Abigail Adams Dbq

November 27th, 1775. Britain and her rebel colony, the United States of America, were officially at war. A sudden cold snap had fallen swiftly on Braintree, Massachusetts, where Abigail Adams was writing a letter to her husband, lawyer, and Founding Father John Adams. As a Founding Father, John Adams was currently away, serving as a delegate from Massachusetts in the Continental Congress. Born to the family of a prominent minister, Abigail Adams had not been given a formal education. Although it was common for girls to receive an education no higher than reading for knowing more was seen as unfit for marriage (Archives: Part One, Women’s Education), she accomplished both reading and writing at home while having access to her family’s large

228). Despite this, she acted as a constant commenter to her husband throughout their marriage. Always ready to give her opinions and observations through a substantial trade of letters, she did so as an advocate of women’s rights, abolition, education, and a believer in Enlightenment ideals such as rationality, liberty, and equality. Although most of her letter from 1775 concerned the welfare of their friends and family, one particular section brings out her true thoughts about the political situation of their country. Responding to a string of previous letters concerning topics from human nature to the situation in Congress, Adams communicates her perspective and establishes her views as a female writer and supporter of Enlightenment concepts. And through her letter, employing the use of imagery and metaphors, Enlightenment logic and reasoning, and the organization of her paragraph into a persuasive one, she overcomes the innate status of men in the social and political

Through the use of several stylistic devices including imagery, simile, metaphor, and personification, she emphasizes her concern for the new government. Starting her paragraph with a phrase that describes men as dangerous creatures, she establishes the idea of male hostility using zoomorphism, a technique where humans are assigned animalistic characteristics. By writing “dangerous creature” (Adams 229), she represents men as barbaric and perhaps irrationally or inhumanly destructive forces the way animals present a danger to humans. In the next sentence, Adams writes how “great fish swallow up the small” (Adams 229), illustrating male ruthlessness with this metaphor. Comparing the only members of society with power during her time - white men - to hungry fish with an insatiable want for more, she represents how this weakness could ultimately prove detrimental to their new system of government. Giving another example of personification, Adams writes how “power whether vested in many or a few is ever grasping, and like the grave cries give, give” (Adams 229). Here, she creates a parallel between greed and the grave. Giving the grave human characteristics and a voice, “ever grasping” for more and crying “give, give” (Adams 229), she is warning the possible