Quote by Abigail Adams: “Remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”

While men were designing a new nation built on freedom, Adams reminded her husband that women deserved to be part of that vision. She was one of the first Americans to formally ask that women be given rights under the new law — and was largely ignored.

Adams wrote this in a letter to her husband John Adams on March 31, 1776, as the Continental Congress was debating independence. The letter was a direct appeal to include women's rights in the foundations of the new American republic — an appeal that went unheeded.

American writer and advocate for women's rights who was the wife of President John Adams and mother of President John Quincy Adams. Her letters to her husband during the founding era are among the most significant documents of early American intellectual life.