Abigail Adams and Mary Tod Lincoln both lived in times of national change and crisis and therefore their accounts are significant windows into the past American societies. However, the fact that they were both women who found themselves next to highly public lives of their husbands provides for interesting insight into roles and limitations of females in the past. And while Abigail Adams passed the very year that Mary Lincoln was born, the lives of these very different women show some very similar concerns such as marriage, struggle for female education, meaning of childbirth, the role of religion and also the role that these two women were to assume as first ladies in their respective eras of Revolution and Civil War. Abigail Adams’ account stands as a testimony to the birth and political maturation of the U.S while Mary Todd’s story gives insight into the more factional nation of Civil War years.

In Abigail’s time but also in Mary’s, the goal of female education was focused towards producing exemplary wives and mothers and female’s future depended on the right, protective husband. However, with marriage came loss of legal identity reflected in the doctrine of coverture, which stated that woman’s existence came under protection and “ownership” of the husband. This in turn relates to the notion of female sphere and the idea that a woman was created by God as a “helpmate” (Akers 23). The husband was the source of protection to which she was completely dependent and it was improper to exchange roles and thus disturb the “divine division of labor.”(Akers 23) Abigail understood that a woman was to be modest and reserved and stay out of public/male sphere and thus, out of politics as well. She accepted the view of her time but this view nevertheless became a challenge. She saw the female role as a “supporter of virtue and conscious of her supposed limitations, but also insistent that sex roles be fully reciprocal, that men be as accountable to their obligations as women.”(Akers 26) Thus, she was disappointed to see that the Declaration of Independence omitted a clear statement against slavery or status of women, and thus revealed to Abigail Adams that she was still living very much in the world where only all men-all white men, were equal. In Massachusetts women didn’t vote or even

Some topics in this essay:
Abigail Adams, Abigail’s Mary’s, Mary Todd, Awakening Enlightenment, President Abigail, Mary Lincoln, South Shore”Akers, Lady United, Abigail Mary, Adams’ Baker, abigail adams, abigail adams’, formal education, civil war, mary todd, female education, death 1818, mary lincoln, adams mary,