"Remember the ladies": Writing Women’s Art History in 1776 and 2026

“Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams famously urged her husband, John Adams, in March 1776. “I long to hear that you have declared an independancy...If perticuliar 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.” Nevertheless, women were not written into the Declaration of Independence, and today, women’s hard-won rights are once again threatened.

How, then – 250 years removed from the Revolution, and in the precarity of our current political moment – are scholars approaching the writing of eighteenth-century women’s history as artists, subjects, and patrons?

Consider Rachel Brewer Peale, the first wife of portraitist and museum proprietor Charles Willson Peale. Their marriage spanned the Revolutionary period, from 1762 to Rachel’s death in 1790. Charles wrote frequently about their life together in letters and diaries, and he completed at least a half-dozen portraits of Rachel, thereby rendering her one of the most visible women in Revolutionary Philadelphia. Paradoxically, though, any documents Rachel may have left have been lost or destroyed.

What did Rachel write? And why does this question matter in 2026? Taking a cue from Mrs. Peale Lamenting the Death of Her Child (Rachel Weeping), which John Adams was among the first to write about in 1776, my remarks will consider the challenges of researching and representing women’s history amid past and present conundrums of presence and loss, silence and voice.