Description
"Jefferson's Daughters: Gender, Race, and the American Revolution" traces the three very different stories of Martha Jefferson Randolph, Maria Jefferson Eppes, and Harriet Hemings (born to enslaved Sally Hemings) to probe the gender, class, and racial conventions in the post-revolutionary era, and analyze how each woman understood and used them. Their stories reveal the limits of the reach of the American Revolution: Martha's and Maria's lives make plain the limited prospects for white women, regardless of their education and connections, in the republic which continued to deny female reason, citizenship, and achievement. Indeed, however paradoxical it may seem, the Revolution may have mattered much more for Harriet Hemings, who had been born into slavery, than for the sisters born into freedom and privilege. We still know little today about what the Revolution meant to American women generally, much less to women of the South. This collective biography assesses the legacy of Revolutionary thought through a study of the daughters of the Founding Father most closely identified with the principles of the American Revolution: Enlightened reason, autonomy, and self-determination. The radicalism of the Revolution remains a contentious debate among historians. These three stories contribute to that debate in an analysis that defies traditional binaries of triumph and failure. This book looks squarly at the tension between the possibilities and disappointments in all their lives, and explains to a broad readership both the gains and costs of their respective struggles to shape their own lives in the wake of the Revolution.
