3/13/09

John Adams: World's Most Unlikely Feminist

As one who does not trust the implicit goodness of his fellow man, I found it surprising that John Adams had such liberal views on women as a person of his times.

He was friends with an early female advocate of the revolution, Mercy Otis Warren. This doesn't seem like a big deal, but for the time, it was.

He came to her defense when newspapers questioned her role in writing a propaganda play during the revolution as similar to the condescension that Great Britain treated its American subjects with.

The stoic Cato of his times remarked on learned ladies to her "I have such a consciousness of Inferiority to them (learned ladies), as mortifies and humiliates my self-love, to such a degree that I can scarcely speak in their presence."

This doesn't sound like the crotchety old Adams we all know.

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