Remember the Ladies (With Apologies To Abigail Adams)

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • March 10, 2025

In the late nineteenth century, 1881 to be exact, Nantucket erected a monument at the burial site of some of the first English settlers on the island. But, given the times, they forgot the ladies – more than a century after Abigail Adams wrote to her husband,


I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable (sic.) to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar (sic.) care and attention is not paid to the Laidies (sic.) we are determined to foment a Rebelion (sic.), and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. (March 31, 1776)


Now, given the time, this is not at all surprising. I will not now go into the history of this site – that can be for a later post – but suffice it to say that it then took almost a century more for the “ladies” to be remembered. The woman who toiled next to their husbands, worked together as two heads and four hands, who gave birth to eighty English children on the shores of an island twenty-eight-miles at sea. In 2008, I was asked to be part of a group that created a monument to the first female English settlers of the island. It stands next to the earlier stone from 1881 overlooking what was once the original settlement site, as well as Washing, Maxcy, and Capaum Ponds (once a harbor), and out into the sound.  


JNLF

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