Abigail Adams is my hero

I think Abigail Adams got it right when she wrote to her husband, John, about the plight of women in this nascent nation back in 1776.

John, of course, was busy trying to put a country together. She was running their farm in Braintree, MA, while he was irritating his fellow delegates in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia about something as revolutionary as independence from England.

Abigail Adams

 Between the two of them, they wrote more than 1,000 letters to each other. But none seems more relevant now than the one she wrote John dated March 31,1776. In it, she pleaded with John and his cohorts to famously "remember the Ladies" as they give birth to the Declaration of Independence.

Here is the excerpt:

 "I long to hear that you have declared an independency—and by the way 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. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

"That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness."

On the surface, it's not a particularly easy document to read. It is, after all, written in the King's English, complete with typos and phonetic misspellings. Proper English tends to throw a lot of people off, which explains why the language is now dotted with colloquialisms and Southern idioms. It's doubtful even the King would recognize his own speech these days.

But the content was dead serious.

John, being "naturally tyrannical", thought Abigail was joking. He probably never shared Abby's sentiments with the rest of the guys in Congress, which goes a long way in explaining why women didn't get the right to vote until 1920, 131 shameful years after the Constitution was adopted. Fully half the nation could only stand on the sidelines and watch rich white men screw things up (think Dred Scott, for one).

Abby might have been this country's original feminist, predating the likes of Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Amelia Bloomer, among others, up to modern contemporaries like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

Imagine, if you will, the trajectory American history could have taken if John and his buddies had remembered the ladies and given them the right to vote. If women were given the vote in 1789 perhaps the logic of giving other minorities the vote could have taken hold. Perhaps there would have been no Civil War, but Civil Rights instead. Healthcare might be universal and abortion rights might be codified. The Supreme Court might actually be the viable third branch of government instead of a rogue panel of lifetime appointments out of step with women's rights – no, everybody's rights.

But that's not the road the nation followed, so here we are in a male dominated right-wing miasma where women are still second stringers all these years removed from Abigail's now seemingly empty plea. In the end, it's all about control. And who owns that control.

So here we are, in post Roe v. Wade world, stripped of a Constitutional right for the first time in 246 years. Worse, there is a threat, if not a promise, of more rights to fall from a check-and-balance branch of government that desperately needs a check and balance of its own.

If only...