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Abigail Adams, by Woody Holton
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Abigail Adams offers a fresh perspective on the famous events of Adams's life, and along the way, Woody Holton, a renowned historian of the American Revolution, takes on numerous myths about the men and women of the founding era. But the book also demonstrates that domestic dramas-from unplanned pregnancies to untimely deaths-could be just as heartbreaking, significant, and inspiring as the actions of statesmen and soldiers. A special focus of the book is Adams's complex relationships: with her mother, sisters, and children; with her husband's famous contemporaries; and with Phoebe, one of her father's slaves. At the same time that John exhibited his own diplomatic skills on a better-known canvas, Abigail struggled to prevent the charitable gifts she gave her sisters from coming between them. In a departure from the persistently upbeat tone of most Adams biographies, Holton's work shows how frequently her life was marred by tragedy, making this the deepest, most humanistic portrayal ever published. Using the matchless trove of Adams family manuscripts, the author steps back to allow Abigail to respond to her many losses in her own words. Holton reveals that Abigail Adams sharply disagreed with her husband's financial decisions and assumed control of the family's money herself-earning them a tidy fortune through her shrewd speculations (this during a time when married women were not permitted to own property). And he shows that her commitment to women's equality and education was intense and explicitly expressed and practical, from the more than two thousand letters she wrote over her lifetime to her final will (written in defiance of legislation prohibiting married women from bequeathing property). Alternately witty, poignant, and uplifting, Holton's narrative sheds new light on one of America's best-loved but least-understood icons.
- Sales Rank: #129529 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Free Press
- Published on: 2009-11-03
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.33" h x 6.54" w x 9.30" l, 1.80 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 512 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
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
"Insightful, sensitive, and original.... Here is a bounty of fine-grained social history as well as a feast of language, from the eye and the voice of a historian-poet." ---Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Well researched. Well written
By bookish nan
Having read many books about leaders of the American Revolution, it was very interesting to read about a well-known woman. I learned a great deal about Abigail as a woman of her time. There was considerably more to her than her reminder to John "to remember the ladies." This book would be enjoyable to anyone with an interest in colonial and early U.S. history. Although some reviews criticized the extensive use of her letters, I felt they lent an authentic voice to the writing. I have a greater appreciation of the woman and her time.
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