Abigail Adams: A Life

With a couple of notable exceptions, I agree with most of the reviews of Woody Holton's wonderful biography of Abigail Adams. The other 5 star reviews say it better than I, so I will try not to repeat too much.Holton's "Abigail Adams" was immensely readable as well as thought-provoking: for example, it made me wonder how many other women of that era felt the same as she did about women's rights, or the lack thereof? AA might not have been an anomaly, were we able to ever know. The obvious fact is, her letters to her husband and other family members were preserved because the Adams family was famous. It's interesting just to wonder, since it can never be discovered, how many other women felt exactly the same way, especially about the lack of education, legal rights (especially regarding abuse), and the inability to own anything in their own right? Her sisters obviously felt the same way, and it stands to reason that other women did too. However, some might not have had the type of husband or families that would even "permit" a discussion of these rights, much less "allow" her to handle monetary transactions and advise others as well. (Witness the one or two star reviews by people who even now feel threatened by the "feminist" from over two-hundred years ago). I would think that it would have taken a lot of courage to express those kind of beliefs during a time when women were little more than slaves. AA had a loving and mostly supportive husband, but others could have risked their lives for saying and doing the same things. It also makes me wonder if any of her direct descendants, male or female, were especially inspired enough by her ideas to try to change anything?Finally, I learned so much history of the lives of real people from reading her letters. This book, however, was not just the letters; I've read other bios of AA, and I particularly liked the way Prof Holton interpreted and explained them. I'm a lifelong history lover/reader and I agree with another reviewer that it's books like this one that should be assigned EARLY in school history classes (middle school, at least?) so that people will grow up wanting to learn about the history of our country and world! It is so interesting and exciting, everyone should read this book and others like it. Thank you Professor Holton!

If a time machine could take you back to Revolutionary Massachusetts and the early years of our republic, you might think the most interesting people you would meet would be George Washington, Joseph Warren, Paul Revere, Ben Franklin, etc., but you would be wrong. The most interesting person there would be Abigail Adams, the wife of future president John Adams. Holton does a excellent job bringing her to life, no doubt because he had several tons of original material to work with, including over two thousand surviving letters, journals, and diaries. Before telephones, literate people wrote a lot, to everyone they knew. The most revealing stuff, of course, is the correspondence between John and Abigail.Quibbles: One wishes Holton's prose would get up and dance occasionally, but it never does. One doubts he has it in him. Sadly, he surrendered to the feminists when choosing how to name his actors. He has an infuriating habit of calling both John and Abigail "Adams" and one must stop and make sure just which Adams he is talking about. He flops from husband to wife and back again in alternating paragraphs. His editor should have demanded that Holton refer to Abigail and John by their Christian names in the service of clarity, and we readers are the poorer because he didn't.

Abigail Adams was a woman ahead of the times yet was able to be successful within the considerable limitations society placed on women of her time. A success story for the ages.

Clearly, substantial research was performed but I felt like the author was making sporadic/frantic efforts to cover details upon details without having a Broad Vision. Therefore, I finished the book feeling very dissatisfied and my expectations unfilled. The writer fails to effectively provide clear insights into the evolving dynamics of her relationship with John and her unique contributions and roles. Abigail's personal evolution and special historical role sadly keep getting lost due to Holton's disorganized and overly detailed coverage of mundane family matters worthy of today's social media. The latter years of her life and John's (post Presidency) are inadequately covered in terms of how they were aging together and their historical legacy. I found Holton's use of modern cliches like "Tick him off" or "In her craw" to be totally inappropriate. Also, as another reviewer commented, his decision to frequently call both John and Abigail "Adams" often was needlessly confusing. The final chapter of the book was totally disappointing. Holton fails to leave the reader with any sense of dramatic or emotional feeling for Abigail's unique and noble life.....Robert esq.

Unique among "founding fathers/mothers" of the United States, this is the story of Abigail Adams, wife of our second president, mother of our sixth, and great grandmother to an additional generation of diplomats. The daughter of a minister whose schooling was minimal, she strove to improve education for girls and an end to coverture, the legal precept that married women ceased to be legal entities and become chattel. Although she spent many years as a single parent, (on several occasions her husband took the oldest boys to Europe on his diplomatic missions,) she managed the family farm, the children's education, became an entrepreneur, and made more money than did her husband did, until he was elected President. Not only did she amass the wealth, but she earmarked a portion of it as her money, and successfully willed it to her children. If those were not enough accomplishments, she and John Adams wrote thousands of letters to each other. Abigail also supplemented the incomes of her two sisters, and her own children as adults.One can hardly curtail one's admiration for this woman. The biographer writes with a sense of wonder at all these achievements. His scholarship is remarkable in its thoroughness.

As much an endlessly engrossing biography of Abigail Adams herself, this is also an insightful look at the lives of women in the Revolutionary era. With no political or legal standing in their own right many women chafed against the strictures of the era, and Abigail Adams was a classic, perhaps a defining, example of this. Her 'Remember the Ladies' letter to husband John is perhaps the best known example of her early campaigning for the rights of women, but it was by no means the only or the last.True to this, John Adams is very much a background figure in this biography. When writing of the wives of powerful and important men, too often the primary figure herself tends to get lost, obscured not only by the force and vigour of the male characters, but by the lack of documentary evidence available. It is fortunate then that Abigail and John were both great letter-writers, often separated for months on end by John's political career, and that Abigail did not destroy her correspondence upon her death, unlike George Washington's wife Martha.Abigail comes across an immensely likeable figure and one modern audiences can immediately sympathise with, with her frustration at the lack of educational opportunities for women, her 'sauciness' and independent will, her financial transactions and political opinions. She lived in a truly remarkable era, and it's as much as a testament to her own character as the skill of the author that the Revolution itself pales in interest to Abigail's own life, much as the two were inseparable intertwined.