Abigail Adams was born on November 22, 1744, in Weymouth, Massachusetts. She married John Adams, who later became the second president of the United States. She was the mother of John Quincy Adams. He became the sixth president of the United States. Only one other woman in American history, Barbara Bush, is both the wife and mother of an American President.

When she was a child, Abigail Adams was shy. She did not go to school because back then girls were not encouraged to go to school. Her family taught her a lot at home. When she grew up, she thought it was unfair how girls weren't allowed to go to school.

John Adams was an important man before the Revolution and during the Revolutionary War. He was a member of the Continental Congress, the group that was drafting the laws to run the United States when it became independent. Abigail Adams wanted the new government to protect and increase women's rights.

Image courtesy of Library of Congress First Ladies of the United States

Abigail wrote to John when he was in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress, "I long to hear that you have declared an independency &endash; 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 favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or Representation." John Adams never took Abigail's plea seriously. The Continental Congress did not pass any laws to "remember the ladies." Women could not vote in the new country. They could not vote in the United States until 1919, more than 100 years after Abigail Adams died, in 1818.

Abigail Adams was very concerned and interested in what happened in the colonies. Abigail Adams and John Adams wrote many letters to each other. They often began, "Dearest friend." One letter that began this way was the letter that Abigail Adams wrote to her husband about their friend Dr. Joseph Warren after she learned that Dr. Warren had been killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

After the Revolutionary War ended, John Adams became the country's first vice president and then its second president. During that time, Abigail always supported her husband in his policies.

Abigail Adams died in 1818. She was 74 years old.