Despite the film's inclusion of Martha Jefferson and Abigail Adams, Dickinson's wife, Mary Norris Dickinson, was the only spouse actually present in Philadelphia during the convention. (Franklin's common law wife, Deborah Read, had died a year or so earlier. Martha Jefferson had just suffered a miscarriage and was dealing with complications of gestational diabetes in Virginia.) In truth, Quaker marriages, such as that of Dickinson and Norris, were often more egalitarian than those of other founding cultures, such as Adams' patriarchal Puritan-style marriage, to which Abigail Adams objects in her letters quoted in the film.