Why Do You Believe That Abigail Adams's Plea to Her

Essay

Why do you believe that Abigail Adams's plea to her husband, Massachusetts Patriot and future President John Adams, to extend to women the revolutionary principles of political liberty and equality largely failed to be heeded by American Patriots of the Revolutionary era,? What accounts for the limited application of the revolutionary ideas of equality and liberty to American women during the Revolutionary era, despite an assertion of the "universality"of these two democratic principles by Thomas Jefferson in his lofty and defiant Declaration of Independence, approved by Congress on July 4, 1776?