The Founding Fathers lorded it over the Founding Mothers in a million ways, but none annoyed Abigail Adams more than the legal degradation that 18th-century women faced the moment they got married.
A spinster or widow had essentially the same property rights as a man. But once women married, their property was "subject to the controul and disposal of our partners, to whom the Laws have given a soverign Authority," as Adams complained to her husband John in a June 1782 letter.
But Abigail didn't simply complain about the government's denial of married women's property rights. She also defied it.
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