MARCH 31, 1776: "REMEMBER THE LADIES"

It seems appropriate to conclude Women’s History Month with Abigail Smith Adams’s appeal to her husband John, while he was in Philadelphia considering colonial “independency.” “[In] the new code of laws . . . I desire you would remember the ladies. . . Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care . . . is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” Her letter proposed protecting wives from violent husbands and securing their rights to divorce and property ownership.

Her husband’s April 14 response seems patronizing. “As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient — that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent — that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented. — This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I wont blot it out. . . . Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. . . . We have only the Name of Masters, and . . . [to] give up this, . . . would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat . . .”

During the Revolution, Abigail was a single parent, managing their farm, educating their children, hiding in the woods from the British, making musket balls and dealing with shortages, inflation, dysentery and smallpox. Over the course of their fifty-four-year marriage, John Adams was frequently absent. Between 1762 and 1801, she wrote him 1,100 letters. Against her wishes, he preserved them. Historian Lindsey Chervinsky describes them as full of “snark, . . . sass, . . . grudges . . . and love.”

Thomas Jefferson called Abigail “one of the most estimable characters on earth.” His wife, Martha Wayles Skelton, died ten years after they married. During that decade, Jefferson served in the Continental Congress, in Richmond as a delegate and governor and in the Congress of the Confederation. She bore six children; two survived. He destroyed their correspondence and recalled every letter she had sent others. Historians believe that his enslaved concubine was literate but Sally Hemings’s name appears only in Monticello’s property inventories.

This essay is about who is named, remembered, acknowledged and valued, and who is ignored, invisible or erased. Women’s history is an exercise in naming. The expression, “Anonymous was a woman,” resonates. Legally stripped of their own names while married or enslaved, powerless people understood the power of names.

President Trump also understands the visceral power of names: to brand his projects, belittle his rivals or recast America’s past. On Inauguration Day, he signed Executive Order 14172, “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,” to reconstitute the US Board of Geographic Names. His target was the highest peak in North America, called Denali by Alaskans. In Koyukon, the name means “great one.” It plays a role in Indigenous creation myths.

Trump prefers McKinley, the name given the mountain in 1896 by a gold prospector named William Dickey. In contrast, British mountaineer Hudson Stuck, who first summitted the peak in 1913 with an Athabaskan guide, Walter Harper, called for “the restoration . . .of [Denali’s] immemorial native name.” In his 1914 book, The Ascent of Denali, Stuck challenged “a certain ruthless arrogance” that “contemptuously ignores native names of conspicuous natural objects” that are “appropriate and significant, and overlays them with names that are . . . neither.”

Congress made Mount McKinley official in 1917, a decision President Obama reversed with an executive order in 2015, noting Denali’s cultural importance and that McKinley had “never set foot in Alaska.” Alaskans, who had lobbied for the Denali name for decades, are again campaigning. Mountains named for William McKinley are found in Arkansas, California, Colorado, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, South Dakota and other states.

Following racial justice protests in 2018 and 2020, pressure increased to reexamine the country’s history and to remove monuments and rename sites which honored Confederates who had committed treason by fighting against the United States. In 2020, a Congressional supermajority passed a law to rename military bases over Trump’s veto. The Pentagon’s Renaming Commission identified 1,111 places named for Confederates but focused first on nine bases.

Using another executive order, Trump has reversed the Commission’s decisions. Fort Benning in Georgia originally referred to Brig. Gen. Henry Benning, a rabid secessionist. Briefly renamed Fort Moore, it’s again Fort Benning, after Corporal Fred Benning, who won a medal for bravery in World War I. North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, named for Gen. Braxton Bragg, an enslaver and failed military leader, renamed Fort Liberty, now honors Private Roland Bragg, a WWII veteran. The gesture seems juvenile.

Renaming military bases is not new. In 1780, a fort on a west point overlooking the Hudson River was called Fort Arnold. After Benedict Arnold committed treason, it was renamed for General James Clinton, who defeated the British at fort Niagara. Renaming bases or removing statues is not erasure. The American Revolution and the Civil War are still taught.

In another “day one” executive order, President Trump banned D.E.I. (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in federal programs, contracts and grants. The Department of Defense has been enthusiastic in its enforcement, ordering removal of all references to diversity on “all platforms.” It refused to mark Black History Month. Because of the word “gay,” minions employing artificial intelligence in word searches eliminated references to the Enola Gay. The B-29 bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan in August 1946 was named for the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay Tibbets.

Recently the Pentagon eliminated references to the “Notable Graves” of Indigenous, Hispanic, Black and female military dead from Arlington National Cemetery’s website. It did not remove references to Confederates buried there. Information about the women who served as WASPs (Women’s Air Force Service Pilots), ferrying untried planes and towing practice targets, was excised. References to the graves of Justices Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are gone.

Articles about the Tuskegee Airmen, members of the Black female 6888^th Postal Battalion and the Navajo Code Talkers disappeared from military websites. Proportionally more Native Americans have served in our armed forces than any other population cohort. Without the Code Talkers, the United States would not have won the battle of Iwo Jima or the war in the Pacific.

An article about Jackie Robinson, who served in the Army during WWII, before breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947, was taken down. I wonder if that blurb included Robinson’s commitment to the “Double V” campaign, the fight for freedom abroad and at home. He was court martialed and acquitted after refusing to move to the back of an Army bus. “I cannot stand and sing the anthem,” Robinson observed years later. “I cannot salute the flag. I am a Black man in a white world.”

The Pentagon’s purge outraged military families, veterans’ groups and the general public, prompting some reversals. Webpages about the Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen and Robinson have reappeared. Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, acknowledge that in “rare cases” mistakes were made, blaming AI. His subordinate, John Ullyot, was removed, but his boss remains zealous. “The single dumbest word [sic] in military history,” Secretary Hegseth asserts, “is ‘our diversity is our strength.”

In 2026, America will celebrate the 250^th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. President Trump’s enthusiasm for the event may be related to his love of pomp and patriarchy. The Declaration was crafted by fifty-six elite white guys, representing thirteen colonies in which slavery was legal. Among them were twenty-four lawyers, eleven merchants, nine farmers or plantation owners and forty-one enslavers.

Jefferson, who enslaved eighty-three people in 1776, wrote the words that have described our ideals and inspired our democracy. The signers pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Five were captured by the British, tortured and died. Nine succumbed to war wounds. Many ended up destitute, their property destroyed. Six survived to sign the Constitution in 1787.

The Declaration calls Americans “one people.” The “self-evident truth . . . that all men are created equal” encompassed everyone. It did not divide us by gender, race, religion or status. The twenty-seven charges against King George III included his “obstruction of laws for the naturalization of foreigners,” curtailing immigration.

It may be a challenge to celebrate America’s past in 2026. Last Thursday, President Trump issued an order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It ordered Vice President Vance to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution’s museums and research centers, including the zoo, and to restore “monuments, memorials, statues, markers” removed the last five years. The President believes there has been “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. . . . remarkable achievements . . . [have been cast] in a negative light. . . . inherently racist, sexist, oppressive or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

It’s impossible to ignore that insult to my profession and my passion. History is fact based. As more evidence is uncovered, history is revised. History documents what happened from multiple perspectives. On occasion, our history has been racist, sexist and oppressive, but it is not irredeemably flawed. Our national story is a testament of progress toward “a more perfect union.”

In finessing the Arlington debacle, Pentagon spokesman Parnell concluded, “We want to be very very clear, history is not D.E.I.” Only American history is diverse, and it aspires to be equitable and inclusive. Our history demonstrates how sundry cohorts of Americans have overcome adversity, fought for equal rights and advanced democracy.

What would Vance remove from “America’s attic”? Evidence of the presence of Indigenous tribes? The cotton gin invented by a woman that advanced a cash crop based on slavery? The spindles from textile factories employing children? The desk on which Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the demand for woman suffrage? Shackles from slave markets? The trains that unified the continent, built with Chinese labor? The stuffed grizzly bears killed in Yellowstone that launched our national parks? Emmett Till’s casket? The Greensboro lunch counter? The helicopter hovering over the Vietnam War exhibit, referencing Agent Orange? Judy Garland, Julia Child or Diana Ross? Bert and Ernie? Every exhibit tells America’s story.

From forever, our continent has had a diverse population, starting with hundreds of indigenous tribes and Scandinavian, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, African, Dutch and English explorers. The country was inhabited by Indigenous people, fortune hunters, second sons, indentured servants, felons, religious radicals and after 1619, enslaved and free Africans. The country had an open-border policy until 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act limited immigration by nationality. The 1924 Immigration Act set country quotas, favoring Northern Europeans. “We only embrace immigrants retrospectively,” concluded a former director of the INS.

As recent events have demonstrated, history is in the cross-hairs of the Trump administration.

It’s important to remember why D.E.I. programs were created, no matter how poorly they may have been administered. They were intended to help people get along better in schools and workplaces, itself an acknowledgement that America’s melting pot was more a tossed salad. Eliminating programs, changing names, removing books, mandating curriculum do not change the facts of our past or the reality of our present.

The ragged American flag that flew over Baltimore’s Fort McHenry during a British attack in 1814, and inspired our national anthem, is among the artifacts displayed at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. (Fort McHenry was named for Scots-Irish immigrant James McHenry, a surgeon-soldier, delegate to the Continental Congress, signer of the Constitution, and Secretary of War under Washington and Adams.) As historian Lonnie Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian, asks, why would citizens of “the land of the free and the home of brave” be afraid of our national story?

We honor our history, with its triumphs, tragedies, victories and violence, by learning its lessons.

On March 27, 2025, President Trump hosted a reception in the East Room to honor Women’s History Month. He saluted Betsy Ross, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Amelia Earhart, Susie Wiles, Pam Bondi, the appointment of “most women in any Republican Cabinet,” and Republican women in Congress. Concluding that “Women love me because I protect them,” he praised wives and daughters, but his were not present.

SOURCES:

Photo credits: public domain unless otherwise noted.

Adams correspondence, https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17760414ja

John L. Smith, Jr., The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Woman “Not Apt to be Intimidated” (Westholme, 2024).

Lindsey M. Chervinsky, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Naftali Bendavid, “Trump Uses Power of Names to Impose His Story of America,” Washington Post (March 14, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/14/trump-renaming-gulf-mckinley-bragg

Cassidy Randall, “How Many Mountains Do We Need Named McKinley?”, New York Times (March 14, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/opinion/denali-mckinley-trump-alaska.html

Ty Seidule and Connor Williams, “’Bragg’ Is Back. No Stop Renaming Military Bases,” Washington Post (February 11, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/11/hegseth-fort-bragg-commission-confederate/

Petula Dvorak, “Trump Issues Executive Order to Eliminate ‘Anti-American Ideology’ from Smithsonian,” Washington Post (March 27, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2025/03/27/trump-issues-executive-order-eliminate-anti-american-ideology-smithsonian/