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In this new, vivid, nuanced portrait, now in paperback, prize-winning historian Woody Holton uses original sources and letters for the first time in a sweeping reinterpretation of Adams's life story and of women's roles in the creation of the republic.
In this vivid new biography of Abigail Adams, the most illustrious woman of the founding era, Bancroft Award–winning historian Woody Holton offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Adams’s life story and of women’s roles in the creation of the republic.
Using previously overlooked documents from numerous archives, Abigail Adams shows that the wife of the second president of the United States was far more charismatic and influential than historians have realized. One of the finest writers of her age, Adams passionately campaigned for women’s education, denounced sex discrimination, and matched wits not only with her brilliant husband, John, but with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. When male Patriots ignored her famous appeal to “Remember the Ladies,” she accomplished her own personal declaration of independence: Defying centuries of legislation that assigned married women’s property to their husbands, she amassed a fortune in her own name.
Adams’s life story encapsulates the history of the founding era, for she defined herself in relation to the people she loved or hated (she was never neutral), a cast of characters that included her mother and sisters; Benjamin Franklin and James Lovell, her husband’s bawdy congressional colleagues; Phoebe Abdee, her father’s former slave; her financially naïve husband; and her son John Quincy.
At once epic and intimate, Abigail Adams, sheds light on a complicated, fascinating woman, one of the most beloved figures of American history.
- Sales Rank: #38337 in Books
- Published on: 2010-06-01
- Released on: 2010-06-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.30" w x 6.00" l, 1.11 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 512 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. While Abigail Adams has always been viewed as one of the most illustrious of America's founding mothers, University of Richmond historian Holton (Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution), drawing on the rich collection of Adams's letters and other manuscripts, paints a strong-minded woman whose boldness developed in the context of the revolutionary era in which she lived. Holton offers a captivating portrait of a reformer both inside and outside the home. Best known for exhorting her husband, John Adams, to remember the ladies in devising America's new political system, she also, Holton has discovered, wrote a will leaving most of her property to her granddaughters, in defiance of the law that made her husband the master of all she owned. Furthermore, she was a businesswoman and invested her own earnings in ways John did not always approve of. Tracing Adams's life from her childhood as the daughter of a poor parson to her long and sometimes uncertain courtship with John, her joys and sorrows as a mother and her life as the wife of a president, Holton's superb biography shows us a three-dimensional Adams as a forward-thinking woman with a mind of her own. (Nov. 3)
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Review
"Holton... allows Abigail's voice to radiate off the page; the biography grips the reader from the beginning tale of Abigail writing her own will. A wonderful book for revolutionary history buffs, women's studies majors, and biography lovers." --Library Journal, starred review
“Holton vividly captures the brilliance, charm, and spunk of Abigail Adams, and shows why she deserves her place at the table along with her husband John and the other Founders. A must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation.” --Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
"Captivating... biography and social history. Through his engaging prose, Holton provides a nuanced picture of Adams as representative of many women of her era yet also ahead of her time." --Journal of American History
About the Author
Abner Linwood "Woody" Holton, III, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Richmond in Virginia and is a member of the Richmond Research Institute. He has published two award-winning books: Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007), a finalist for the National Book Award; and Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999). Holton received his B.A. in English from the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. in History from Duke, and is currently an associate professor at the University of Richmond. Holton has received numerous awards, including three from the Organization of American Historians (OAH). His first book, Forced Founders (in which he argued that Jefferson, Washington, and other Virginia gentlemen rebelled against Britain partly in order to regain control of Native Americans, slaves, and small farmers), received the OAH’s prestigious Merle Curti award for social history. In 2006, the OAH named Holton one of its Distinguished Lecturers. Holton’s article, “‘Divide et Impera’: The Tenth Federalist in a Wider Sphere,” was selected by a panel of distinguished scholars for publication in the OAH’s Best American History Essays 2006. Holton received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the 2008-09 academic year to write ABIGAIL ADAMS and today lives in Richmond with his wife Gretchen Schoel (the director of an organization combating prejudice against Arabs and Muslims) and their daughter Beverly.
Most helpful customer reviews
67 of 69 people found the following review helpful.
Holton does justice to Abigail's life story
By Bookreporter
Abigail Adams is perhaps best remembered for requesting that her husband, the not-yet-president John Adams, "remember the ladies" as he helped forge a new government in 1776. This famous private letter has turned Adams into a feminist icon, and while here she may have been specifically referring to domestic violence, in other letters she expressed what is often seen as a progressive, enlightened view that women should be equally educated with men and allowed to engage in business and control their own finances. This aspect of Adams's biography is well-known. But less so are her conflicted ideas on religion, African-Americans, money making, Europe, politics and family. In ABIGAIL ADAMS, by American history scholar Woody Holton, readers are given a vivid and complete picture of America's second first lady.
Abigail Smith was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1744, the daughter of a parson. She was raised by her overprotective parents but spent a lot of time with her more affectionate maternal grandmother. Along with her brother and two sisters, she had a typical childhood. She was atypical, though, in the sense that she yearned for an education forbidden to her, one of science and critical thinking in addition to literature and language. She managed to find ways to more fully educate herself through the study of languages and by reading whatever she could get her hands on.
Just before her 20th birthday, she married John Adams, a lawyer family friend nine years her senior. Though one would expect her concern with education and worldly topics to end at that point, she remained true to her belief that girls should be educated as boys are and that women possess intelligence, reason and dignity.
However, as Holton shows, Adams was not a feminist by today's standards. Her ideas of gender were complicated; she asserted that education and business opportunities were important to girls and women, but also believed that propriety, decorum and fashion were important as well. Her own business dealings were often done behind her husband's back, and at times those dealings verged on illegal. She was usually less than generous about African-Americans and foreigners or immigrants in her private letters, though she was always charitable and mostly kind.
It is the contradictions that make Adams so fascinating and Holton's book so interesting. This is not a romantic or idealized view of this American icon, but an honest, refreshing exploration of a remarkable woman who at once personified and challenged the perceptions of women of her time and embodied many of the changing mores and deeply rooted beliefs of the foundering generation of the United States.
Adams's tale gets all the more rich as she finds herself moving up in the political world. She spends years in Europe as the wife of a diplomat and comes home to be the wife of the first vice president and second president of the new nation. But while the politics and history are important, it is as a wife, sister, daughter, friend, mother and thinker that Adams is most compelling. And Holton does a terrific job explaining the ways in which she was a product of her time and place and how she was unique and trailblazing. The relationship between Adams and her husband is tender and relatable and their exchanges surprising in their language, passion and thoughtfulness. These sections often make for some of the best reading in the biography.
Holton's prose is at once light and scholarly; the details and facts are clearly presented, but he lets the story unfold in an entertaining way and allows the main characters to speak for themselves, stepping in to elucidate, explain and occasionally question the material.
ABIGAIL ADAMS is a must read for those interested in American history but will find many happy readers among those who thought historical biographies had to be stuffy or dull. Adams was a true partner with her powerful husband, a well-read and outspoken advocate for women, a financial risk-taker, and loving mother and sister. Holton does justice to her life story.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
33 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
Fun, original, well written
By a reader
Everybody knows the name Abigail Adams but few people know much about her. The John Adams mini-series and the book it was based on hardly tell anything about her. Boy, was she interesting. Woody Holton doesn't just take us through her whole life but provides tons of interesting details. The part I found the most fascinating was the stuff about her financial wheeling and dealing. She was quite the savvy investor. And she even wrote her own will--at a time when women couldn't legally pass along property--to make sure her assets were divided how she wanted them. She was quite the feisty feminist icon. I thought Holton did a great job of bringing Abigail alive in all her complexity--not just the financial speculator, but the wife, the mother, the political advisor. After reading this its hard not to think that Mrs. Adams should be added to the pantheon of "Founding Fathers" as well. Not just as an early feminist hero but as an important player in her own right. The other thing I liked about this book was how it really placed Abigail in the ebb and flow of the events of the Revolution and John's presidency. Holton's a real historian, with years of studying the Revolution behind him, so he's able to bring context that other of the biographies lack. As you'd expect from someone who was a national book award finalist, Abigail Adams is smoothly written and easy to read. He's especially good at explaining complicated business deals in a straightforward way.
This book is great for anyone interested in the Revolution or anyone looking for a good read about an important founding mother.
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
a spellbinding life story
By hmf22
Abigail Adams was all over the place in the Revolutionary era, her life entwining not only with that of her husband John, her son John Quincy Adams, and her daughter-in-law Louisa Catherine Adams, but also with those of Benjamin Franklin, George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, Mercy Otis Warren, George III and Queen Charlotte, and other famous men and women, some she admired and some she deprecated. In this brisk and engaging new biography, Woody Holton highlights Adams's keen observation of the public events and public figures of her day, but even more importantly, he shines a steady light on the recesses of her private life, her relationships with her sisters and brother, husband, children, and grandchildren, her economic ventures, her daily activities, and her private dreams and values.
Much of Holton's analysis focuses on two intertwined themes: Abigail Adams as economic agent and Abigail Adams as commentator and critic of women's roles in society. Holton convincingly argues that Adams was responsible for managing and shepherding much of the Adams family's wealth and that her investments turned a better profit than her husband's investments did. The final chapter features an intriguing account of Adams's will, which she used to endow granddaughters, nieces, and other female relations (some already married) with modest economic portfolios of their own. Throughout her life, Adams testified to her concern for women's education-- she believed that the revolution in girls' schooling was one of the most important social changes of her lifetime-- and her wish that women might have more of a voice in society. Yet, as Holton notes, she stopped short of being a feminist in the modern sense and always insisted on wives' ultimate subordination to their husbands' judgment, even when that principle came hard for her.
There are a few curious ellipses in this book. Holton says very little about Adams's Christian faith, even as he acknowledges that it was important to her, and relatively little about sexuality (aside from a speculative comment that she may have employed some form of contraception), even though Abigail and John's letters, with their passionate undertones, by-play about the prospect of infidelity during their long separations, and allusions to Abigail's evident appreciation of the sexual magnetism of one of her daughter's suitors, would seem to provide ample material for a more considered discussion. But on the topics on which he chooses to focus, particularly Adams's economic ventures and relations with her extended family, Holton is incomparable. I breezed through the 400-page book in 48 hours; I simply couldn't put it down. Highly recommended.
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