Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other famous American women will soon grace our paper currency. And it’s about time! But the Treasury Department overlooked the candidate most deserving such an honor. After all, it was Abigail Adams who – at the moment of independence – issued a clarion call to her husband that American revolutionaries “remember the ladies” in their new government.
Of course, John Adams ignored her plea and I’m not suggesting that we honor her for her inability to effect changes in women’s political or legal status in the new republic. No, Abigail belongs on the money because of her successful defiance of laws preventing married women from controlling their own property. As her biographer, Woody Holton, points out, Adams was an extraordinarily successful businesswoman.
At the time, married women were legally “femes covert” – literally “covered” by husbands who held legal title to their property and its use. For Abigail to conduct business independently, even to write her own will, defied centuries of legal precedent.
But, with the tacit cooperation of her husband John, she did just that. During the Revolutionary War she conducted a highly profitable import business, getting John to ship fine goods from Europe, which she had a male relative sell on her behalf. When the British captured two ships carrying her merchandise, John expressed doubts, but Abigail demonstrated a shrewd understanding of risk. With few imports available, merchants could name their price. “If one in 3 [cargoes] arrive,” she wrote, “I should be a gainer.”
And she was, reinvesting the profits to expand her business and then diversifying into speculating on depreciated government bonds and investing in real estate ventures in far-off Vermont. At the same time, she profitably managed the Adams farm and advised her husband on his own financial dealings. In her will, she made token bequests to two surviving sons but left the bulk of her estate to granddaughters, nieces, daughters-in-law, and female servants, in the hope that they would follow in her footsteps.
Former U.S. Treasurer Ivy Baker Priest once argued that women didn’t care about getting their pictures on the money as long as they could get their hands on it. When we alter our currency to “remember the ladies”, we ought to honor one of America’s first successful businesswomen - Abigail Adams.
