Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president of the United States, was never a leader of any kind during her lifetime, except in the circle of her devoted family. But a generation after her death, Americans began to see her as a paragon of domestic patriotism during the Revolution. By the late nineteenth century she was widely regarded as one of America’s finest letter writers. In the late twentieth century she took on a new role as a feminist heroine, and her current reputation—as a fully engaged patriotic wife and mother, as an accomplished literary correspondent, and as a powerful voice for all women in the premodern era—stands higher than ever.