A cohort of educated Boston women left some of the most vivid accounts of the Revolutionary moment. Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Mary Palmer (a family relation of Abigail), and Hannah Fayerweather Tolman Winthrop corresponded with one another and with leaders in Philadelphia throughout the Siege of Boston, debating Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and recording military events with precision. Mary Palmer wrote detailed dispatches to John Adams, who praised women's ability to see the larger picture clearly. Abigail Adams, recovering from a smallpox inoculation when the Declaration arrived, walked to King Street on July 18, 1776, to hear it read from the State House balcony, and described the crowd afterward tearing down the King's arms. Functioning as indispensable witnesses and historians of the Revolutionary moment, these women preserved a record of the war's daily texture and political stakes that few of their male contemporaries matched.
Interviewees
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Miriam Liebman
- Assistant Editor, The Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society
