“In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to form, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put so much unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.” Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776
“As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. . .. Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems.” John Adams reply to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776
The United States Constitution as originally drafted and sent out for ratification in 1787 uses the masculine pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his” over 30 times times when referring to the qualifications required to be eligible to serve as a Senator, Congressman, or President. It didn’t use a single female pronoun.
“All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy. If he has not given us the rights which have, as I conceive, been wrested from us, we shall soon give evidence of our inferiority, and shrink back into that obscurity, which the high-souled magnanimity of man has assigned us as our appropriate sphere. . .. All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification . . . but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and says, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
Sarah Moore Grimke, 1838, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Men, Letter II