Spring Fashion & Textile Symposium

The Will of a Woman: Abigail Adams’s Textile Legacy

The law of coverture traveled across the Atlantic to the New World in the established legal practices of the English colonists. Coverture dictated that when a woman married, her identity, her person, and her property became her husband’s, and she had no agency to sign contracts or engage in business. It endured beyond Abigail Adams’s lifetime, continuing to haunt female credit card applicants and prospective homeowners well into the 20th century. However, in the 18th-19th centuries, ownership of textiles and textile goods did not rest solely with a manufacturer, merchant or even the purchaser; it could be established by possessing, wearing, or sleeping on them, and women across the spectrums of race and social status asserted and exercised these claims to ownership.

Textiles held enormous value in themselves, whether as clothing or yardage, and were a much more stable form of wealth than cash or other assets. When Abigail Adams believed she was dying in 1816, she drew up a will bequeathing large sums of money as well as gowns and lengths of fabric to her daughters-in-law, nieces, and granddaughters. She began the will by assuring executors that it was written “by and with my husband’s consent,” in accordance with the restrictions of coverture. But this presentation aims to demonstrate that apportioning out valuable textile goods to the women in her extended family, who had no other expectation of personal property or wealth to call their own, was itself an act of resistance.

Sarah Walsh is a school librarian and educator who became involved in living history through theater. In 2015, she took on the role of Abigail Adams in the first fully staged production of “1776” with a cast of only women and nonbinary actors. A year later, she was invited to portray Abigail with an 18th century re-enactment group and launched into studying Abigail’s life and letters in earnest. Having learned machine sewing from her mother at age 10, Sarah is now using historical clothing construction techniques and skills to create a wardrobe spanning the years of Abigail’s life. She is on Instagram as pins.abigail, and regularly shares updates about her 18th- and 19th-century sewing projects and research. She lives with her family in the Washington, D.C. area, and has given first-person programs at a variety of sites and organizations including History-at-Play, the DAR Museum, City Tavern, Mount Harmon Plantation, and Historic Port Royal.