...remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

Abigail Adams wrote these lines in a private letter to her husband, John Adams, on March 31, 1776, while he was serving in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. As revolutionary leaders debated independence and the shape of new governments, Adams urged that women’s interests be considered in any new legal order. Her appeal reflects both the upheaval of the American Revolution and the realities of coverture in Anglo-American law, under which married women’s legal identities and property rights were largely subsumed under their husbands’. The letter is commonly remembered as her pointed request to “remember the ladies” during the founding moment.

The passage is a warning and a political argument: if the Revolution is justified as resistance to tyranny, then unchecked authority in the household is likewise suspect. Adams links women’s legal subordination to the broader revolutionary critique of arbitrary power, insisting that liberty cannot be selectively applied. Her rhetoric—“all Men would be tyrants if they could” and the threat to “foment a Rebellion”—uses the language of resistance to press for legal reform and representation. Even as a private letter, it has become emblematic of early American feminist consciousness and of the tensions between revolutionary ideals and the limited scope of rights in the new republic.