Abigail Adams

One of history's most prolific letter writers was Abigail Adams. She wrote to practically all of the Founders during her lengthy life, in addition to her husband during his numerous extended absences. She sent letters to numerous people, including Jefferson, Washington, Lafayette, John Dickinson, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Benjamin Rush, and Benjamin Franklin, who replied in the stiff style of the time. And the majority of her letters, which have survived, show how strongly she pushed the founders to embrace women's rights, democracy, and independence.

During the French Revolution, she traveled to Paris with her husband, and her letters reflect her New England Puritan disdain for many of the court's customs. She went with him to the Court of St. James where she was introduced to the King and made equally scathing remarks about British culture. She reprimanded her husband during the Constitutional Convention to make sure that women's rights were taken into account and given equal respect. She wrote to Jefferson following their political disagreement to defend her husband's views and deeds.

In 1800, when she and her husband first moved into the White House, they discovered it to be unfurnished, lacking in landscaping, and insufficiently heated. As the story goes, she did hang her washing in the unfinished East Room. Years earlier, through her husband John, she wrote the all-male Continental Congress a letter warning them that "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."

Despite John's resistance to Abigail's criticisms, which he referred to as a "despotism of the petticoat," Abigail had a remarkable amount of influence over the founders. She "would have been a greater President than her husband," Harry Truman famously said of her.

• Born: Abigail Smith, November 11, 1744Weymouth, Massachusetts Bay, British America
  
• Died: October 28, 1818 (aged 73)Quincy, Massachusetts, U.S.
• First Lady of the United States ( March 4, 1797 – March 4, 18010
• Second Lady of the United States ( April 21, 1789 – March 4, 1797)