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One of the most discerning and provocative studies of Jefferson in years.
– Publisher’s Weekly
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Mr. Jefferson’s Women
Summary
Dramatis Personae
Advance Praise
Reviews
Summary
A pioneering study of Thomas Jefferson’s relationships with women in his personal life and in American society and politics. The author of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote the words “all men are created equal,” was surprisingly hostile toward women. In eight chapters based on fresh research in little-used sources, Jon Kukla offers the first comprehensive study of Jefferson and women since the controversies of his presidency.
Educated with other boys at a neighborhood boarding school, young Jefferson learned early that homemaking was the realm of his mother and six sisters. From adolescence through maturity, his views about domesticity scarcely wavered, while his discomfort around women brought a succession of embarrassments as he sought to control his emotions. After Rebecca Burwell declined his awkward proposal of marriage, Jefferson reacted first with despondence, then with predatory misogyny, and finally with the attempted seduction of Elizabeth Moore Walker, the wife of a boyhood friend. His marriage at twenty-nine to Martha Wayles Skelton brought a decade of genuine happiness, but ended in despair with her death from complications of childbirth. In Paris a few years later, Maria Cosway rekindled his capacity for romantic friendship but ultimately disappointed his hopes. Against the background of these relationships, Kukla offers a fresh and cogent account of Jefferson’s liaison with Sally Hemings.
Jefferson’s individual relationships with these women are examined in depth in five chapters. Abigail Adams, the women of Paris, and the wife of a British ambassador figure in the first of two closing chapters that examine Jefferson’s attitudes toward women in public life. In the last chapter, Kukla draws connections between Jefferson’s life experiences and his role in defining the subordination of women in law, culture, and education during and after the American Revolution.
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Dramatis Personae
(Major characters in order of appearance)
Thomas Jefferson
Attorney, planter, inventor, statesman, slaveholder, parent.
Author of the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and Notes on the State of Virginia. Governor of Virginia, President of the United States, founder of the University of Virginia
Rebecca Lewis Burwell Ambler
At 17 the fair “Belinda” declined 20-year-old Jefferson’s awkward proposal of marriage at a party in Williamsburg. Months later Jefferson suffered debilitating head-aches in response to news of her betrothal to a rival.
Elizabeth Moore Walker
Years after it happened, President Jefferson admitted making sexual advances toward Betsy Walker, the wife of a boyhood friend and classmate: “I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknolege its incorrectness.”
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson
Jefferson’s wife, the daughter of a law client, was a young widow when they met. Married to Jefferson for ten years, she died in 1782 from complications after the delivery of their sixth and her seventh child.
Maria Cosway
The beautiful and talented wife of the English artist Richard Cosway was the object of Jefferson’s infatuation in Paris and recipient of his famous “Head and Heart” dialogue in 1786.
Martha Jefferson Randolph (Patsy)
From the moment of her mother’s death Jefferson’s eldest daughter shouldered many responsibilities for her father, his domestic world, his estate, and reputation.
Mary Jefferson Eppes (Maria, Polly)
Jefferson’s younger surviving daughter traveled to Paris in 1787 accompanied by Sally Hemings. Maria died at 26 after the birth of her second child.
Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings
The mulatto child of a Virginia slave and an English ship’s captain, Betty Hemings was the slave consort of Jefferson’s father-in-law John Wayles and matriarch of the Hemings family at Monticello.
Sally Hemings
Born in 1773, Sally Hemings accompanied Mary Jefferson to Paris in 1787. After Jefferson and his household returned in 1789, Sally lived at Monticello until Jeffeson’s death in 1826, and then in Charlottesville until her own death in 1835. Her six children all achieved freedom during her lifetime.
Abigail Smith Adams
In 1776 Abigail urged her husband in Congress to “remember the ladies.” During their diplomatic assignments in Europe, she nudged Jefferson to the only gender-neutral expression yet found in his voluminous writings: “I pray you to observe,” he wrote Abigail in 1785, “that I have used the term people and that this is a noun of the masculine as well as feminine gender.”
Anne Willing Bingham
In correspondence with this stylish Philadelphian whose ‘republican court’ emulated the salons of Paris, Jefferson boasted that American women were “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.”
Elizabeth Leathes Merry
The tall, articulate, and wealthy wife of Great Britain’s ambassador was the target of Jefferson’s ire in 1803. He called her a “virago who has already disturbed our harmony extremely.”
Exeunt omnes
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Advance Praise
Jon Kukla's sensitive portrayal of Jefferson's relationships with the women in his life leads to new insights not only about his infatuations and loves but also about his attitudes toward women in general--attitudes that influenced his political writings and his presidency. Clearly, there is much to be learned by applying the questions and techniques of women's history to the study of “great white men.”
- Mary Beth Norton, author of Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society
Jon Kukla has crafted a persuasive, insightful and eminently readable interpretation of Jefferson’s poignant and occasionally mystifying relationships with women. He has captured surprising sides of his personality–sometimes masculinely conventional but often endearing. Yet Jefferson appears less beguiling than what we might expect from the inventive master of Monticello.
- Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760’s –1880’s
In this lithe and lively survey, Jon Kukla carries the conversation forward in a most inviting way. How did Jefferson experience romantic love? And what can we know about his impulses? Mr. Jefferson’s Women is for those who do not shy from addressing delicate issues of early American politics and culture.
- Andrew Burstein, author of Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello
Jon Kukla imaginatively brings to life a series of formidable but mysterious women who fascinated Thomas Jefferson. The result is a vivid new portrait of a founding genius who sought the “happiness of loving companionship” with certain women, yet saw womanhood in general as “a dangerous threat to republican government and the cause of liberty.”
- Melvin Patrick Ely, author of Israel on the Appomattox
Jon Kukla provides a compelling, insightful portrait of Thomas Jefferson’s intimate life, tracing the fear of women’s power that increasingly defined the Virginian’s relationships. Kukla brilliantly links Jefferson’s personal anxieties about the disruptive influence of women on him to Jefferson’s endorsement of political and legal restrains upon those he called “the weaker sex” throughout his lifetime. This is a book that every admirer and critic of Thomas Jefferson must read.
- Carol Berkin, author of Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence
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Reviews
Publishers Weekly:
This highly insightful study . . . investigates Thomas Jefferson's relationships with women, from Elizabeth Moore Walker, the married neighbor with whom Jefferson may have had an affair, to Sally Hemings, the slave whose children he purportedly fathered. One of the most fascinating chapters examines the young Jefferson's failed attempts to woo a classmate's sister, Rebecca Burwell, whose rejection of his marriage proposal may have incited the misogyny found throughout his writings. Perhaps the least satisfying section studies Jefferson's relationship with his wife, Martha: since Jefferson destroyed their private correspondence after she died, Kukla's re-creation of their relationship is necessarily sketchy. The conclusion moves to a larger argument concerning Jefferson's thinking about women as citizens. Kukla shows that Jefferson was much less open to women's political participation and education than were contemporary Enlightenment thinkers, and his definition of America as a white male polity was rooted in his personal discomfort with women. This is one of the most discerning and provocative studies of Jefferson in years.
History Book Club and Book of the Month Club:
Thomas Jefferson is routinely hailed as a champion of human freedom. Indeed, despite his complicity in the grave sin of slavery, Mr. Jefferson is almost universally understood as an essential architect of American liberty and republican government.
But what did Thomas Jefferson, whose pen spelled out the revolutionary phrase “all men are created equal,” think about the opposite sex? Did he support women’s equality? Oppose it? And what do his relations with the women in his life, from his mother and six sisters to his first wife, Martha, and slave-mistress Sally Hemings, reveal about his political and moral values? In Mr. Jefferson’s Women, esteemed historian Jon Kukla provides some startling answers. “Jefferson did nothing whatsoever to improve the legal or social condition of women in American society,” he writes, “and he was always wary of female influence in government.”
A pioneering study drawn from a number of previously untapped documents and other resources, Mr. Jefferson’s Women suggests that the author of the Declaration of Independence actually harbored feeloings of hostility toward females. No collection on the Founding will be complete without this remarkable volume.
Library Journal:
It is hard to dislike a book that, like this one, starts off with a discussion of how J. Peterman Company shirts are related to Thomas Jefferson. Kukla . . . not only knows his subject well but writes in a fluid and sparkling style. . . . Kukla's research is impeccable, and his voluminous notes are a treasure trove.
Kirkus Reviews:
After a stormy scholarly conference about Thomas Jefferson's long affair with his slave Sally Hemings, Virginia historian Kukla . . . looked for a book about Jefferson's relations with women in general, assuming that it already existed. Instead, he ended up writing it, and his conclusions are dismaying. Kukla asserts that after belle Rebecca Burwell rejected his proposal when he was 20, Jefferson demonstrated throughout his adult life predatory urges toward women, a fear of disruptive female influences (exacerbated by the alarming conduct of women during the French Revolution) and a distasteful endorsement of the master-slave model for male-female relations. Despite his friendship with Abigail ("Remember the Ladies") Adams, Jefferson remained adamant about excluding women from the liberties of the new American republic. . . . Closing with a grim litany of his subject's consistent opposition to "any departure from an exclusively domestic role as republican wives and mothers," Kukla concludes that "Jefferson's personal aversion to and fear of women in public life shaped American laws and traditions in ways that echo into the twenty-first century. Necessary reading—but an awful revelation of a great man's failings.
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