Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America by Catherine Kerrison (review)

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. 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. 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. In so doing, the author provides valuable insight into the ways that Thomas Jefferson conceptualized gender. 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. Kerrison underscores that Harriet, Maria, and Martha understood these restrictions all too well. Ultimately, this book is a tale of the evolution of three women’s gendered and racial identities at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Early chapters in Jefferson’s Daughters focus not on Martha and Maria’s lives in Virginia but on their time in Paris, specifically during the years when their father served as minister plenipotentiary to France. A notable strength of Kerrison’s narrative is her analysis of the burgeoning educational opportunities for elite young women in France and how they impacted Martha and Maria. Kerrison especially considers the role that the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, a convent school in Paris, and its ambitious headmistress, Marie-Catherine de Béthisy de Mézières, or Madame l’Abbess, played in challenging Martha’s conceptions of gender. L’Abbess “presented a model of female energy, capability, and authority that [Martha] would have found extraordinary, especially as she cast back to the memory of life in Virginia, in which most women (with the exception of widows) lived under the daily government of men” (p. 45). While Panthemont and Madame l’Abbess did not instill proto-feminist ideas in their students, Martha certainly admired the ways that Roman Catholic nuns “offset the disadvantages of their sex in religious communities” (p. 65). Martha likewise thrived in Parisian society—at salons and even at balls—where women were encouraged to display their intellectual prowess. Maria, while less academic than Martha, similarly benefited from her Panthemont education.

The second half of the monograph focuses on Jefferson’s daughters in early republican America in such locations as central Virginia, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Emphases include Martha’s and Maria’s respective courtships and marriages to Thomas Mann Randolph and John Wayles Eppes; Martha’s strong ideas about her own daughters’ educations and developing identities; and Thomas Jefferson’s conceptions of gender as they related to his grandchildren. Kerrison also turns to Harriet’s childhood, which she argues was simultaneously defined by her “elite” status within the slave hierarchy yet confined by her internalized notions of deference. With her father’s tacit assistance, Harriet escaped from Monticello in 1822. Kerrison particularly excels in her investigation of Harriet’s life in freedom. Harriet—who was of one-eighth African American descent—assumed a life as a respectable white woman, though who she became remains unclear. However, any gains in Harriet’s status came at the painful cost of permanent separation from her mother and younger brothers as well as her identity as a proud member of the Hemings family.

Kerrison has aimed this triple biography for a general audience. However, this insightful, well...