Remember the Ladies

Rights Without a Foundation

The American founding declared that certain rights are self-evident, inalienable, and endowed by the Creator. Abigail Adams understood the logic of this claim better than most of the men who signed it. If rights derive from God rather than from social convention, then no social convention can legitimately withhold them from any human being made in the image of that God.

Her letter of March 31, 1776, is not merely an early feminist document. It is a theological argument. Adams was pointing out an internal contradiction in the founding project itself — a republic that grounds its liberty in the Creator’s endowment of human dignity cannot consistently deny that dignity to half its population.

What the Letters Reveal

Adams’s letters are remarkable documents of moral intelligence operating under pressure. Her insistence on education for women, her suspicion of unchecked male authority, her reading of political events through a moral lens sharpened by Scripture — all of this reflects a mind that took the founding claims seriously enough to demand their consistent application.

What makes Adams theologically significant is not merely that she was devout but that her faith produced a particular kind of clarity. She could see the contradiction between the republic’s stated principles and its actual practices because she measured both against a standard that transcended politics.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 speaks of enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. What is striking is that the subordination of women in fallen human history is not the end of the story but a condition that the gospel itself subverts. Paul’s declaration that in Christ there is neither male nor female is not an abolition of distinction but an assertion that the image of God belongs equally to all who bear it.

Abigail Adams did not use this theological language explicitly. But her argument has precisely this structure — insisting that the logic of the founding, properly followed, required acknowledging what the gospel had always affirmed.

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