Abigail Economicus

In both the publishing and cinematic worlds of Founders chic, Abigail Adams is a hot property. The sacred circle of the Founders has traditionally been reserved for a handful of politically prominent men—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison. Few of these have been of sufficient entertainment value to interest Hollywood; two relatively recent productions, Jefferson in Paris and Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor, did so because of titillating sex lives: Jefferson sleeping with his biracial slave and Arnold sleeping with the enemy, his young wife Peggy.

A different kind of romance—staid, conjugal, and enduring—has made the Adamses the latest stars. The 2008 HBO special John Adams updated the bicentennial hit The Adams Chronicles, celebrating, with even greater fanfare, the mythology of Abigail and John's fifty-four year marriage. With producers and a scriptwriter who cared little for facts, John Adams also gave viewers a whimsical chronology. Dr. Benjamin Rush returns from the grave to perform a mastectomy on Abigail's daughter, an operation he never did even when alive. A bodice-ripping reunion in France encourages John and Abigail to get it on (ugh!) under posterity's gaze. But perhaps the most stupefying scene (though there are many to choose from), involves Abigail's frustration over John's long absences, during which she is shown frantically scrubbing her bedroom windowpanes. Women of every generation, it seems, clean when they are mad at their man. It is annoying to anyone familiar with Abigail's correspondence to see the filmmakers reduce her famous "Remember the Ladies" letter to near-hysterical venting to John (in person), with an allusion to the care she takes in organizing her kitchen cupboard. "All men would be Tyrants" is given a Lifetime movie gloss—something like: "I am Woman, see me fume."

Were she alive today, publishers would be engaging in a bidding war for the rights to Abigail's memoir. But since that is not possible, they have given readers a crop of new biographical studies. In 2009, William Morrow released feminist historian Edith B. Gelles' critical and engaging Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage; Joseph Ellis, in an early interview, billed his new release with Knopf, First Family: Abigail and John Adams (2010), as a love story;¹ and the University of Chicago has just released intellectual historian G. J. Barker-Benfield's Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility (2010), a thoroughgoing study of sensibility that focuses on the letters of Abigail and John.

Amid the rush to ride the wave of America's current fascination with the Adamses, John Kaminski has put together The Quotable Abigail Adams. This volume is composed of selections from her letters, carefully arranged by topic; there is the obvious: "Family and Home," "Education," "Politics," and "Women"; and the unexpected: "Vices," "Language, Grammar and Penmanship," "Health, Medicine, and Exercise," and "Dreams, Imagination, Memories." Previous to this, Kaminski edited The Quotable Jefferson (2006) and Citizen Jefferson: The Wit and Wisdom of an American Sage (1994). A Quotable John Adams was published in 2008 by the author of trivia-card box sets. The Quotable Founding Fathers: A Treasury of 2,500 Wise and Witty Quotations from the Men and Women Who Created America also hit the bookstores in 2004. When did women become "Founding Fathers"? It appears anyone can be seminal these days.²

What explains the ever-enlarging fad for quoting the Founders? Such books seem to be aimed at individuals who append a biblical quote at the end of their e-mails. It is not much of a leap to go from reciting Pauline epistles to the Adamses' letters. Kaminski includes maxims similar to Franklin's in Poor Richard's Almanac: "Cut your coat according to your Cloth"; or, "Business once lost, does not easily return to the old hands" (pp. 156, 79). A...