.
Abigail Adams
1744-1818 She strongly supported independence from England, espoused equal opportunities for women, and vigorously opposed slavery.
She was the wife of John Adams,
second president of the US and mother of John Quincy Adams, sixth president.
Owing to Henry's mental weakness she was in effect sovereign, and the war of 1449, in which Normandy was lost, was laid by the English to her charge. In the Wars of the Roses, after a brave struggle of nearly 20 years, she was finally defeated at Tewkesbury (1471), and imprisoned for four years in the Tower, until ransomed by Louis XI. She then retired to France, where she died in poverty.
Together with Elizabeth Stanton she published 'The History of Women Suffrage'. In 1872 she tested the right of women to vote in Rochester; she was arrested, tried, and convicted.
Her work paved the way for the
19th Amendement (1920) to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote.
Mistreated by the British, she was pushed into the rebel camp during the
Sepoy Mutiny.
Leading the rebel troops, she inflicted a series of defeats on British units but is killed by a
Hussar during a skirmish.
She was known as a patron of the Renaissance and her court at Ferarra was filled with artists.
She became America's first feminist when her demand for a vote in the Maryland Assembly was refused.
She actively supported military defence of the colony, and upon the death of her brother-in-law, Leonard Calvert, became executor of his estate. After the Maryland assembly denied her appeal for two votes in the proceedings, one as landowner and one as attorney to the Baltimore family, she moved to Virginia (c.1651), where she developed another large property. Sometimes cited today as a pioneering protofeminist lawyer, she seems to have acted basically as a strong-willed property owner, making no claims as a woman, nor in any way practising law.
She inherited the duchy of Aquitaine. Married at age fifteen to Louis VII of France, she was queen of France for 15 years, and participated in the second crusade. After the marriage got annulled she married Henry Plantagnet who became Henry II, king of England. She took an active part in administering his kingdom and direct control of her own domain. Aquitaine became Europe's centre of high culture and all the great troubadours performed at her court in Poitiers. Of her 10 children two would reign as kings (Richard the Lion Heart and John of England) and two as queens, earning her the title 'grandmother of Europe'.
www link :
|
