Jefferson's Daughters by Catherine Kerrison

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Despite Kerrison’s dogged and thoroughly detailed detective work, Harriet’s life remains a mystery.Īn insightful contribution to women’s history. But the author’s greatest challenge was finding evidence of Harriet’s life, both at Monticello and later, when she left Virginia and, passing as white, probably lived the rest of her life in Washington, D.C. Martha lived into her 60s, keeper of family papers. Kerrison discovered more sources to document Martha’s life than Maria’s: a talented amateur pianist, Maria died in childbirth at 25, barely a memory for her surviving son. Still, like her sister, she was expected to embrace “the life of wife, mother, and plantation mistress”-including overseeing slaves-tasks that proved, “after Paris, a trial so arduous as to require heroism to be endured.” While Martha was in France, the younger Maria was left behind with relatives “her peripatetic childhood” was marked “by only brief periods of loving stability that came to sudden unannounced ends.” Even after Jefferson returned to America, his political obligations kept him away from the family’s home.

After her mother died, Martha accompanied Jefferson to Paris, attended a convent school, learned to speak French fluently, and absorbed France’s antipathy to slavery. He saw little use in educating females, who were not permitted entrance to the University of Virginia, which he founded. Jefferson’s enlightened ideas about education extended only to men. Kerrison draws from those works as well as abundant historical and archival sources to portray “the benefits and perils” of each daughter’s experiences. As the author acknowledges, Jefferson’s long affair with Hemings has been well-documented by Annette Gordon-Reed and Monticello historian Lucia Stanton.

Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South, 2005) illuminates women’s experiences in early America through the lives of Thomas Jefferson’s three daughters: Martha and Maria, his children by his wife, and Harriet Hemings, the offspring-one of four surviving children-of his relationship with the slave Sally Hemings.

The circumscribed paths of women’s lives emerge from a deeply researched history.

Jefferson's Daughters by Catherine Kerrison