Remember the Ladies: How Women Shaped America’s Founding

On March 31, 1776, three months before the Declaration of Independence was signed, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John in Philadelphia and asked him to “Remember the Ladies” in whatever new code of laws the Continental Congress was about to draft. John replied on April 14 that he could not but laugh. The new code, when it finally came eleven years later as the United States Constitution, did not remember them. American women would not vote nationally until 1920.

And yet the founding era is full of women whose political work mattered enough that the Founders argued with them, satirised them, asked them for advice, took credit for their writing, and — in one quiet case — adopted their argument almost wholesale. This is what they actually did, and why the Bill of Rights you live under may owe more to a sixty-year-old woman in Plymouth, Massachusetts, than to any single Founding Father.

The Edenton Tea Party: The First Organised Women’s Political Act

Eight months after the Boston Tea Party, on October 25, 1774, Penelope Barker organised 51 women in Edenton, North Carolina, to sign a public boycott of British tea and cloth. The Boston Tea Party had been carried out by men in disguise. The Edenton signers used their real names — and sent the document to England, where it appeared in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser on January 16, 1775.

The reaction in London was mockery rather than alarm. James Iredell, who would later sit on the first US Supreme Court, received a sneering letter from his brother Arthur in England joking that the only good news was how few American towns possessed so much “female artillery.” A London cartoon that March showed the signers as caricatured drunks and bad mothers. None of this was accidental. A public political act by women was so unusual in 1774 that contemporaries struggled to take it as politics at all.

Modern historians at NCpedia and the National Women’s History Museum treat the Edenton Resolves as one of the earliest public political documents written and organised by women in colonial America. The resolution explicitly framed the boycott as a civic duty the signers owed not only to their families but to themselves — a striking claim for any woman to make publicly in 1774.

Abigail Adams and the “Remember the Ladies” Letter

By March 1776, John Adams had been in Philadelphia for months. Abigail, in Braintree, Massachusetts, was managing the farm, running the household, raising five young children, and reading every newspaper she could get her hands on. On March 31 she sent him a long letter that mixed war news, complaints about his short replies, and one famous paragraph. She told him she wanted independence declared. She told him a new code of laws would be needed. And she told him not to put unlimited power in the hands of husbands.

The line historians quote endlessly is short and sharp: she warned that if particular care was not paid to women, they would foment a rebellion and refuse to be bound by laws in which they had no voice or representation. That is the language of “no taxation without representation” applied to gender, written four months before the Declaration of Independence.

John replied on April 14 with a long teasing letter that called her saucy and joked he could not but laugh at her “extraordinary Code of Laws.” The New-York Historical Society notes that what Abigail asked for was not the vote — that demand was still decades away. She was asking for relief from coverture, the English common-law doctrine under which a married woman had no separate legal existence from her husband. She wanted the new nation to give women legal autonomy as wives and mothers. The new nation declined.

Document	Date	Author
Edenton Resolves	Oct 25, 1774	Penelope Barker & 50 others
“Remember the Ladies” letter	Mar 31, 1776	Abigail Adams
Sentiments of an American Woman	Jun 10, 1780	Esther de Berdt Reed
Observations on the New Constitution	1788	Mercy Otis Warren (“A Columbian Patriot”)

Esther de Berdt Reed and the First Women’s Association

Four years into the war, in the spring of 1780, Washington’s army was unpaid, underfed, and mutinying. Charleston had just fallen. From Philadelphia, the wife of Pennsylvania’s chief executive — Esther de Berdt Reed, English by birth and thirty-three years old — decided to do something about it.

On June 10, 1780, she published an anonymous broadside titled The Sentiments of an American Woman. It argued that women’s patriotism was not a sentimental decoration but a political force, and it laid out a detailed plan for women to raise money for the Continental Army themselves. Two days later she helped found the Ladies Association of Philadelphia, with Benjamin Franklin’s daughter Sarah Franklin Bache as one of her partners.

The numbers are extraordinary. Within three weeks and three days, the Association had collected more than $300,000 in paper currency from over 1,600 individuals in a city of about 30,000 people. Reed wrote directly to George Washington on July 4, 1780, informing him of the result, and then politely argued with him about how to spend it. Washington wanted the money used for shirts. Reed initially wanted it given directly to soldiers as a personal bonus. Washington won the argument — but only after a back-and-forth letter exchange that historian Owen S. Ireland calls one of the clearest examples of an early American woman acting as a public political operator in her own name.

Reed did not live to see the result. She died of dysentery on September 18, 1780, at thirty-three. Sarah Franklin Bache took over leadership of the Association.

The Association ultimately produced more than 2,200 shirts for the Continental Army, each personally signed by the woman who sewed it. Comparable associations soon formed in Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia — and Virginia women alone raised more than $100,000 for the cause, according to research collected by Encyclopedia Virginia.

Mercy Otis Warren and the Bill of Rights

The story most worth telling, and the one most often missed, belongs to Mercy Otis Warren of Plymouth, Massachusetts. By 1788 Warren was sixty, a poet, satirist, playwright, and political correspondent of John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. She and her husband James had decided that the new federal Constitution drafted in Philadelphia the year before was a betrayal of the Revolution — too much central power, no real protection against a future government that might behave like the one the colonies had just thrown off.

In early 1788, as state ratifying conventions began debating whether to adopt the document, Warren published a 19-page pamphlet titled Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions. She signed it “A Columbian Patriot.” The arguments are technical and pointed: insufficient checks on the executive, no protection for the press, dangerous combination of executive and legislative power, no term limits, no guarantee of jury trial, no bill of rights at all.

The pamphlet circulated widely. Anti-Federalists in New York alone distributed roughly 1,700 copies as a counter to the 500 copies of The Federalist Papers they had received. Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York ultimately ratified the Constitution only on the condition that a bill of rights be added. In 1791, James Madison drafted what became the first ten amendments. Warren’s specific demands — free press, jury trial, restraints on standing armies, limits on the executive — are recognisably present in the document that resulted.

For more than a century after publication, the pamphlet was attributed to Elbridge Gerry, a male anti-Federalist politician from Massachusetts. Warren’s authorship was not established until her descendant, the legal historian Charles Warren, discovered a reference to it in a 1787 letter she had sent to the British historian Catharine Macaulay. The Library of Congress now refers to her as “the secret muse of the Bill of Rights.”

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Popular tellings of the founding either ignore women entirely or insert them as inspirational background — wives, mothers, helpers. Both readings are wrong, in different directions.

It is true that no woman drafted the Constitution. None attended the 1787 Convention. Under coverture, most married women could not sign contracts, own property in their own names, or sue in court without their husbands’ involvement. Abigail Adams did not get her new code of laws. The Constitution as ratified in 1788 did not mention women at all, and several states actively rolled back the limited voting rights some unmarried women had held in places like New Jersey before 1807.

But the Bill of Rights — the part of the document most Americans actually live under day to day — exists in significant part because a woman writing under a male pseudonym made the most philosophically sophisticated Anti-Federalist case against the original draft, and because three crucial state conventions found her arguments persuasive enough to demand amendments before ratifying. Historian Rosemarie Zagarri describes the post-Revolutionary moment as a brief opening of political possibility for American women that was then deliberately closed by the early nineteenth century — what she calls the “revolutionary backlash.”

The honest summary: women did not write the Constitution. They argued the country into amending it.

Why It Still Matters

Almost a hundred and fifty years separate Abigail Adams’s 1776 letter from the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920. The work in between was not a single uninterrupted march. It was a long political tradition that the Edenton signers, Reed’s Ladies Association, and Warren’s pamphlet helped found. Every time a citizen claims a right under the first ten amendments — freedom of the press, the right to a jury trial, protection against warrantless search — they are using arguments a woman in Plymouth, Massachusetts, wrote in 1788 and could not put her name to. That is a debt worth remembering.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Abigail Adams actually ask for in the “Remember the Ladies” letter?

Abigail Adams asked her husband John, then serving in the Continental Congress, to limit husbands’ legal power over their wives in the new laws being drafted for an independent America. She was not asking for women’s suffrage — that demand was still decades away — but for relief from coverture, the English common-law rule that erased a married woman’s separate legal identity. John dismissed the request in his teasing reply of April 14, 1776.

Did any woman attend the Constitutional Convention?

No. The Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia from May to September 1787 and was attended only by male delegates from twelve of the thirteen states. Women were also excluded from the state ratifying conventions that followed in 1787 and 1788.

Who really wrote “Observations on the New Constitution”?

Mercy Otis Warren of Plymouth, Massachusetts, wrote the 1788 anti-Federalist pamphlet under the pseudonym “A Columbian Patriot.” It was attributed for more than a century to Elbridge Gerry, a male politician, and was only restored to Warren when her descendant Charles Warren found a reference to it in a 1787 letter from Mercy to the British historian Catharine Macaulay.

How much did the Ladies Association of Philadelphia raise?

Esther de Berdt Reed and her Ladies Association raised more than $300,000 in paper currency from over 1,600 donors in three weeks and three days, beginning in June 1780. The funds were ultimately used to produce more than 2,200 shirts for Washington’s Continental Army. Sister associations in Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia raised additional substantial sums.

Was the Edenton Tea Party the same as the Boston Tea Party?

No. The Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, was a covert action carried out by men disguised as Mohawks. The Edenton Tea Party of October 25, 1774, was a public political signing by 51 women in North Carolina, organised by Penelope Barker, who attached their real names to a boycott resolution that was then published in the London press. It is recognised as the first organised women’s political demonstration in what would become the United States.

When did American women gain the right to vote?

American women gained the constitutional right to vote on August 18, 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified — 144 years after Abigail Adams’s “Remember the Ladies” letter and 132 years after the Constitution she had asked her husband to write differently.

Sources

1. Founders Online, National Archives — Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March 1776
2. Massachusetts Historical Society — Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March – 5 April 1776
3. NCpedia, State Library of North Carolina — Edenton Tea Party
4. National Women’s History Museum — Penelope Barker biography
5. Library of Congress, In Custodia Legis — “Mercy Otis Warren: The Secret Muse of the Bill of Rights”
6. National Constitution Center — Observations on the New Constitution (1788)
7. American Battlefield Trust — The Ladies Association of Philadelphia
8. Encyclopedia Virginia — “The Sentiments of an American Woman” (1780)
9. Owen S. Ireland, Sentiments of a British-American Woman: Esther DeBerdt Reed and the American Revolution (Penn State University Press, 2017)
10. Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)
11. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women (Cornell University Press, 1980)