I've not read the the David McCullough work, but I was able to find the passage via Amazon I think you're referring to. Writes McCullough, "[Abigail Adams] was not being entirely serious. In part, in her moment of springtime gaity, she was teasing him" (105).

I think you're extrapolating something that McCullough did not write or even intend. McCullough never said that AA was "joking" about women's rights. In fact, AA did speak tongue-in-cheek in her famous "Remember the ladies" dialogue. She writes that "If particular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies, we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation." AA clearly did not mean for John to take her threat seriously and indeed, he did not. "I cannot but laugh" at "your extraordinary Code of Laws," he replied, jokingly calling it the "Despotism of the Peticoat." The only way a man even as indulgent as Adams could deal with women's politicism was by refusing to take it seriously.

And AA wasn't necessarily asking for a "slice of the independence pie." She never explicitly asked that the vote be given to women. Rather, she asked that the nation's new code of laws include protection for women from unscrupulous spouses. While AA demonstrated a most unusual political awareness for a woman of her time, she never again agitated for women's inclusion in the political process with John after the "Remember the Ladies" exchange or elsewhere (outside of personal correspondences with her lady friends). She advocated girls' education as did many Republicans of the time, but by most accounts, AA was a typical eighteenth century woman. Sure, she ran the family farm, but she did so reluctantly, often writing to John and asking him to come home and resume management again over it.

I don't mean to diminish the feminist legacy of AA in anyway, but has a historian, I feel compelled to point these things out.

Amen.

Abigail Adams was a woman of admirable spirit and independence, but she was still a woman of her times. While she was progressive for the era, she was not a "feminist" in the modern sense of the word-- or even in the sense that it is applied to nineteenth century suffragettes.

The women's rights movement had not even started to coalesce by the time of the American Revolution. Female suffrage was not being seriously discussed even in progressive circles. Though A. Adams clearly was concerned for the welfare of women, she, like most of her contemporaries, accepted a mostly apolitical role.

We are all complex beings, deeply intertwined with the times we live in. To presume that Abigail Adams must have seriously advocated the politicization of women to not be considered "docile" and an "equal" is an unfortunate devaluation of the truth, as well as of the courage it took for Adams to advocate for the measures she did in the eighteenth century context.