Remember the Ladies

We're recording.

There is a rope across my parlor.

There is.

A velvet rope, on brass posts, across the door of my own parlor, and a young man in a hat who tells me I may not step over it. I asked him whose house it was. He said it was the nation's. I said I had understood the nation to have a great many houses and asked why it wanted this one. He said people come to see it.

Just under fifty thousand visits in 2025.

Fifty thousand. To see my parlor.

And the kitchen. And the library.

They pay to see my kitchen.

It's free, actually.

Then they don't even pay. Mr. Corrigan, I kept this house through a war with two children and a farm and a husband in Philadelphia, and I would have given a good deal for fifty thousand people to take an interest in the kitchen while I was in it. The young man says the rope is to protect the carpet. I chose the carpet. It was not that good a carpet.

I'm told it's the original.

It is the third. I know because I bought the second. Whoever told you it was the original has a rope across his understanding as well. Shall we sit?

We're on the other side of the rope.

Naturally.

This is The Hitching Post. I'm Peter Corrigan, and this week we're on the road, about eight miles south of Boston, at the Old House at Peacefield in Quincy, which the family bought in 1787 and which four generations of them lived in, and which our guest ran. She was the wife of the second President and the mother of the sixth, and for two hundred years the only woman who'd been both. She wrote more than a thousand letters to her husband, most of them while he was somewhere else, and the ones that survive are the reason anyone knows what the eighteenth century sounded like from a kitchen. She is on no currency. Neither is he.

He would want it noted that this is consistent.

He noted it.

He would.

I want to begin where everyone begins, and I'll read it, because everyone reads it, and then I want to ask you what it meant, because I don't think anyone asks that. March 31st, 1776, to your husband in Philadelphia: "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 favorable 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 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."

Yes.

What did you mean by it?

I meant what I wrote, sir, which is a thing people find surprisingly hard to credit. I meant that the law of England, which was about to become the law of nowhere in particular, made a married woman not a person. Her property was her husband's on the day she married. Her earnings were his. Her children were his. If he beat her she had no remedy the law would hear unless he did it badly enough to be noticed by the neighbors. If he drank her inheritance she might watch. That is coverture. It is a very old word and it means what it sounds like: she is covered. And the men in Philadelphia were about to write a new code of laws from nothing, which no men had done in living memory, and I thought it a pity to copy that part.

You said "by the way."

I said "by the way" because I was writing to my husband about the smallpox and the price of pins and whether the British would come back to Boston, and this was the fourth thing in the letter. I have since learned that the fourth thing in a letter is the only thing anyone reads. I would have put it first had I known.

His reply, April 14th: "As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh."

He did.

"Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and in practice you know we are the subjects."

He thought that was charming. He was often charming when he was losing. I wrote back that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken, and that notwithstanding all his wise laws and maxims we had it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our masters. He did not reply to that part. He replied to the part about the pins.

There's a third letter. You may not have seen it. Six weeks later, May 26th, 1776, he wrote to James Sullivan, a judge here in Massachusetts, who'd raised the question of who should vote in the new government. Sullivan hadn't mentioned women. Your husband brought them up. He wrote that if the franchise were opened, "there will be no end of it. New claims will arise. Women will demand a vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing will demand an equal voice." And that it would "confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level."

I had not seen that.

No.

He wrote it six weeks after he laughed at me.

Yes.

Then he was not laughing. He was answering. He answered Sullivan because he could not answer me, and he could not answer me because I was right, and he knew it, and he had a war to run. I will say this for the letter, Mr. Corrigan, and you may read it back to him. He was right that there would be no end of it. He was wrong that this was an objection.

Let me tell you what happened. Stop me where you need to.

I have been told some of it. Tell me all of it.

Coverture began to come apart state by state starting in the 1830s. By the end of that century a married woman could own property, keep her wages, and make a contract, most places. Women vote in every state since 1920. Every office is open to them and they hold many, including seats in the Senate and on the Supreme Court. A woman has been nominated for President by a major party. Women are the majority of students at the colleges.

Including his.

Including Harvard. For about twenty years now.

Then the rebellion was fomented.

It took a hundred and forty-four years to the vote.

I said we were determined, sir. I did not say we were quick. We had the children to raise while we did it.

Now the question I came with, and it's not one your letter reaches, and I want to be honest with you about that before I ask it.

Ask it and I will tell you whether it reaches.

In 1973 the Supreme Court held that the Constitution protects a woman's decision to end a pregnancy, within limits that shifted over the months of it. States could not forbid it early. In 2022 the Court reversed itself and said the Constitution says nothing about it and each state may do as it likes. Since then about half the states forbid it, most of them nearly entirely, and about half permit it, and women travel between them.

Stop.

Go ahead.

The Supreme Court. That is the court my husband appointed Mr. Marshall to. Nine judges in Washington.

Nine.

Decided in 1973 that the Constitution, which I have read, and which I was in the room for some of, protects a woman's decision about her own child. And then in 2022 nine other judges decided it did not.

Some of the same ones. Mostly others.

And in between, for fifty years, this was the law of the whole country, from Washington, on a question that in my day was not a question at all.

Tell me what it was in your day.

It was not the magistrate's business until the quickening, and after the quickening it was hardly his business either. Blackstone says so. A child was not a child in law until it moved, which is to say until its mother said it moved, since no one else could know. Before that there were things a woman could take, and every woman knew what they were, and every midwife, and the apothecary sold them under names that fooled nobody. Massachusetts had no law on it whatever until long after I was dead; I am told 1845, and I am told that the law when it came did not mention the quickening at all, which is the whole of what I have been saying; and that what it did instead was to punish the thing more heavily if the woman died of it, which tells you what the legislature was frightened of, and it was not the child. If a woman miscarried in the fourth month nobody asked why. If she miscarried in the eighth, people might ask, and the answer was generally that God had willed it, and sometimes that was even true.

Did you know women who—

I knew women, sir. I was one. I bore six and buried three, one of them stillborn in this house's predecessor in the summer of 1777, in the middle of the war, with my husband in Philadelphia, and I wrote to tell him and he wrote back about the Congress. Do not ask me whether I knew women who ended a pregnancy. Ask me whether I knew women who did not know how. I did not.

So what's the question, from where you sit?

The question, from where I sit, is not the one you asked. You asked what I think of the decision. I have been trying for some minutes to understand what the decision is. In my day a woman and her midwife decided a thing before the quickening and God decided it after, and the magistrate was not consulted in either case because he had nothing to offer. You have described a country in which the magistrate has been consulted for fifty years and has now been consulted again and given the opposite answer, and in which the thing is decided not by the woman, nor by God, but by which side of a line on a map she happens to be standing on. That is not a question about the child. It is a question about the magistrate. And I would put it to you the way I put it to my husband: do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. I wrote husbands because husbands were the power I could see from my kitchen. You are asking whether I would have written legislatures if I had been able to see them.

I'm asking what you'd have written.

I would have written men. And then I would have been asked, as I am now being asked by your face, whether I mean that a woman may do as she likes, and I would have said what I say now, which is that I was a minister's daughter and a Christian and I do not think a woman may do as she likes with a child any more than a man may, and that I did not need a judge in Washington to tell me so, and that the women I knew did not either. They had consciences. They had ministers. They had mothers and sisters and the fear of God and the price of bread, and they weighed all of it, and they decided, and it was hard, and nobody in Philadelphia was any help. The thing I cannot understand is not that your country has an opinion about it. It is that your country thinks the opinion is the magistrate's to have.

The argument on the other side is that the child is a person and the magistrate protects persons.

Then let the magistrate say when a child becomes a person, and let him be as sure of it as the mother is, and I will listen to him. In my day he said the quickening, because that was the first thing anyone could know. Your magistrates, I gather, have said a great many different things in a great many states, which suggests to me that they are not sure either, and that they have simply decided to be unsure in the direction of their own power. Which is the thing men do. I said so. It was the fourth thing in the letter.

Philadelphia.

Oh, must we.

Dr. Franklin.

[on the line] I am here. Mrs. Adams, I am told you are in your own house and not permitted in it, which is a condition I recognize from Passy.

Doctor.

You will recall that we met in Paris, in 1784, and that you formed an opinion of my friend Madame Helvétius, and that you wrote your niece that she wore a small straw hat with a dirty half-gauze handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze than ever your maids wore sewed on behind, and that she came in crying "Où est Franklin?" and kissed me twice on each cheek and once on the forehead, and sat at dinner spreading her arms on the backs of both the gentlemen's chairs and throwing one carelessly upon my neck, and that you had never wished for an acquaintance with any ladies of that cast.

I wrote "carelessly," Doctor. That was the word, and I chose it. And I did not write "of that cast" as a compliment. I wrote that I was highly disgusted, and that she had a little lap-dog who was next to you her favorite, and that when the dog wet the floor she wiped it up with her chemise. You have left out the dog.

Have you revised your opinion, in two hundred and forty years?

I have not. And I will observe, since you have brought her up in front of fifty thousand visitors, that she kept her own house and her own money and her own opinions and her own dog on the table at dinner, and that no husband and no magistrate told her otherwise, and that I found her disagreeable and I found her free, and that I have had two hundred and forty years to notice that those may have been the same observation.

[pause] That is better than anything I was going to say. I will go and think about it in the garden. Corrigan, the device tells me I have been on the line for four minutes and that this is costing someone money.

It isn't.

Then it is lying, which is a thing I did not expect from a device. Good day.

He always liked her better than me.

He said so, later. In a letter.

He said everything, later, in a letter. It was his gift.

I have one more document, and it's yours, and it's the one I expect you'd rather I didn't have.

I expect you have several of those. Choose one.

1798. Your husband is President. The Republican papers are calling him a monarchist, a madman, and worse. In July, Congress passes the Sedition Act, making it a crime to publish false and malicious writing against the President. You wrote to your sister Mary that spring and summer, repeatedly, about Benjamin Bache, the editor of the Aurora in Philadelphia. You wrote in May that "this Bache is cursing and abusing daily," and that if that fellow and his agents were not suppressed "we shall come to a civil war." In June, that "in any other country Bache and all his papers would have been seized, and ought to be here," and that Congress was dilly-dallying about it. You wanted the law before it passed. You were, by every account, more for it than he was.

I was.

You'd written, in 1776, that you would not hold yourself bound by any laws in which you had no voice. That arbitrary power is very liable to be broken. And in 1798 you wanted a newspaper seized by law for calling your husband names.

Yes.

That's all?

No, sir, that is not all, but I wished to say yes first so that you would not think I meant to wriggle. I wanted Bache stopped. He printed lies about my husband every morning and my husband read every one of them and could not sleep, and I had sat up with that man through a war and a plague and the loss of children, and I would have had Bache in the harbor if the law had allowed it. That is not a principle. That is a wife. I have never claimed to be a philosopher; my husband claimed it, and you have seen how that went. But you are right to put the two letters together, and I have had a long time to put them together myself, and here is what I have concluded, and it is not comfortable.

Go on.

In 1776 I was the one with no voice, and I saw very clearly that a law made over the heads of people without a voice was tyranny. In 1798 I had a voice. I had the President's ear, which is more voice than any woman in America had ever had, and I used it to silence a printer. I did not think of it as the same question because I did not think of Bache as a person without a voice; he had a newspaper, which is the loudest voice there is. I thought of him as the enemy. And that, sir, is how it is always done. Nobody suppresses a person. They suppress an enemy. I knew that in 1776 because I was on the other side of it, and I forgot it in 1798 because I was not. If you want the lesson, it is that the woman who wrote the first letter would not have recognized the woman who wrote the second, and they were the same woman, twenty-two years and one husband's sleeplessness apart.

Jefferson pardoned the men convicted under it.

He did. And I wrote him in 1804 that faithful are the wounds of a friend, and I meant it about something else, and it applies here too. He was right to pardon them. I would have hanged Bache. Both things are true and I have stopped trying to make them one thing.

Mail. When Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson were here together, a listener in Providence wrote: "Your host let Adams have the last word on the Sedition Act by letting Jefferson change the subject to Callender. Adams signed a law that jailed newspaper editors and the only person who pushed back was Jefferson, who'd paid one of the editors. Nobody asked Adams whether he'd do it again." We reached out to Mr. Adams, and he sent this.

[recorded] I am told my wife is your guest this week and is sitting in her own parlor on the wrong side of a rope. I have nothing to add to what she will already have said on the subject of the Sedition Act, because she will have said it better and with less excuse, and because I signed it, and she only wanted it, and the difference between wanting a thing and signing it is the whole of the office. Would I do it again? I would not. Would I have done it again in 1799? I did, in effect, by not repealing it. The listener may take whichever answer he finds more useful. Tell Abigail the carpet is the third. She will have said so, but she will want it confirmed.

It is the third.

So noted.

Last question. Same for everyone, one sentence. Did they remember the ladies?

They did not, sir, and then the ladies reminded them, which I told him we would, and it took a hundred and forty-four years, which I did not, and I notice that the rope is still up.

That was one sentence.

It was a letter. You have simply read it aloud.

That's The Hitching Post for this week, from Peacefield, with thanks to Mrs. Adams, to the National Park Service, to the young man in the hat, and to Dr. Franklin, who has gone to think about Madame Helvétius in a garden, which is where he generally did it. Next week we're back in Boston, at street level, with a guest who has never been asked to sit on the far side of anything.

Mr. Corrigan.

Yes.

The young man in the hat. Ask him whether the fifty thousand people are told about the fourth thing in the letter, or only the first three.

I'll ask.

Ask him in front of the rope.