Abigail Adams

Abigail Smith was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1744. She was educated at home, reading widely in history and philosophy, and in 1764 she married John Adams, with whom she would raise five children and conduct one of the great correspondences in American letters.

While John was away at the Continental Congress she managed the family farm and finances, reported on events in Boston, and pressed him on the limits of the political order being built. In a letter of March 1776 she asked him to remember the ladies and not to place unlimited power in the hands of husbands, a demand that made her an early voice for women's standing in the republic.

She later joined him in Europe and in the new capital, where she observed politics at close range and wrote with unsparing clarity about the leaders around her. She died at Quincy in 1818, and her letters remain among the fullest records of the founding era.

Wikipedia