Abigail Abbot Bailey was an eighteenth-century Congregationalist woman whose memoir describes her religious response to her husband's extended incestuous involvement with one of their teenage daughters. As one of a relatively small number of published memoirs by eighteenth-century American women, it illuminates the way in which women appropriated and lived out the teachings of New England Congregationalism in their everyday lives. Moreover, as the first autobiographical account of family violence published in the United States, Bailey's memoir provides an important source for understanding the problem of domestic violence, including father-daughter incest, in historical perspective.

The work published in 1815 as Memoirs of Mrs. Abigail Bailey was one of several documents written by Abigail Abbot Bailey and found among her possessions at the time of her death. While the others have not survived, her first editor, the Reverend Ethan Smith, included passages from her diary in the introduction and the...