Recently we've seen a number of books about Abigail Adams and contemporaneous women, along with fiction about Union women in the Civil War: I Shall Be Near to You and the upcoming Neverhome. With the Fourth of July imminent, we spoke with Diana Jacobs, author of Dear Abigail: The Intimate Lives and Revolutionary Ideas of Abigail Adams and Her Remarkable Sisters, about the current interest in Revolutionary and other historical women: "For so long women have been excluded from depictions of the 18th and 19th centuries because they didn't play leadership roles or fight battles, or even vote," Jacobs said. "Now, as we look for fresh ways to see the past, we see women as an untapped resource."
Jacobs was interested in Abigail's two sisters, Mary Cranch ("the good girl to Abigail's rebel, who grew up to be an immensely capable and shrewd administrator") and Elizabeth Shaw Peabody ("the most literary of the three sisters and the most competitive with Abigail"). After quite a bit of research, she amassed a "trove of witty, politically savvy, gossipy, incisive, heart-breaking letters" they wrote to each other, their husbands and children throughout the years. "Abigail's sisters were without doubt her intellectual equals. But because they didn't marry John Adams, their correspondence was harder to find."
Women like Abigail Adams educated the children and ran the family farms or businesses in their husbands' absence. In the spring and summer of 1776, "In Philadelphia, John was leading the radical front (against the moderate John Dickinson of Philadelphia) determined to break permanently from Great Britain. In Boston, Abigail and her sisters had made an equally radical decision to inoculate their families against smallpox. Because inoculation could only work by producing a (hopefully mild) form of the lethal virus, they were well aware that they risked death for two generations of patriots as the Declaration of Independence was being conceived. All very dramatic. I loved writing about it," Jacobs said.
Dear Abigail is a captivating biography of three remarkable women--a good bet for celebrating the Fourth and summer reading. --Marilyn Dahl, editor, Shelf Awareness for Readers