This, Which I Call Mine

I made the deliberate decision to not write yesterday – and that is something I fully intend to incorporate into my writing schedule – time off. My back gave me that signal – an old ache in the place where wings used to be attached. I woke up in the morning thinking such an image – It hurts just where my wings used to be . . .

Instead I took an extra long walk, fed my sourdough pets, and took my inner writer on a field trip to the Library of Virginia for a book talk and signing by author Woody Holton who has just published a non-stuffy biography of Abigail Adams. I always love these book talks – authors who seem ordinary and plain as they talk about their book and, more importantly, about their struggles in writing the book. Often the insights they gain while struggling to write the book are far more interesting to me than the distilled and dressed up version of the book itself. After buying the book, I often can’t find all that good, behind the scenes stuff they talked about.

He spent years reading the thousands of letters written and received by Abigail – at least 1,500 between her and her husband, John Adams, and thousands more to and from others close to her. He said he was struck  one day, years into the project, by the oft repeated phrase she used in many letters to her husband, nieces, sisters, friends, sons and daughters -- This money which I call mine.

Married women were not allowed to own property or money. Her husband, second President of the United States, told her he would be the laughingstock of the Republic if he suggested the laws be otherwise. He called her “saucy” and “a wit” for speaking such a thing. She was allowed “pocket money” to run the household during periods when her husband was in England (once he stayed there 5 years). Unbeknownst to John, a conservative investor, she had persuaded his investor to buy government bonds with some of her pocket money – yielding 25 percent profit as compared to her husband’s 1 percent profit in land he bought and sold. Much of Abigail’s profit was given to women in similar positions – married sisters, nieces, grown daughters. Once her sister wrote back in gratitude – “Sometimes it is best that the right hand not know what the left hand is doing.”

When Abigail became ill, she sat down to write a will – also a thing which married women were not allowed to do since of course they had no property to will. By that time, in spite of what she had given away, she had amassed $5,000 in “pocket money,” well over $100,000 in today’s terms, according to the author. She willed virtually all of her money to women – daughters, nieces, sisters-in-law, daughters-in-law (leaving out her own two sons whom she had financed through Harvard and who ultimately died of alcoholism), and a few other women whom she deemed ought to have their own money to do as they pleased.

Her husband had the right to destroy the will since it was not a legal document (his signature was not on it) and since she had no property to will – but instead he chose to let the will stand. Of those women to whom she bequeathed money, not one of them gave the money to their own husbands as would have been legal and proper at the time.

She could not change the law, and so she defied the law -- that's what the author said.  Soon after her death – I don't recall how long – the laws were changed – and in many ways I am the richer for having taken myself to this wonderful book talk about a saucy woman, Abigail Adams.