---
title: 250 Years After 'Remember the Ladies', American Women Are Still 144 Years From Being Remembered as Equals
description: Abigail Adams wrote 'Remember the Ladies' in 1776. Is 'behind every successful man is a woman' still true in 2026? Her letters and the latest data.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-10-25T11:20:12.450Z
updated: 2026-10-25T11:22:48.660Z
canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/abigail-adams-remember-the-ladies
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-10838691.webp
categories: Family & Relationships
content_type: Feature
region: United States
publication: Rich Dad Magazine
schema_type: Article
about:
  - type: Person
    name: Abigail Adams
    description: Abigail Adams (1744 to 1818) was the wife of John Adams, the second president of the United States, and the mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth. Her letters, including the 1776 'Remember the Ladies' letter, made the case for women's rights, education for women and an end to slavery.
    jobTitle: First Lady of the United States (1797 to 1801)
    sameAs:
      - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_Adams
---

On 25th October 1764, in her father's parsonage at Weymouth, Massachusetts, a 19-year-old minister's daughter named Abigail Smith married a 28-year-old country lawyer called John Adams. Today is the 262nd anniversary of that wedding, and you can still read what the couple said to each other. More than 1,000 of their letters survive at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Together they record a marriage that ran a farm, raised a president and, for long stretches, helped run a revolution by post.

Abigail had no formal schooling. She read her way through her father's library and grew into one of the sharpest political minds of her generation, then America's second First Lady.

The old saying holds that behind every successful man stands a woman, and Abigail Adams is usually offered as proof. Her letters make a stronger case that she stood beside her husband, and on several questions well ahead of him. Her story also gives you a clean way to test whether the saying still holds at the end of 2026.

## She ran the farm and the family while John helped build a country

John left for the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774. Over the following decade, Congress and then diplomatic posts in France, the Netherlands and Britain kept him away for years at a time. Abigail stayed in Braintree with four young children, a working farm, tenants, debts and a war on her doorstep.

On 17th June 1775 she climbed Penn's Hill with her seven-year-old son, John Quincy, and watched Charlestown burn during the Battle of Bunker Hill. In the summer of 1776 she took the children into Boston to be inoculated against smallpox, a risky procedure at the time. When wartime shortages hit Massachusetts, she asked John to buy her a bundle of pins in Philadelphia, as local demand for them had become desperate.

She also handled money with a skill her husband lacked. Abigail bought government securities and land, and [kept funds she regarded as her own](https://richdadmagazine.com/article/gender-pay-gap-and-how-women-fight-for-financial-independence) at a time when a married woman's property legally belonged to her husband. In 1816 she wrote a will leaving her assets mainly to the women in her family. The document had no legal force, and John honoured it anyway.

She signed many of her wartime letters 'Portia', after the outspoken wife of Brutus in Roman history.

## 'Remember the ladies' was a threat as well as a request

On 31st March 1776, three months before independence, Abigail wrote the letter that made her famous. John was in Philadelphia among the delegates shaping a new nation's laws. She told him she longed to hear that independence had been declared, and then added:

'In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.'

She went further. If women were ignored, she wrote, 'we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.' She had taken the colonists' own complaint against King George III and turned it on the men making it.

John's reply of 14th April 1776 opened: 'As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh.' He joked that his wife had exposed 'another tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest' that had grown discontented. He did not take up her proposal. American women waited 144 years, until the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, for the national vote.

## Her letters pushed further than her husband's on education and slavery

On 14th August 1776 Abigail wrote the line her readers have loved most ever since: 'If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.' She reminded John that mothers instil a child's first principles, so a nation that wanted educated citizens needed educated women. John agreed with her in writing eleven days later.

Two years earlier, she had written to him about a rumoured plot by enslaved men in Boston. Instead of fear, she offered a verdict: 'I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.' She wrote those words on 22nd September 1774, nine years before Massachusetts courts ended slavery in the state.

She acted on it. In February 1797, weeks before John's inauguration as president, a neighbour named Faxon called at her house in Quincy. A Black teenager in her household, James, had enrolled at the local evening school, and Faxon said the other apprentices refused to sit with him. Abigail had already taught James to read and write in her own parlour. She told Faxon that James was as free as any of the other boys and asked whether the colour of his face should cost him an education. Then she sent him off with a message for the objectors: 'tell them Mr Faxon that I hope we shall all go to Heaven together.' Faxon laughed, and she heard no more about it.

## Her critics called her 'Mrs President', and she was not always on the right side

When John became president in 1797, Abigail was 52 and his closest political adviser. His opponents resented her for it. Albert Gallatin, the Republican congressman who later served as Treasury Secretary, sneered that she was 'Mrs President', not of the United States but of a faction.

Her influence was not always benign. Abigail backed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which allowed the government to deport foreigners and prosecute newspaper editors who attacked the president. Several opposition editors went to jail. Historians count the acts among the worst decisions of the Adams presidency, and her private letters show her urging them on.

In November 1800 she became the first First Lady to live in the President's House in Washington, then so unfinished that she hung the family laundry to dry in the East Room. Abigail died of typhoid fever at home in Quincy on 28th October 1818, aged 73, after 54 years of marriage. John told friends he wished he could lie down beside her and die too. Their son John Quincy Adams became the sixth president in 1825.

## The saying started as a tribute to mothers and became a feminist slogan

'Behind every great man is a great woman' has no single author. Versions crediting a man's mother appeared in American print in the 1880s. The form most people know turned up in a Texas newspaper in February 1946, when a college footballer named Meryll Frost said that while he was not a great man, he had a great woman behind him. Feminists in the 1960s and 1970s adopted the line, and in 1985 Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin recorded a hit built on the idea that women no longer needed to stand behind anyone. A 1980s retort summed up the mood: behind every successful woman is herself.

The Adams letters expose the flaw in the original saying. Abigail was not standing behind John. She managed the money he could not, held the home front he had left and pressed him on rights he had not considered. The word 'behind' turns a partner into scenery.

## At the end of 2026 the support is still real, and so is the gap

On the numbers, the saying still describes the world. The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2026, published on 16th September, found the global gap 69.2% closed, with [full parity 120 years away at the current pace](https://richdadmagazine.com/article/legal-reform-progress-masks-300-year-wait-for-global-gender-equality). Women's political empowerment stands at 22.1%, a gap the Forum projects will take 194 years to close, and progress towards parity in leadership has stalled for a fourth consecutive year. North America is on course for parity in 144 years, the same span that separated Abigail's letter from the Nineteenth Amendment.

Women lead just 28 countries and hold 27.4% of parliamentary seats worldwide, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union and UN Women count at 1st January 2026. In the United States, a record 56 women now run Fortune 500 companies, 11.2% of the list and up from 7.4% in 2020. Men still run the other 444 of America's largest businesses.

The role Abigail played in 1776, running the household so a spouse could build a public career, still falls mainly to women. US Labor Department figures showed [212,000 women aged 20 and over leaving the workforce](https://richdadmagazine.com/article/gender-pay-gap-2025-women-working-more-hours) between January and the summer of 2025, while 44,000 men joined it. Among women aged 25 to 44 with a child under five, labour force participation fell from 69.7% to 66.9% in the first six months of that year, as office mandates returned and childcare costs rose.

A woman at the top does not guarantee anyone remembers the ladies, either. When Sanae Takaichi became Japan's first female prime minister on 21st October 2025, the Associated Press reported that she had resisted measures for women's advancement during her political career.

So the saying survives in its least flattering sense: most successful men still have someone, usually a woman, [carrying the domestic load that frees their time](https://richdadmagazine.com/article/from-kitchen-sink-to-corner-office-how-women-rewrote-the-rules-of-their-lives-in-the-last-50-years). What has changed is who carries it. Husbands of senior women increasingly relocate, cut back their own hours or stay home with the children, and the women name their partner's emotional support as the thing that mattered most to their careers.

## Five things the Adams letters can teach you about a working partnership

Abigail never held office, never voted and never owned property in law. She still helped shape the founding of a nation, and her methods transfer to your own life and career.

1. **Put the hard conversation in writing.** Abigail made her case for women, education and abolition on paper, where John had to read it to the end and answer it.
2. **Attach a consequence.** 'Remember the ladies' would have been a pleasantry without the promise of rebellion that followed it.
3. **Keep your own money.** She built assets in her own name when the law said she could not, and she left them where she chose.
4. **Credit the person carrying the load.** If someone at home frees your time, say so in public. John and Abigail opened their letters to each other with 'My Dearest Friend', and they meant it.
5. **Expect resentment for your influence.** Her critics called her 'Mrs President'. She kept writing.

Two hundred and fifty years after Abigail wrote 'remember the ladies', the version of the saying her letters support is simpler than the original: successful people have partners, and the best partners expect to be heard.