The Women Jefferson Loved
4.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
“A focused, fresh spin on Jeffersonian biography.” —Kirkus Reviews
In the tradition of Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello and David McCullough’s John Adams, historian Virginia Scharff offers a compelling, highly readable multi-generational biography revealing how the women Thomas Jefferson loved shaped the third president’s ideas and his vision for the nation. Scharff creates a nuanced portrait of the preeminent founding father, examining Jefferson through the eyes of the women who were closest to him, from his mother to his wife and daughters to Sally Hemings and the slave family he began with her.
Related to The Women Jefferson Loved
Related ebooks
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant's Search for Her Family's Lasting Legacy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Monticello: A Daughter and Her Father; A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slavery's End In Tennessee Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBelle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Isle of Canes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gullah Days: Hilton Head Islanders Before the Bridge 1861-1956 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJoining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Diary of Charlotte Forten: A Free Black Girl Before the Civil War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr: A Riveting Untold Story of the American Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jubilee Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Growing Up in Slavery: Stories of Young Slaves as Told By Themselves Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I, Dred Scott: A Fictional Slave Narrative Based on the Life and Legal Precedent of Dred Scott Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Voices from the Mississippi Hill Country: The Benton County Civil Rights Movement Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
History For You
100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know: Secrets, Conspiracies, Cover Ups, and Absurdities Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of The War of Art: by Steven Pressfield | Includes Analysis Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Great Reset: And the War for the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters--And How to Get It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The ZERO Percent: Secrets of the United States, the Power of Trust, Nationality, Banking and ZERO TAXES! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Richest Man in Babylon: The most inspiring book on wealth ever written Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wise as Fu*k: Simple Truths to Guide You Through the Sh*tstorms of Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whore Stories: A Revealing History of the World's Oldest Profession Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secret History of the World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lessons of History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unveiled: How the West Empowers Radical Muslims Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Great Awakening: Defeating the Globalists and Launching the Next Great Renaissance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England: 400 – 1066 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Women Jefferson Loved
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a very different book from Mr. Jefferson’s Women by Jon Kukla (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007). Mr. Kukla’s book is about women that Jefferson loved romantically; Ms. Scharff’s primarily the women in Jefferson’s family and slaves. The Women Jefferson Loved is divided five parts: Jane (his mother), Martha (his wife), Sally (Hemings, his slave and concubine), Patsy and Polly (his daughters), and A House Divided (Jefferson’s later years including his relationship with his grandchildren.) Of necessity there is overlap among the parts since the stories of these people overlap. The book also includes a useful Jefferson-Wayles-Hemings family tree in the front, and lists of the central characters with brief descriptions of them in the back in addition to endnotes, bibliography, and index. Jefferson’s view of women and their role in life is demonstrated throughout the book. He “believed in a natural law of gender, a separation of the roles and responsibilities of women and men that, ideally, confined women to the protected sphere of domesticity while giving men both the freedoms and the burdens of public life” (p. 195). Jefferson saw “wifely submission as the source of marital happiness” (p. 277). Although his daughter Patsy was a very highly educated woman, she married very young to a man she did not know well and assumed her role of running a plantation (for Jefferson himself instead of her husband). Patsy educated her daughters, but they also, because of their station in life, could not work outside the home.Ms. Scharff adheres to the current feminist theory that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’ children. Sally “never conceived a child except when the master [Jefferson] was at home. Between the time Jefferson took the office of secretary of state and the time he retired from the presidency, Sally Hemings gave birth to at least six children, at least some of whom bore a stunning resemblance to Thomas Jefferson. Four of these children lived to adulthood [and] … were … set free” (p. 264). Interracial families were an integral part of life at Monticello. A reason that Jefferson’s wife, Martha, on her deathbed asked Jefferson never to remarry was because she did not like being raised by stepmothers; she “had preferred her father’s slave mistress to her white stepmothers” (p. 381). At Martha’s request, Jefferson had brought the Hemings family, Martha’s father’s mistress and children to live at Monticello. Sally Hemings was his wife’s half-sister. Following Polly’s death, Jefferson’s son-in-law, Jack Eppes, took the slave, Betsy Hemings as his concubine and fathered her children. There are few documentary sources for some of the characters in the story. Often, Ms. Scharff suggest that a woman felt a certain way – or offers several theories of how a particular woman might have felt concerning a particular situation.