Abigail Adams

Much emphasis is rightly given to the founding fathers of America such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. But rarely do we get such a detailed glimpse into the homes and personal lives of these men as we do the Adams' in Woody Holton's biography of Abigail Adams. With riveting detail, Holton introduces us to the complex woman who helped shaped America more than perhaps any other of the "founding mothers" through her influence on her husband. Strong-willed, intelligent and willing to speak her mind, Adams was decades ahead of her time when it came to women's rights and involvement in the everyday affairs of life and politics. Relying heavily on Adams' correspondence between her husband and others, Holton places much emphasis on Adams as an advocate of women's rights. We glimpse the struggles that the Adams family endured through the many long absences of John Adams; but through these struggles we also get to see Abigail's knowledge and fortitude in being able to "keep the home fires burning" as it were. In a culture that frowned on educating women, she was very intelligent, widely read, and very active in promoting the education of her gender. She made financial investments often without the knowledge of her husband - also a cultural taboo. Holton does an excellent job of highlighting Adams' strengths as well as her weaknesses, giving us a well-rounded, quite readable biography of this great woman. He certainly does Adams justice in examining her life as a woman and not simply as the wife of a founding father. I would highly recommend this book to any reader of American history or of women's rights.

Woody Holton's rendition of Abigail Adams is not only eloquently written and deeply researched, it is also a brilliantly fresh analysis of a well-known name in American history. Adams comes alive as a financial genius and the confident de facto head of a family for much of her married life. Especially fun is Holton's depiction of her relationships with her sisters, showing her to be a complex thinker who was also a compassionate, committed, smart and savvy friend. It is so refreshing to hear something about Adams' thoughts and actions beyond the world of her more famous husband. A great read. Highly recommended.

Mr. Holton has written a very readable biography of Abigail Adams and has brought her to life the way David McCullough brought to life her husband, John Adams. The author did extensive research on the hundreds of letters that she wrote to John and her relatives, and quotes from them generously. Abigail was an excellent writer and fun to read. In an era of male dominance with legal sanction, she was a voice for equality and lived it within her extended family (it helped that John was gone for months at a time on political matters, so that she could develop her financial skills and thoughts at a distance from him). This is the best one volume biography of Abigail Adams.

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.

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, sist