Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted that you are here today. We're going to return to the

life of one of my favorite first ladies. I just love her because she is such an independent thinker,

and she was way before her time. I shared a lot of details about her in episode 44 of

this podcast, an episode called 1100 strongly worded letters. And so if you haven't listened to it yet,

you can check that episode out. It will give you a lot of biographical details about Abigail Adams. But today I want to

concentrate on one of the times when John and Abigail were together. In particular, the years

they spent living abroad during the first two years after the American Revolution. So

let's start in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's

where it gets interesting. Okay, first let's do a very quick recap of Abigail's early life

in case it's been a while since you listened to episode 44. She was born into a very prominent and politically involved Massachusetts family.

Her name was Abigail Smith before she got married. She was educated at home by her mother,

along with her two sisters, Mary and Betsy. She was taught to read and write something that

many girls of her era did not get to experience. And she was given leave

to use her father's library and the libraries of her uncles, which meant that she had access to

extensive English and French literature libraries. So she developed a reputation for being a very

avid reader. And you can see that manifested in the

letters that she wrote throughout her life. She often filled them with her favorite passages

from literature. She met a man named John Adams, who was nine years older than her when she was

15. Her parents were not convinced that he was a good match for her. He was a very small-time

lawyer, making not a lot of money. And he had what her parents considered farm manners from his

country upbringing. He did not have any level of aristocracy to him. He wasn't refined.

But eventually they relented and Abigail and John Adams married in 1764.

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