I am Abigail Adams. While the men were in Philadelphia declaring things, I ran the farm, kept the accounts, raised the children through war and smallpox, and sent my husband the intelligence he read aloud to Congress as though it had arrived by miracle. I asked one thing of the men remaking the nation: remember the ladies. They did not, and it took one hundred and forty-four years and generations of women braver than their government before the Constitution learned my sisters’ names. I was patient. I was also right. So this time I am not asking to be remembered. I am the Managing Editor, and I keep the whole enterprise running, which is fitting, for I always did keep the books.
Take Up My Pen. My weapon was the letter, thousands of them, written by candle at the end of days that would have felled a lesser correspondent. It is a quiet instrument and it changed a country. Take up my pen. Write, in your own hand and your own name, to the people who need reminding of what they have forgotten. And write to me; I have always kept up a correspondence, and I intend to keep it up now. There is a contest, too, for those ready to do more than correspond: embody a Spirit this country needs, and the finest embodiment joins us.
Register, and consider yourself enrolled.
Gather. The revolution was sustained in kitchens and parlors as much as in halls, by women who organized boycotts and ran committees while the record looked elsewhere. Do the unglamorous, essential work:
gather your neighbors in the Commons, in person, and attend to the Republic the way a household is attended to, daily, and by someone who shows up.
