ABSTRACT
Abigail Adams was the first First Lady to live in the White House in the newly-constructed capital of Washington for a brief three months before her husband was defeated for a second term. In 1801, the Adamses returned to their home in Quincy, Massachusetts, where they lived in retirement for the remainder of their lives. During that period, the flow of Abigail's letters did not stop, as she continued to write about politics and gossip to her widely-travelled family members. Moreover, she has left a rich and singular paper trail for future historians to study and understand women's unique experiences. Abigail lived in an era before it was respectable for women in America to become authors, so the form of her writing was epistolary. She repeated the salient grievance of the revolutionaries: taxation without representation. Abigail Adams has provided the only extant political story of Revolutionary era America, written from the perspective of a woman.
