Pop culture is rather heavy on ridiculous young women these days --- those who consider big shoe collections and a penchant for drunken Twitter tweets to be a positive and interesting response to our high-tech world. But in the early days of America, there were families that fostered young women of enormous intellectual and creative capacities whose output was controlled --- and often withheld --- by a patriarchal society that did not value their input.

DEAR ABIGAIL is a book about three young women --- sisters --- who shared interests that belied their status as good Puritan girls. Becoming part of the bigger world and their reliance on each other to try to make sense of all those ideas was encouraged by Abigail’s husband, John Adams, the Founding Father. In letters that span every possible aspect of their lives, Abigail and her sisters give us a view into some of the seminal events of American history and the ways in which women shaped colonial America.

"Diane Jacobs uses the sisters’ own words to weave a tapestry of life in the 18th century, just as women were not only facing the creation of a new society but also considering their ultimately very important place in it."

Diane Jacobs has brought to bear all the usual elements of early American history and made them live in ways we haven’t experienced before through the articulate and searching prose of Abigail Adams and her two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, who sound more like those of us who are constantly on Facebook with our sisters than a trio of well-behaved colonial girls whose extended family members are trying to create a new country. Jacobs’s own prose is never overwrought or too academic, thus the two styles of this narrative blend together in a most sincere and compelling way.

The Adams’ work to create the United States of America runs through the girls’ lives like a road sign, creating a path to all the potential they possess but can’t quite utilize in the world the way it exists at the time. Sexism reigns supreme, and young women are not supposed to be political or educated, or care about much other than love. And there is plenty of talk about love and marriage amidst the sisters’ letters.

Their social lives are as full of intrigue and as eventful as episodes of “Sex and the City,” and Jacobs renders each detail with a sharp pen: “Time had taught her the limits of erudite company, and, more even than financial comfort, she longed for a demonstrative and considerate spouse.”

Although these young women grew up amidst progressive ideals, the lifelong pursuit of a proper mate, and the possibility of love and companionship were still important goals in their lives. Jacobs never condemns the less feminist leanings of the women themselves as well as the society in which they live. The pursuit of a happy home life becomes just another reason for the sisters to strive to maintain their relationships with each other, confiding and supporting one another through thick and thin.

“Humble in prosperity, cheerful in affliction,” they write about the way Nabby Adams Smith, one of Abigail’s daughters, faces the end of her life from consumption. This Puritan ethic, this 18th-century ideal about how young women should comport themselves, speaks strongly of the strength these women maintained in the face of all the changes in their world at that time. And that strength was supported in substantial ways by the love and friendship the sisters endured and cherished. In DEAR ABIGAIL, Diane Jacobs uses the sisters’ own words to weave a tapestry of life in the 18th century, just as women were not only facing the creation of a new society but also considering their ultimately very important place in it.