Category : Book Review

Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America
by Linda Kerber
The University of North Carolina Press, 1997

Frequently if not ubiquitously cited in later studies of women in the Revolutionary era, Women of the Republic holds up in many significant ways to its reputation. Kerber combs through first-hand records—files, letters, documents—to glean information about and, most interestingly, quotes from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American women to give a glimpse into their private and political lives. Not merely a documentary record, however, Kerber unites her primary sources under subject-specific chapters and knits them together with both insight and theory.

Kerber is equally interested in the theoretical and the everyday, and the mix of the two lends the book a roundedness, since it doesn’t have to live in either realm—something that’s often stifling to women’s history, or any history—but considers and draws from both. The chapter on women in Enlightenment literature, drawing from hefty philosophical texts, is just as engaging as the chapter on divorce, drawing on municipal documents and diary entries, is just as interesting as the chapter on women’s education, which draws on everything from letters to newspapers to more theoretical texts. Together this wealth of sources come together to create a cohesive look at women’s experiences in the early Republic.

Or rather, some women’s experiences in the early Republic—though Kerber is able to include information on middle and lower-class women, at least through official records if not the letters and diaries she uses for upper-class women, Women of the Republic is devoid of evidence of any women who weren’t white. There are only the most oblique of references to anyone at all who might not be white, alluding only in passing to nameless and narrative-less slaves. Race seems not to be a concern in the book, as it labors under the implicit notion that only white women—only white people—exist at all. Native Americans get not even a mention. (more…)

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
by Annette Gordon-Reed
University of Virginia Press, 1997

Gordon-Reed makes explicit at the beginning of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings that she is not trying to prove that they had a sexual relationship. The book was released a year before the DNA test results that convinced even many skeptics of the idea, and at the time Gordon-Reed was writing there were few, at least in academic circles, that believed that Jefferson could have fathered Hemings’s children.

Despite this, however, Gordon-Reed makes a strong case for the plausibility of the relationship. She focuses primarily on inspecting what previous Jefferson historians have said on the subject, the evidence they’ve used, and the methods by which they’ve come to their near-universal conclusion that the relationship was in no way possible—and finds them on all counts severely lacking. In a methodical style that’s saved from tedium by her dry, often cutting wit, Gordon-Reed examines the way the discussion of Jefferson and Hemings had progressed through the years, pointing out the ways in which the evidence has been twisted by historians to defend Jefferson against the charge of miscegenation.

Take for example one of the most astute and convincing portions of the book, the discussion of the memoirs of Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings’s son, and of the statements of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson. Gordon-Reed demonstrates that the way historians have framed these two pieces of evidence—Hemings’s statement that Jefferson was his father, Randolph’s statement that Jefferson was not—is both blatantly racist and, because of this, just as blatantly inaccurate. Historians have characterized Madison Hemings negatively to establish him as an unreliable narrator, while at the same time implying Randolph is a trustworthy and reliable source.

Gordon-Reed demonstrates, however, that many of Hemings’s statements can be corroborated by other sources (and Hemings’s descriptions of Monticello are in fact used by historians as trustworthy descriptions of what life was like there), while Randolph’s statements are at their heart not factually true. (Randolph claims that his mother, Martha Jefferson Randolph, told him that Jefferson could not have fathered Sally Hemings’s children because he was not at Monticello when they would’ve been conceived. Thanks to Jefferson scholar Dumas Malone’s exhaustive timeline of Jefferson’s whereabouts during most of his adult life, we know that Jefferson was in fact at Monticello nine months before each of Hemings’s children was born.) “It is a strange turn of events,” Gordon-Reed says dryly, “when individuals who held other human beings in bondage are given presumptive moral superiority over their captives.” (more…)