“Remember the ladies,” wrote Abigail Adams on March 31, 1776, to her husband and future president John Adams, as he and other founding fathers framed the constitution, “and be more generous and favorable 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 particular care and attention 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.”
When Abigail Adams urged her husband to “remember the ladies” in 1776, she warned him. The spirit of that admonition still echoes today in any corner of our citizenry disenfranchised by those in the halls of power.
Adams’ words are a reminder that civic participation requires courage, organization, and determination. And her words don’t stand alone.
The history of the League of Women Voters, founded in 1920, is inseparable from the long, uneven struggle that won women the right to vote. The suffragists did more than march and petition; they prepared entire generations for citizenship. The first formal suffragist groups formed before 1848, when 68 women and 32 men (including Frederick Douglass) signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which built on the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal,” it begins. It notes that “when any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it.” Like the Declaration of Independence, the statements mentioned a “long train of abuses and usurpations” that gives evidence a design of government that puts women and minorities like enslaved people and Native Americans under “absolute despotism.” “It is there duty to throw off such government, and provide new guards for their future security,” it read. “Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government,” which made it necessary to demand equal station. “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman,” the suffragists wrote, making them feel they’d been subjected to tyranny.
Women continued to organize for the next seventy years, and in 1911, the first anti-suffragist groups formed, deriding the suffragists as either radicals or naïve. Meanwhile, the suffragists had built study circles, distributed reading lists, and trained women to legislate and policy so they would be ready—on day one—to exercise the franchise responsibly.
After the passage of the 19th Amendment, the League of Women Voters united various groups to become the suffrage movement’s sequel: an organization created to carry on the work of civic education.
From its earliest years, the League’s mission has been to educate citizens and encourage informed participation in government. The simple tagline —“Empowering voters. Defending democracy.”—distills that goal into a timeless call to act. Whether through voter registration drives, public forums on ballot initiatives, or candidate debates moderated with neutral rigor, our local League carries forward that century-old ethos of nonpartisan education.
Education for democracy is not rote civics; it is an active process of questioning and expanding our understanding of history, justice, and power. That spirit is alive in our Well Read Citizen Book Club, which has read books this year meant to enrich our understanding of policies. We tackled books like Still Alice by Lisa Genova, Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis by Ryann Liebenthal, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thomspon, I Never Thought of It That Way by Monica Guzman, and Every Who is Gone is Here: The U.S., Central American and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer, among others.
We wrapped up the 2025 selections, chosen and voted upon by participants, with We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance by historian Kellie Carter Jackson. The conversation reminded us that learning, like democracy itself, is never static—it thrives on discomfort, reevaluation and dialogue.
Carter Jackson’s book challenges conventional portrayals of the Black freedom struggle by examining moments when Black Americans, particularly women, exercised revolution, protection, force, flight, and joy in the process of attaining equality in the U.S.
One striking section recounts the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs unleashed violence on Black communities from Chicago to Washington, D.C. Amid the terror, young Black women helped defend homes, set up barricades, and tended to wounded defenders. The book reveals these women not merely as victims or bystanders but as armed actors who altered the course of those confrontations.
The book evoked rich conversation, including sitting with discomfort about what action to take and if the audience was for “us.” Sometimes, we determined, the response is to bear witness, to avoid the instinct to intervene and fix, which humans often do from their own perspective and interests, complicating rather than resolving problems. The book challenged the binaries about violence vs. non-violence by offering a multiplicity of responses to injustice.
We Refuse was not only about history but about the moral imagination required to sustain justice. It insists that democratic progress has always depended on people being willing to act when patience is misused as delay and peace is confused with submission. That insight matters to our League because education, at its core, is not about comfort but preparedness. The League does not take sides in elections, yet it takes a stance on participation itself: that every citizen can and should be informed, engaged, and willing to confront complexity.
Like Abigail Adams, who demanded to be “remembered,” the women and men of We Refuse demand that we remember them not as abstract symbols but as people with agency.
Our League’s continuing work—registering voters, hosting study groups, moderating debates— springs from the same conviction that democracy is not self-sustaining. It must be discussed, practiced, and defended.
We will continue the Well-Read Citizen Book Group in 2026. Visit the https://lwvmontcoin.org/ or follow the League of Women Voters MoCo on Facebook for more details.