![]() ![]() Kerrison underscores that Harriet, Maria, and Martha understood these restrictions all too well. The Founder may have helped craft a nation that heralded equal opportunities for its white male citizens, yet still he was a product of his native Virginia, whose elite vehemently defended a strict racial and gendered hierarchy that denied such freedoms and opportunities to his daughters, black and white. ![]() In so doing, the author provides valuable insight into the ways that Thomas Jefferson conceptualized gender. ![]() Via an examination of family papers, newspapers, interviews with Jefferson and Sally Hemings’s descendants, and even DNA testing, Kerrison, a professor of history at Villanova University, makes visible the previously invisible lives of Jefferson’s daughters. A cogent and compelling triple biography of Thomas Jefferson’s white daughters, Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836) and Mary “Maria” Jefferson (1778–1804), as well as his African American daughter, Harriet Hemings (1801–?), Kerrison’s text excavates their individual experiences, thoughts, fears, joys, dreams, disappointments, frustrations, and legacies. ![]() Catherine Kerrison’s Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America is an important study that adds to our collective understanding of gender and race during the Revolutionary and early republic eras. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |