Woody Holton: Abigail Adams
Apr. 8th, 2010 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessOk, I admit it: I have the tiniest bit of a crush on Abigail Adams, inexplicable when you consider that in many ways she remained deeply conservative and patronizingly racist for her entire life, and inexplicably attached to John Adams. (I think she remains the only woman who ever thought John Adams was hot. I mean, I've looked at the pictures, and I just can't see it.) Then again, you kinda have to at least slightly like a woman who fell deeply in love with her future husband because he brought her books and wanted to talk to her about them.
Which is why I ended up reading another biography, the 2009 biography by Woody Holton. Holton does a good, if often dry, job of elucidating the multiple contradictions in Adams' life: a proto-feminist, she nonetheless supported traditional roles for women and believed in the general superiority of men; a devoted U.S. patriot, she made money off of war profiteering and took shameless advantage of her husband's posting in France to run a little import business of luxury goods during the American Revolution; an abolitionist (who had grown up in a well to do New England slave holding household) who nonetheless continued to hold patronizingly racist views and looked upon black-white sexual relationships (which were absolutely not limited to the southern United States) with stark horror. The biography contains other tidbits: Adams's friendly yet frequently fraught relationship with her father's former slave, Phoebe Abdee, who used her freedom to support indigents of both races in the house that she was renting and caretaking from Adams; a horrifying account of the then-brutal mastectomy treatments for breast cancer; a hint that Abigail and John Adams may not have waited for their wedding date; Adams' insistence, not particularly legal at the time, in drawing up her own will, where she left her money and possessions to granddaughters and nieces – but not to her grandsons and nephews. She was well aware of the precarious financial position of women, having watched her own female relatives trapped in financially disastrous marriages, or hurried into marriages to ensure homes, respectability and money – even if those three would later disappear.
The biography suffers from the same problem that any biography of Abigail Adams will have: far, far too many people are named "Abigail" or "Elizabeth" or "Louisa" and attempting to keep them all straight is difficult to impossible for any reader. (Holton includes family trees in the book's endpapers, but library copies tape over them, so they're not as helpful as they could be.) Once I gave up the attempt, the book significantly improved.
Which is why I ended up reading another biography, the 2009 biography by Woody Holton. Holton does a good, if often dry, job of elucidating the multiple contradictions in Adams' life: a proto-feminist, she nonetheless supported traditional roles for women and believed in the general superiority of men; a devoted U.S. patriot, she made money off of war profiteering and took shameless advantage of her husband's posting in France to run a little import business of luxury goods during the American Revolution; an abolitionist (who had grown up in a well to do New England slave holding household) who nonetheless continued to hold patronizingly racist views and looked upon black-white sexual relationships (which were absolutely not limited to the southern United States) with stark horror. The biography contains other tidbits: Adams's friendly yet frequently fraught relationship with her father's former slave, Phoebe Abdee, who used her freedom to support indigents of both races in the house that she was renting and caretaking from Adams; a horrifying account of the then-brutal mastectomy treatments for breast cancer; a hint that Abigail and John Adams may not have waited for their wedding date; Adams' insistence, not particularly legal at the time, in drawing up her own will, where she left her money and possessions to granddaughters and nieces – but not to her grandsons and nephews. She was well aware of the precarious financial position of women, having watched her own female relatives trapped in financially disastrous marriages, or hurried into marriages to ensure homes, respectability and money – even if those three would later disappear.
The biography suffers from the same problem that any biography of Abigail Adams will have: far, far too many people are named "Abigail" or "Elizabeth" or "Louisa" and attempting to keep them all straight is difficult to impossible for any reader. (Holton includes family trees in the book's endpapers, but library copies tape over them, so they're not as helpful as they could be.) Once I gave up the attempt, the book significantly improved.