Abigail Adams : An American Woman

by Akers, Charles W.

• ISBN13: 9780321043702
• ISBN10: 0321043707
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-01-01
• Publisher: Longman

Summary

The titles in the Library of American Biography Series make ideal supplements for American History Survey courses or other courses in American history where figures in history are explored. Paperback, brief, and inexpensive, each interpretative biography in this series focuses on a figure whose actions and ideas significantly influenced the course of American history and national life. At the same time, each biography relates the life of its subject to the broader themes and developments of the times. Professor Akers. . . brings his subject vividly to life. . . A fascinating portrait of the wife of one of America's greatest statesmen. -- New York Times

Table of Contents

Editor's Preface	ix
"You May Take Me" 1744--1764	1	(18)
"An Important Trust" 1764--1774	19	(16)
"Remember the Ladies" 1774--1776	35	(18)
"Bereft of My Better Half" 1776--1778	53	(16)
"Patriotism in the Female Sex" 1778--1784	69	(22)
"The Amaizing Difference" 1784--1785	91	(14)
"I Will Not Strike My Colours" 1785--1788	105	(20)
"In Their Proper Sphere" 1788--1792	125	(18)
"Tellegraph of the Mind" 1792--1797	143	(20)
"Fellow Labourer" 1797--1798	163	(18)
"What I Cannot Remedy" 1798--1801	181	(20)
"The Mother of Such a Son" 1801--1818	201	(20)
A Note on the Sources	221	(10)
Acknowledgments	231	(2)
Index	233

Excerpts

Editor's Preface The Europeans who crossed the Atlantic brought with them conventions about family life that endured long after their migration. Their children inherited beliefs and practices that defined the roles appropriate to each member; a network of communal institutions reinforced the pressures that induced each to play the assigned part. Religion, education, and the law sustained the expectations of what a father, a mother, a husband, a wife, and children should be and do. In 1776 the family of the New World was, in many ways, what it had been in the Old.Yet the circumstances of life in a wilderness generated subtle forces of change. Though Massachusetts was several generations away from the frontier, it was more remote still from London and had developed in a fashion of its own, so that husbands, wives, and children in that province stood toward one another in a relationship not precisely the same as that in England.Abigail Adams in her life exemplified what it meant to be a woman, an American, and a revolutionary of the transitional period between colonial status and independence. Her aspirations were not precisely the same as those either of her seventeenth-century ancestors or of nineteenth- and twentieth-century descendants. The role she defined for herself as a woman was that of a wife, but a role entirely the equal of her husband's --not the same but equal. As an American she discovered the uniqueness of her nation's ideas, conventions, and habits of behavior by contrast with those of the women of London and Paris. And as participant in the Revolution she explored the meaning of the ways in which the new woman of the New World would stand beside its new man. Articulate and introspective, she recorded in detail the exciting incidents that crowded her long life. Her records provided the materials for this book.Professor Akers was fortunate in his choice of a subject; Abigail Adams was fortunate in a biographer whose sensitive account brings her to life.Oscar Handlin