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Reviews of Books
| Mr. Jefferson's Women. By Jon Kukla. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. 297 pages. $26.95 (cloth).
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Reviewed by Susan A. Kern, College of William and Mary
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This book is Jon Kukla's mea culpa, in which he revises his 1979 position (explicated in an article with Virginius Dabney) that only "a declining sense of responsibility and taste" could account for publishing on such topics as Thomas Jefferson's sex life.1 This is an exercise now familiar among Jefferson scholars. Kukla proposes that readers will learn two things from revisiting Jefferson's relationships with women. The first is insight into the nature of Jefferson's intimacy with Sally Hemings, which scholars have debated more vigorously since the 1998 publication of DNA tests proving Jefferson's paternity of one and probably all of Hemings's children. The second is how Jefferson's alleged awkwardness with women curtailed the rights of women during the founding of the United States. |
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Kukla's first chapter outlines his broad questions, and chapters 2 through 6, in chronological order, explore the lives of five women connected with Jefferson in amorous or sexual relationships: Rebecca Burwell, the subject of Jefferson's embarrassingly adolescent letters; Elizabeth Walker, his married neighbor to whom he made advances that he had to defend publicly; Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, his wife of ten years who died following childbirth; Maria Cosway, the sparkling married woman in France who inspired some of Jefferson's most poetic writing; and Hemings, the mixed-race mother of Jefferson's slave children. This is familiar ground. None of these stories is new to either Jefferson scholars or the general public, although Kukla adds details and interpretive potential by putting them together. A final two chapters change course and explore the roles of other women in Jefferson's political world. Kukla includes three useful appendixes of documents about Jefferson's women: "The Jefferson-Walker Affair," "Children Born to Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson and to Sally Hemings," and "Dialogue between My Head and My Heart: Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786." |
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The chronological structure of the book implies that Jefferson matured sexually, but his relationships with the five women cannot be compared. In fact, it is hard to find a single word other than "women" to group these people whose relationships with Jefferson were not all amorous or romantic or sexual. His only marriage was to Martha Jefferson, whose death left her husband in deep despair, and Kukla's fine prose does justice to this heart-wrenching story. Burwell represents adolescent admiration from afar, and Kukla argues persuasively that Jefferson's infatuation with Cosway was similarly unrequited. Walker was a victim of Jefferson's unwanted sexual advances. The main controversy is still the Hemings-Jefferson relationship. Kukla observes that Jefferson exploited Hemings, but he imagines that there must have been some "measure of affection" (141) because Jefferson freed their children. Two important changes within the historical profession guide Kukla's reinterpretation. In 1997 Annette Gordon-Reed admonished historians that they were abdicating their responsibility to evidence in their defense of Jefferson based on character, a warning justified by the DNA tests.2 The second is the willingness of historians to consider sexuality as an important part of historical actors' lives. The mature Kukla considers that Jefferson's contemporaries viewed masturbation and sex as necessary; Jefferson may have justified sex with Hemings in terms of natural philosophy or medicine. |
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