Power changes when it meets a clear-eyed partner. That’s the thread that runs through our conversation with Dr. Kirsten Birkhaug as we trace the political and personal partnership of John and Abigail Adams—two sharp minds who treated marriage like a working lab for ideas that would shape the early republic. We open with why their story is the right entry point for Women of the Founding, then follow the through line from courtship candor to presidential counsel, guided by the letters that map their lifelong exchange.
John’s reputation as a formidable thinker grows more interesting when you watch him think with Abigail. While he serves as lawyer, revolutionary, diplomat, and president, she runs the Quincy homestead through war and inflation—hiring hands, negotiating prices, and making the farm solvent when legal coverture makes every contract harder. Her plea to “remember the ladies” was not a slogan; it was a precise push against a system that erased married women’s legal identities, blocking them from the very commerce they kept alive. We unpack those letters, the teasing reply about a “republic of petticoats,” and the way Abigail’s wider correspondence—especially with Mercy Otis Warren—kept the pressure on. The picture that emerges is not a myth of perfect founders but a credible model for how theory meets the ledger, and why that friction made John’s political judgment age unusually well.
We also share where to start if you want to read the record yourself: the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Papers, the exchanges between John and Abigail, and biographies like David McCullough’s that render the texture of their days. Along the way, we contrast John’s grounded pragmatism with more untethered strains of founding-era thought, and we close with the lesson that still resonates: ideas last when they are tested against the lives they will touch. If this conversation reframes how you see the Founding, tap follow, share it with a friend who loves history, and leave a quick review telling us which Adams letter you’ll read first.
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