antto preserve the liberty and civil rights of his countrymen. this duty stimulated his brain. it appealed to his ego. it bolstered his self confidence. he discovered that the talents that had earned him success as a provincial lawyer, his speech and his sagacity, suited him as well in this larger theater. he had arrived somewhat timidly at the first continental congress, wondering how he would measure up to the great delegates from other states. to his satisfaction, if not his amazement, he measured up. now he had joined with them, in an undertaking that consumed his attention and his energies in the best of missions. he was liberated from the law. he soon became liberated from most of his family responsibilities, because abigail, his partner, was a willing consort in this new

mission and relieved him of family cares. if not a soldier, john could still be a revolutionary. and now abigail. as it was for john, independence was on abigail's mind in that spring of 1776. and this was after the declaration of independence had already been signed. i suppose in congress, that you think of everything relative to trade in commerce, as well as other things she wrote. demure, before she forwarded her own recommendations. she proposed that congress place an excise tax on spirits and liquors, that would be equal among all the states. currently, she pointed out, new england carries a heavier surcharge than others, which

damaged their trade. sensing then perhaps that she was on a role, abigail next introduced a topic that the delegates had purposefully avoided. i have sometimes been ready to think, and she backed into her subject before delivering her blow, that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breaths of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of airs. artfully proposing her comments in the conditional form, she then stepped audaciously into the hornet's nest of slavery, that congress had cautiously avoided in order to maintain unity among the states wile engaging in the war for independence. the one topic that would certainly spell the end of cooperation between the southern and northern states was slavery.

abigail, however, reminded john that political expediency contradicted both morality and religion, to say nothing of its hypocrisy. of this i am certain, that it is not founded upon the generous and christian principles of doing to others that we would as others should do untoe us. abigail's distress about slavery was not new. she had written to john at the time of the disentarry, that it had been been sent as a punishment for slavery, but even then, she condemned the pervasive action that she saw in her state. most sincerely, there was not a slave in the province, she wrote to john, when rumors of a slave rebellion circulated during the chaotic days of september 1774. it always appeared a most

inequitious scheme to me. fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have and she added, you know my mind on that subject. abigail had given careful thought to the forum in philadelphia, from which she as a woman was excluded, and there were a number of issues of which she was irritated. slavery was one. and wile she was ruminating on the paradox of the delegates talking and writing about liberty and freedom, wile all the while excluding some groups from the benefit of ideological mission, she introduced another delicate topic. alone at her kitchen table at night, writing by canned light, as her household slept, abigail had the time to focus her mind and her thoughts drifted to the forum at philadelphia and to her husband. this was her moment to consider

issues that were important to her, and so she initiated another sadicious. i long to hear that you have declared an independence and by the way in the new code of law which i suppose it will be necessary for you to peak, i would desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. that was an audacious move. again, as she sat, her thoughts carried her to a territory that what more revolutionary than any american, male or female, had wandered in the course of their rebellious consideration. slavery was the live specter that the delegates avoided but the idea of the rights of women

was so contrary to anyone's imagination, much less expression in the halls of congress, that the issue would have been considered amusing rather than alarming. but abigail was serious, very serious. remember, old men would be tolerant if they could. then recovering her sense of reality, the reality with which she anticipated her claim would be met, she continue with a famed threat, and here we hear her teasing him. if particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foe meant a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. she covered her tracks with satire, mocking the same phrases that john and his fellow delegates used in their debates, as her method of demonstrating the limitations of their objectives.

abigail's command to remember the ladies has resonated for more than two centuries. it was the boldest statement written by an american woman in the 18th century and for much of the 19th. as a demand for political rights. it came from the mind and the soul of a woman whose life had been transformed over a long decade of rebellion, from the pod he will of a new england matron, recapitulating her mother's life and that of generations of women before her into a rebellion of her own. she was ernest, she had access. she made her move on behalf of women in an age when such a demand was no less radical than the state's rebellion against great britain, and as radical as her words were, as far out of context as they were from the mentality of most radicals who fought for american independence, they were still

couched in an ethos that reflected her culture and her times. so that's my abigail section. a i would be happy to answer questions if you have questions. [applause] [inaudible] >> thank you for your talk. >> thank you. >> it's very, very good. i'm interested in all of the letters. it seems to me from what i know is that so much about the adams comes from the letters that have been written. how were they accumulated and saved for so long throughout history? >> excellent question.

thank you very much. they were saved because the adams were a family who was aware that history was being made and that they were participating in history. john adams carried trunks of letters and papers around with him wherever he traveled. literally trunks. abigail of course saved all of her letters that she received from him, and her friends. and so all of those family letters were kept by both of them. in that era, both men and women practiced writing letters before actually writing what they called a fair copy. so generally, there were two copies of the letter, the draft

and the fair copy. abigail rarely copied. so her letters primarily are drafts, and they were saved, they were saved because john kept them and he had a sense of history. she very often wrote to him, burn my letters. i don't want anyone to ever read these letters. and she meant that because she had beared her heart in her letters. john letters she kept, but sometimes there are two copies. a copy that he wrote and then sometimes his secretary or one of the children would copy it over in a fair hand. so sometimes with john's letters, there's either the recipient's copy or the rough draft remaining. there were many letters between abigail and her friends as well.

and she had kept a lot of them. so what happened was, their house was filled with boxes and trunks of letters. and the family kept them. finally, in the second generation, they started to build a library, where they would keep these letters, and sort them and when charles francis adams sorted the letters in the 1830's and 18 40's, this is abigail's and john's grandson, the son of john quincy, he threw out a lot of abigail's letters from her friends. which is painful to us women today because he said, those aren't really important. the important letters are the historical ones between the adams. so a lot of her correspondence with her friends was lost. but they were very careful, the adams family was very careful to

keep all of those letters. and it -- they were sorted by every generation was given the responsibility of sorting and then binding the letters and they did that. they sorted them by dates and put them into bound volumes. in 1954, the adams family burned with not just abigail's and john's letters, but four generations of adams letters, gave all the letters to the mishistorical society. the first thing the mishis tore l cool society did was microfilm all of the letters, so that there was a permanent record. you remember microfilm, it came in the 19 50's an 1960's, it came before the computer. i read the letters mostly on microfilm, because once they were microfilmed, the original

copies of the letter were closed to historians. you can't see them in the mass historical. you can only read from the microfilm, which is what i did, and any of you have ever read microfilm, you know it -- your tolerance wears down very quickly and at first i could read for half an hour and then i would have to take a break and go outside and look at a tree far off to refocus my eyes and then go back, but i got good at reading them and i got good at reading hand. now, all of this is available on the computer. so if you go to google, and you google adams papers.com, you can have these letters, not only in their original hand, but text script, so you can read the letters on your computer interest your home with great ease. this is the transformation that the computer has made.

so that is the odyssey of the adams letters as far as i know it. yeah? other questions. yeah, please. >> john adams -- >> david mccollough's john adams book. >> it's a wonderful book. >> and he quotes a lot of abigail's letters in there and i'm wondering how much of a duplication is there in your book compared to that one, with the letters? >> good. how do i differ from david mccollough. i think david mccollough's john adams has been not only a service to john adams, but to all of us. john adams was the least known of all of the founding fathers until mccollough's books.

there were few biographies of adams, but mccollough's book brought him to attention and since that time, there have been a couple of television programs as you know and so forth, so it was a very wonderful book and he gets john adams spot on from the first paragraph, where he has john adams on a horse, in a snowstorm, riding from quincy, mis, to boston, talking and talking, and talking, and that to me is john adams spot on. the mouth talking in every circumstance. inventively, creatively. mccollough also likes abigail a great deal, but she's a subordinate figure in the book. she shows up only as it

compliments john adams, and he doesn't give her what i call agency. that is, she reacts throughout the book. she doesn't -- you don't see here as an innovator. for instance, this passage that i just read you about remember the ladies, he does nothing with it. he does absolutely nothing. he wrote the letter, and then goes on to something else. so his abigail and john are out of balance for one thing. but the other thing is, he has john adams in the political and diplomatic world, and i don't have to do that so much because he's done it, and i have john more in the family world. while the political and the diplomatic is there as well. and there's also a difference of interpretation. my background is, i'm a feminist scholar, i'm a scholar of women, i'm a historian of women, and it

is most important to me that we understand that women were part of the historical past. and so my emphasis on abigail and on what women do and on the daily events in women's lives is recorded in this book, in a way that it isn't in a biography of john adams. that's -- yeah. injuries. -- yes, sir? >> from what i understand, i watched the documentary on john adams on public tv, and it sounded like jefferson played some dirty tricks on adams, so he wouldn't get elected, so he -- jefferson would. and i was wondering if i imagine that abigail played a big role if supporting her husband during

that time. did you find out much about that? >> yes, i know about that election, and the fact of the matter is, that's correct. we tend to think that we live in the age of dirty politics. and bad journalism. it was nothing like that age or, if anything, it is not worse now than it was then. politics was played in this country from the beginning and journalism was dirty from the beginning. journalists, for instance, could make up their stories, which provoked abigail enormously. she would be very angry because she would read in the newspaper that she had attended a con certificate the night before. well, she hadn't been there, or john had, george washington had.

they made stories up in the newspapers and we know journalists don't do that today, right 70 report the news and just the news. so that was one thing and journalism plays into politics, it's very important in politics. jefferson became alienated from john adams. he was vice-president in the early adams administration, and he left and he went home, because their politics had grown apart. and they -- they came apart politically. they came apart politically, early on when they were in europe, but they both tolerated one another. but during the adams' -- during john adams' administration, what happened was france was a very great threat. and the french revolution had happened and americans --

americans were sympathetic with the french revolution. they thought, an jefferson was particularly sympathetic with the french revolution, because he thought it was going to be another american revolution, that what was happening over there was its same thing that was happening over here and it took a very long time for them to discover that heads were flying, that heads were being chopped off and there was a reign of terror in france and it was in fact a civil war. but jefferson was most sympathetic to france, and it took him a long time to become disabused of france. and adams, during that time, exercised a kind of diplomacy that kept the country out of war. this was the end of the 1790's, his administration. jefferson and his party would have gone to war against either france or england. it was touch and go, because

both of them were stopping american ships on the high sea. and adams wanted to pursue a policy of getting peace at any cost because he said, this nation is in no position to have another war so soon after the revolution. we couldn't sustain another war. so there were difference -- that was the major reason for the breach between them. but jefferson also thought that adams was exercising too much power as president and wanted a strong federal government and he wanted a weak federal government. what jefferson did was first of all, wrote a letter to thomas paine, who had written a book about the french revolution, ex tolding the french revolution, an jefferson's letter of sympathy for thomas paine got appended to the introduction of

that book when it was published in america, an everyone knew it was a criticism of adams. and the person who really knew it was a criticism of adams was adams, and so that made him very angry. this man of great passion. and then jefferson did write a couple of letters that got published in this news -- in the journals of the times, which were critical of adams and adams saw that as a betrayal, and he -- he did -- he did things that with he expect politicians to do in hour age. but which we don't think our founding fathers and mothers engaged in that kind of politics. the second component to your question was, what was abigail's role. in campaigning for the presidency? abigail was not happy that john either took the vice-presidency

or the presidency, but like everything else, she went along with it, because he had a duty to serve and she had a duty to serve as well. so it was that sense of duty that really compelled her to go along with this, and not prevent him from taking office. did they campaign in a way that modern politicians? no. they didn't believe in campaigning. they didn't believe political parties even existed. there were differences of opinions, but they thought all of us are in favor of the new constitution and the new government, so all -- there should be no political differences. there are shades of opinion, there are perhaps taxes, but not political parties. we look back and say oh, they were political parties, they just didn't know it. the consequence was they didn't believe they had to campaign.

they didn't believe -- they didn't know yet. this is an experimental phase in american history. everything they did was experimental. and so none of them went out on the campaign trail. john adams went home and expected everyone would vote for him, just on the basis of his record. not only jefferson, was subversive, but john's arch nemesis, alexander hamilton, and hamilton was really hamilton's campaign against adams for the presidency was the effective subterfuge that destroyed adams' second candidacy, because what he did was he supported someone else and then a tie developed for the presidency and it had to do with things being

complicated, you know, the electoral college and all of this mess that we have today that was even messier at that time in history, and that's how john came in third. as there was a tie between jefferson... >> okay. other questions? well, thank you very much for

coming and hearing about abigail and john. thank you. [applause] >> edith gelles is the author of several books. she's currently a senior scholar at stanford university's institute for gender research. for more information visit stanford.edu/group/gender.

>> acclaimed novelist ayelet waldman responds to the public outcry that branded her a bad mother for claiming she loves her husband more than her children. barnes & noble tribeca in new york city hosted the event, it's 40 minutes. [laughter] >> hi. okay, so i'm just going to launch into this. this is what we're going to do, we're going to read a little, then we're going to ask some questions. i want you to be thinking of

your questions right now, here's why. there are stupendous prizes for those who ask questions, and you want to win a prize. you do, you know you do. i hope there's someone lactating. excellent. i'm going to read an essay called breast is best. once when my son abraham was six weeks old i was standing in line at a local bakery. i had him in a sling, and i was feeding him. the baby had finally taken his bottle, and i was loathe to adjust anything for fear of disturbing our tenuous peace. i rocked a bit on my heels. the baby paused in his sucking, and i held my breath. suddenly, a voice behind me said, you know, breast is best. i turned. the speaker, a woman a few years

older than i, smiled pleasantly. now, the correct response to that comment might have been a stern rejoinder to mind her own business. instead, what i did was burst into tears and launch into a long explanation about how the milk in the bottle was my own pumped at 4 in the morning. i told this stranger that i had, in fact, been pumping breast milk for abraham every two hours because he was born with a an abnormality that made it lift for him to suckle from the breast. immediately, however, he began losing weight, and by the time the pediatrician finally made time to see him, he was dangerously thin. no one, not even the nurses in