of John Quincy Adams, the Sixth President of the United States (though she did not live to see him attain that position). This biography of her shows how she was an influential woman of her time, as an intelligent woman who respected her spouse and who conceived her main duty as that of supporting her husband in his work and raising their children to be virtuous, moral, and worthy sons and daughter of the new country.
Born as Abigail Smith, the second daughter in a family of three daughters and one son (her mother had been a Quincy), she lived the typical life of a daughter in a well-to-do Boston-area family, in that the boys were tutored and eventually sent to Harvard, while the girls were not so educated. However, Abigail and her sisters made good use of all of the books in the family library, and were also interested in the political doings of New England. At the age of 20 she married John Adams, who was some nine years older than her; he was an up-and-coming lawyer with a deep sense of civic responsibility to Massachusetts. (He was the lawyer who defended the British soldiers accused in the 1770 Boston Massacre.) One of the Founding Fathers, he spent much time away from home while Abigail raised their children and ran all the household affairs. Their marriage was very much a meeting of the minds; he valued her intelligence and opinions, and she welcomed that he did respect her intelligence and opinions.
Abigail had never traveled more than some 50 miles from the Boston area before 1784, when she and her daughter joined her husband and her eldest son, John Quincy, at her husband’s diplomatic post in Paris. After 1785 she filled the role of wife of the first U.S. minister to the Court of St. James (Britain). The family returned to Massachusetts in 1788, but the election of John Adams to the Vice-Presidency made their rented house in Philadelphia (then the seat of the government) a center of entertaining. This pattern continued with Adams’ election to the Presidency in 1796. While she did hang laundry in the unfinished East Room of the White House in Washington when the government moved to that location in 1800, they only lived in the White House for three months before the election of Thomas Jefferson as the third President, at which point the Adams family gratefully returned to retirement in Massachusetts.
Abigail was a proponent of women’s rights, primarily in the area of education. She averred that it was not fair to not educate girls, who would then grow up to be mothers who were expected to educate their sons in early childhood. She was also a very prolific letter writer; besides the hundreds of letters written to her sisters and other correspondents, there are some twelve hundred letters of the correspondence between Abigail and John Adams, revealing both her deference to her husband and her penetrating intelligence and grasp of political realities.
I loved reading this short book; Abigail Adams was indeed a product of her time and place, but she made the most of what her opportunities were, and is a worthy Founding Mother of this nation of ours.
Born as Abigail Smith, the second daughter in a family of three daughters and one son (her mother had been a Quincy), she lived the typical life of a daughter in a well-to-do Boston-area family, in that the boys were tutored and eventually sent to Harvard, while the girls were not so educated. However, Abigail and her sisters made good use of all of the books in the family library, and were also interested in the political doings of New England. At the age of 20 she married John Adams, who was some nine years older than her; he was an up-and-coming lawyer with a deep sense of civic responsibility to Massachusetts. (He was the lawyer who defended the British soldiers accused in the 1770 Boston Massacre.) One of the Founding Fathers, he spent much time away from home while Abigail raised their children and ran all the household affairs. Their marriage was very much a meeting of the minds; he valued her intelligence and opinions, and she welcomed that he did respect her intelligence and opinions.
Abigail had never traveled more than some 50 miles from the Boston area before 1784, when she and her daughter joined her husband and her eldest son, John Quincy, at her husband’s diplomatic post in Paris. After 1785 she filled the role of wife of the first U.S. minister to the Court of St. James (Britain). The family returned to Massachusetts in 1788, but the election of John Adams to the Vice-Presidency made their rented house in Philadelphia (then the seat of the government) a center of entertaining. This pattern continued with Adams’ election to the Presidency in 1796. While she did hang laundry in the unfinished East Room of the White House in Washington when the government moved to that location in 1800, they only lived in the White House for three months before the election of Thomas Jefferson as the third President, at which point the Adams family gratefully returned to retirement in Massachusetts.
Abigail was a proponent of women’s rights, primarily in the area of education. She averred that it was not fair to not educate girls, who would then grow up to be mothers who were expected to educate their sons in early childhood. She was also a very prolific letter writer; besides the hundreds of letters written to her sisters and other correspondents, there are some twelve hundred letters of the correspondence between Abigail and John Adams, revealing both her deference to her husband and her penetrating intelligence and grasp of political realities.
I loved reading this short book; Abigail Adams was indeed a product of her time and place, but she made the most of what her opportunities were, and is a worthy Founding Mother of this nation of ours.
September 16, 2020
Abigail Adams was the wife of 2nd President John Adams, and mother of the 6th President, John Quincy Adams. But, she was also much more. She lived through the American Revolution and also the political chaos of afterwards- the splitting of the politics between Federalists and Republicans. She had children and cared for them and an estate while her husband John was away- and she supported him wholeheartedly and gave him advise. All of this is through letters that were saved by the family- thousands and thousands of letters to friends and family that is used to paint the picture of the life of this extraordinary woman.
April 2, 2019
Abigail Adams was a fascinating woman. I appreciate how Ackers tried to present Abigail in her own historical context, rather than superimposing a modern lens on her life and opinions.
February 5, 2022
One of the best accounts of Abagail Adams' life I have read yet. Easy to digest but extremely informative. I thoroughly enjoyed this book!
September 10, 2022
Historical look at the wife of our President John Adams and her influence on that time period
December 25, 2024
I'm not usually a non-fiction reader, but I had to read this one for a class and it was REALLY good. Abigail Adams was an amazing woman. This was a great read.
December 10, 2025
Terrific book about the life and times of Abigail Adams, wife and mother of presidents. This was much more interesting and personal than I expected.
October 11, 2013
An indepth passage into republican womanhood and revolutionary America, Abigail Adams paradoxically represents or embodies a woman,or, more importantly, a person, who revolutionized and challenged the basic or fundamental purpose of women. As First Lady, she constantly became a beacon of comfort and knowledge for her husband John Adams and her eldest son John Quincy Adams as they progressed into the advent of Revolutionary America, into the politics of forming a new nation, and the challenging, yet solemn years of the nation's existence as a seaparate entity or government. Maxine Hong Kingston would agree that Abigail constantly "crossed lines not delineated in space," while simultaneously involving herself and dedicating her time, energy, and resources towards the betterment of her husband and the growth of a nation. I find this source to be invaluable in its content and depiction of not only Abigail Adams, but also of a revolutionary woman. Akers describes Adams to be a woman who defied the natural tendencies of republican women, yet at the same time shows her to divulge in the intellectual conversations that are clearly honed or sharpened by the thinkers and innovaters of the Englightenment. I think everyone and anyone would benefit from this insightful work.
December 21, 2011
A terrific portrait of one of this nation’s “founding mothers,” a strong woman not afraid to share her own thoughts and opinions, but one who also stood by her husband and supported him throughout his long political career. The separations Abigail had to endure from John only made their marriage stronger and relationship sweeter. Though admittedly not as educated as she would like to be, Abigail nevertheless left behind a wonderfully rich written record, mostly through letters, of life at the beginnings of American independence. Her candor and wit are on full display throughout this biography.
Favorite quotes: “Is it not better to die the last of British freemen than live the first of British slaves.” – Abigail Adams
“When will Mankind be convinced that true Religion is from the Heart, between Man and his creator, and not the imposition of Man or creeds and tests?” – Abigail Adams
Favorite quotes: “Is it not better to die the last of British freemen than live the first of British slaves.” – Abigail Adams
“When will Mankind be convinced that true Religion is from the Heart, between Man and his creator, and not the imposition of Man or creeds and tests?” – Abigail Adams
February 2, 2016
Good introduction to Abigail's life. Like most books of this kind, its main purpose is to give you jumping off points for deeper reading elsewhere. Maybe it is unavoidable in biography this short, but Akers makes assertions which sound reasonable and might even be true, but are unsupported in the text. For example, he claims that Abigail and her sisters always maintained a close relationship based as much on a common feminine outlook as on blood ties. How does Akers know this? How does he assess how much of their closeness is based on commmon feminine outlook and how much is from blood ties? Akers doesn't say. Maybe a more in-depth biography of Abigail makes this clear. In Akers's book, we have to take his word for it.
May 15, 2013
Akers did a great job depicting the details of Abigail Adams' life from childhood until her death. Sometimes the book seemed to be overly-elaborate on details that were irrelevant or repetitive, but that's probably because I'm not particularly a fan of colonial persons of a "high-power/influence" stature such as herself. Nevertheless, I read this book for my college history class and it provided me with a vast amount of information I was required to learn from her life and the time period. In sum, the book does a good job expressing great deal, it just might get boring from time to time.
June 23, 2014
As a book it was very broad. This was a short biography that (I think) is really only meant to give the reader a taste of what Abigail Adams was like. The book was fairly dry and read more like a timeline than a narrative but gives the reader enough to formulate a picture of the woman. I wonder how another biography would compare to this one.
As for the subject matter, I feel that I should write a paper on it to truly convey my opinions. I need to read a bit more about her, but I definitely made some judgments on Abigail Adams.
As for the subject matter, I feel that I should write a paper on it to truly convey my opinions. I need to read a bit more about her, but I definitely made some judgments on Abigail Adams.
April 18, 2009
I've always loved Abigail Adams--what an amazing woman! She's my favorite First Lady! Akers has a very readable style, but sometimes adds his opinion a little too freely. I liked how he separated her (as much as is possible) from her husband and told her story. Abigail's life leaves a wonderful legacy of what it means to be an American woman (despite not being perfect! :) )!
November 3, 2017
I absolutely loved learning about our former First Lady. It took me a little longer than usual to get into the book, but once I was able to truly get away from distractions I found her fascinating. The writing was just okay and at times a little dry, but very informative for someone, like myself, with no real knowledge of her outside of her being the wife of President Adams.
June 10, 2009
What an interesting and incredible woman and one of the first feminist striving for equality among a male dominated world. She went through a lot including losing 3 or her children. She's an inspiration to me and a wonderful hero.
October 6, 2014
I had a hard time getting into this book...but it had alot of history and ended up being pretty good.
February 8, 2009
Wonderful book that explores not only Abagail's life, but life for women in colonial America.
February 27, 2009
A biography of the wife of the second President, John Adams, and mother of John Quincy Adams, with information taken from letters written by her.
August 31, 2009
Pretty good introduction to the life of Abigail Adams.
August 22, 2015
A biography of John Adams must include quite a bit about Abigail, but she surely deserves her own volume. Akers does it very well.
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February 26, 2016Good book regarding Abigail Adam's life and her contributions to the American republic- specifically in the progress and ideals regarding females
January 15, 2022
What can I say? I'm not a fan of history.
Biased review.
Biased review.
January 11, 2008
Very interesting chick
Read
November 16, 2017its bad
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews