The lives and times of the most important women in Thomas
Jefferson’s life. Jefferson’s much-discussed affair with his
slave, Sally Hemings—one which allegedly produced several
children—is well-known, but Scharff (History/Univ. of New
Mexico; Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West,
2002, etc.) is quick to point out that her book is not “an
inquiry into the history of Thomas Jefferson’s progenerative
body parts.” Instead, she delivers a series of nuanced portraits
of Jefferson’s mother, Jane Randolph, who outlived not only her
husband, but four of her children; his wife, Martha Wayles, whom
Jefferson married when she was a 23-year-old widow, and who died
just ten years later; Hemings, who was both a slave and Martha’s
half-sister by blood; Jefferson’s daughters, Patsy and Polly;
and his granddaughters. The author brings out each of the
women’s importance in Jefferson’s life and, along the way, looks
at what life was like in America for women of their various
social stations. Scharff is often forc