Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were feminists – NOT!
Celebrating International Women’s Day (and Black History Month too)
In celebration of International Women’s Day, I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive into…the Founding Fathers and Framers of these here United States of America. Specifically, into the veneration with which they are still treated, over 240 years after they launched a new nation. In a way, it’s kind of touching, how we honor these traditions, and those men, and that history. There is much there to be proud of, if one is inclined to be proud of one’s nation.
But there’s also something odd about how, nearly a quarter of a millennium later, we hold up these very human male leaders and their 18th century handiwork for glorification. As a diverse nation, we lack a common religion so we worship our Constitution as the scripture that holds “We the People” together. Many Americans feel so deeply about the Founders’ creation that they proclaim themselves its true defenders and their opponents as misguided and even “un-American.” Many “originalists,” including certain political leaders and Supreme Court Justices, still try to read the original texts in a Biblical fashion, as if these were gods and we mere mortals who should not touch the hem of their document.
Yet when it comes to other aspects of this Holy Canon – uncomfortable and inconvenient facts — such as the fact that many of the Founders and Framers were slaveowners, that they enshrined Blacks as 3/5 of whites, that some of the Founders impregnated their female slaves, that they were the paterfamiliases of a patriarchal society in which their wives and daughters lived in their households as second class citizens, that they made treaties with the native peoples and then abrogated those treaties when it suited them, and used their superior military technology, including possibly the biological weapon of smallpox, to wipe out virtually all the original inhabitants – when it comes to all of that -- we modern types are supposed to give the Founders and Framers a big pass. We are supposed to understand their personal limitations “in the context of their times.”
Okay, I get that. But it is still troubling that apparently we value what they wrote and did in public, but don’t want to recognize what they said or did in private. The private realm is supposed to be out of the eye of public scrutiny.
The only problem though, is that the private realm is where inequality and patriarchy and racism begin. And where it is taught and imbibed and learned by each new generation.
I can’t help but muse on these things when I think about International Women’s Day (and having just ended Black History Month), and the fact that women still only hold about 28 percent of the seats in the U.S. Congress, and still only make about 80 percent of what males earn for the same occupations, and still possess less wealth, influence and power – well, at that point I can’t help but think about where this stark level of inequality all started.
In America, of course, it began with the Founders and Framers.
So for International Women’s Day, I thought we would take a dive into what some of the leading Founders and Framers thought about not only women in general and their human rights, but the women in their own lives. Specifically, let’s go pay a close up visit with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
The American Enlightenment
Adams was perhaps the most influential of all Founders during the early years of the American Revolution, as a workhorse of the Continental Congress laboring on committee after committee, and as the leading figure helping the newly breakaway colonies cum states to write their own state constitutions. He later became the second president of the young United States, and his wife Abigail Adams is known as an early proponent of women’s rights, still quoted today with her “Remember the Ladies…we are determined to foment a Rebellion” letter written to husband John in 1776. The patronizing Adams, meanwhile, patted the “ladies” on the head and got back to the real work of founding a nation.
Thomas Jefferson needs no introduction. At least not the sanitized version of Jefferson. The sanitized Jefferson was third president, chief author of the Declaration of Independence, a genius of arts, letters and science, an architect, a farmer who incorporated the latest scientific breakthroughs into his husbandry, a true Renaissance man of the Enlightenment…but a parallel Jefferson also happened to be a slaveholder who fathered his own octoroon slave children and never freed them and other slaves during his lifetime, despite promises to do so, because he had to sell many of them to settle his debts. That Jefferson also held some the most deeply sexist views of women – including his women -- of any of the Founders.
As prize-winning historian Gordon Wood points out in his book Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, “Most 18th-century marriages were not intellectual partnerships between equals…
Women rarely had an independent existence…In public records they were usually referred to as the “wife of,” the “daughter of,” or the “sister of” a male. Before marriage women legally belonged to their fathers, and after marriage they belonged to their husbands.… She could not sue or be sued, make contracts, draft wills, or buy and sell property. It went without saying that women could not hold political office or vote. They were considered to be dependent like children and were often treated like children by their husbands. Husbands might address their wives as “dear Child” but be addressed in return as “Mr.”
Jefferson, who came from the great wealth of Virginia’s aristocratic slaveholding society, married into even more wealth, into another slaveholding plantation family. He married Martha Wayles when he was 28 and she was 21. And Martha already had been widowed from a previous marriage to another wealthy scion. Wayles was a talented and devoted wife, a Southern belle wallflower who fit into the mold of the traditional patriarchal marriage.
How, according to Jefferson, should women behave?
“Sweetness of temper, affection to a husband, and attention to his interests,” Jefferson wrote to his eldest daughter, on the eve of her own marriage, “constitute the duties of a wife and form the basis of matrimonial felicity.” Wives, he said, must realize that their happiness depended “on the continuing to please a single person.” As a skill to be learned, Jefferson recommended seamstressing as the foundation of a woman’s domestic life, more valuable for women than the ability to read.
As historian Wood goes on to tell it, in Jefferson’s conception of the ideal marriage, even the husband’s failings should be shouldered by his wife. If the marriage developed difficulties, Jefferson advised his daughter, the wife must not “allways look for their cause in the injustice of her lord,” for “they may proceed from many trifling errors in her own conduct.” Above all, writes Wood
A wife must never communicate to others any want of duty or tenderness she thinks she has perceived in her husband, for “this untwists, at once, those delicate cords, which preserve the unity of the marriage engagement.” If third parties witness the failings of a marriage, “it’s sacredness is broken forever.”
Martha Jefferson apparently fulfilled her husband’s marital expectations and more. In his autobiography Jefferson called her “the cherished companion of my life” and the marriage apparently was a happy one. The widowed Martha already had one child when she married Jefferson, and then gave birth to six children in 10 years (though only two daughters reached maturity). Four months after the birth of her last child, weakened by her many pregnancies and other health issues, Martha Jefferson died. She was only 33 years old, and Jefferson was devastated.
On her deathbed, as the story goes, Martha made Jefferson promise that he would never marry again. Though he was only 39 years old and would live another 44 years, he never did re-marry. But when you are landed aristocratic gentry, and the owner of hundreds of slaves, many of them females, and have written things like sexual desire is “the strongest of all the human passions,” you don’t need to be married to have your pick of female concubinage and companionship. More about that in a moment.
John and Abigail
The marriage of John and Abigail Adams was quite different than Jefferson and his wife. John and Abigail had what was considered for that era more of an “equal” partnership. But therein lies the fallacy, for how “equal” could equal ever really be in 1776?
When they married, John was nearly 29 and Abigail not yet 20. John was an up-and-coming Massachusetts attorney from modest means and hard-working New England disposition, and also one of the most learned of the Founders. He studied Greek and Roman history and political theory and suffered from envy and anxiety which filled him with a will to succeed. Abigail was self-taught and brilliant, she read voraciously and taught herself French. She read many of the same works of history and poetry that John read, and tried to match him in citing and quoting from the classics and contemporary authors. As Wood describes it, “She aimed to be her husband’s intellectual partner, if not his equal.”
During John’s long periods away, either as an itinerant attorney riding the circuit courts or up-and-coming patriot of a burgeoning new country, attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and later serving as minister to England, France and the Netherlands, the couple wrote long letters to each other. About 1200 of them, all in all, their correspondence threading fluently between the quotidian details of Abigail’s single-handed management of their farm in his absence, including milking cows herself, to local news and rumors, to the politics of the Continental Congress and a rising nation, even political advice for her husband’s political career. Abigail was steady as a plow horse and could be dazzling as a comet. She quoted from a range of writers, including John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Shakespeare, books of ancient history and more. She had strong views about everything, including slavery, writing sympathetically about “those who have as good a right to freedom as we have” (Adams never owned slaves). Their correspondence reflected an unusual companionship for the times between “two friendly Souls,” as John put it.
But this was the late 18th century, and even this most enlightened of female-male relationships had limits.
Let’s talk for a moment about that “Remember the Ladies…we are determined to foment a Rebellion” letter. It was not the radical statement of 18th-century liberation that modern-day feminists have made it out to be.
The letter was written in late March 1776. The rebellious colonies were filled with not only talk of how to break away from England and its king, but also how to reform their new society with a new system of governance. Adams, Jefferson, indeed most of the Founders and Framers were almost as fearful of social disorder and the “Spirit of Levelling,” as Adams called it, as they were of the British army. Adams, indeed many of the Founders including Madison and Hamilton, were primed to think the worst about human nature, and they devised a governance system that revolved around the philosophy “the government that governs best, governs least.”
Adams became especially worked up by suggestions that the qualifications for who should be allowed to vote might be expanded. Don’t touch that issue, he warned a colleague in late May 1776, just two months after Abigail’s “Remember the Ladies” letter. Otherwise “There will be no End of it… New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote… every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice.”
Coming face-to-face with the anti-democratic tendencies of some of the Founders still comes as a bit of a shock at times. You see a quote that you had never read before, and wonder, “Wow, did he really say that?” Or, “Did he really do that?”
Jefferson, who at that time was married to his conventional southern belle, would never have considered for even a moment that their new nation should enfranchise women. He thought women were “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.” Instead, “they are contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning from political debate.” Women had “the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other, and the art to cultivate it beyond all others.” Thirty-seven years later in 1813, Jefferson still believed that the participation of women in politics was “an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”
So when Abigail wrote her famous letter on March 31, 1776, to modern advocates of equal rights it seems especially prescient:
“Remember the Ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
Those sound like fighting words. Abigail’s letter has inspired modern-day advocates of woman’s rights, who have placed her high in the pantheon of early matriarchs. But sadly John did not take his wife’s sentiment seriously at all.
“I cannot but laugh” at your ideas, he said in response. Poking fun at his earnest wife, he joked that the comprehensive system of masculine superiority was “little more than Theory… We have only the Name of Masters” who in actual fact are subjected to “the Despotism of the Petticoat.” Wood writes that Abigail’s “Remember the Ladies” letter was a style she had developed, in the face of her second class status and with a stubborn and sometimes acerbic husband, of using teasing and banter to broach difficult subjects.
But despite her complaints, Abigail did not seriously question the place of women in colonial society, and she did not have expectations to fundamentally transform the role of women. She wanted nothing more than to have her husband back from his travels, so that she could stop being the sole manager of the family farm and could resume what she thought of as her rightful role as wife and mother and occasional intellectual companion.
At the same time, Abigail certainly felt the equal of men, telling her sister in 1799 that she would “never consent to have our sex considered in an inferiour point of light.” She admitted that God and nature designed men and women differently, but that didn’t make them unequal: “If man is Lord, women is Lordess,” wrote Abigail.
You’ve got to admire her pluck, given the times. Wood concludes that, as John knew intimately Abigail’s feelings, and had read her sassy letter about women voting, it is not at all surprising that he should have warned his colleagues not to contemplate opening that Pandora’s Box by changing voting eligibility requirements.
Tom and Sally
Jefferson the widower, one of the “fathers” of his country, was surrounded by a racial churn in and among the plantations of Virginia that had a sexual component all its own. As an 18th-century slaveholding Virginia planter, it would not have been unusual for Jefferson to have a black concubine, and such relationships were in evidence throughout the region. For visitors to Jefferson’s plantation Monticello, it would have been impossible to not notice that a number of the slaves in the household were mulatto.
Enter Sally Hemings. Amidst this controversy, which has been treated by the originalists as a national stain that must be wiped away through the hypnosis of denial, it is rarely mentioned that Sally herself was three-fourths white. Not only that, she was half-sister to Jefferson’s deceased wife! Say what?
Martha Wayles Jefferson’s father, John Wayles, lost his own wife when Martha was only a month old. After losing two more wives, Wayles began living openly with one of his slaves, a mulatto named Betty Hemings whose own father was an English ship captain. Martha’s father and Betty Hemings had six children together, including Sally.
When John Wayles died, he left his son-in-law Jefferson a lot of property, including Betty Hemings and all her offspring. So the whole clan, all of them Martha’s half siblings, came and lived at Monticello. Over the next half century, more than eighty of Betty Hemings’ extended family – five generations of slaves – lived and worked at Monticello. By the time Jefferson died in 1826, one-third of the 130 slaves on his plantation were members of the Hemings’ genetic kin group.
Sally Hemings was for all intents and purposes white-skinned with “straight hair down her back,” as numerous visitors to Monticello attested to. She was also 30 years younger than Jefferson. She gave birth to six and possibly seven of his children, with this father of the American Enlightenment. That means Jefferson’s own children by Sally were seven-eighths white, known as octoroons. Yet Jefferson never freed his own enslaved children during his lifetime, nor did he free mother Sally. Jefferson never acknowledged his slave children publicly or privately, apparently never taught them to read, he never gave them presents and did not leave them anything in his will, as other Virginia slaveholders with concubines did for their mulatto children and grandchildren.
Such was the mass hypnosis of that 18th-century race supremacist patriarchy that the “enlightened” Jefferson, preaching the virtues of an agrarian democracy and yeoman landowner reciprocity, could not bring himself to free his own mostly white children. And such was the extreme white fear of blackness that even a mere pepper-pinch of black blood overwhelmed the whiteness. You have to ask yourself: why would someone who was seven-eighths white be treated as a black slave? What kind of a society — what kind of a man — would do that??? And to his own children???
As Southern novelist William Faulkner once wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past.” History is a strange thing. We’re supposed to learn from it so that we don’t repeat it, but sometimes I wish we could tear it up so that we are not so chained to its long reach and limitations.
Surrounded by the fog of history, it’s all the more important that we honor important events like International Women’s Day and Black History Month. That’s when the fog rolls back a bit and the sun pokes through and we can better view these crucial stories of our nation’s history. These stories are a part of our collective story. Without them being known and acknowledged, our history looks like a frayed Constitution riddled with worm holes.
Steven Hill @StevenHill1776
Very interesting piece, Steve. Thank you!