WHAT THOMAS JEFFERSON’S DAUGHTERS CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE FALSE PROMISES OF PATRIARCHY
In hindsight: American women have come to the aid of men in power since the Founding Fathers, but the costs of such actions have not always been immediately apparent.
North and South Korea have set April 27 as the date for their historic summit, possibly paving the way for the first-ever visit between North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and U.S. president Donald Trump in late May. In the Olympic overtures that preceded this thaw in North and South Korean relations — not to mention the unprecedented prospect of a meeting between a North Korean leader and a sitting American president — Kim Yo Jong, the dictator’s sister, and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, played prominent roles. Defusing what had been an escalating verbal war between their male relatives, the women applauded both North and South Korean teams and charmed athletes and politicians alike.
In both cases, the women’s service as their nation’s delegates softened the image of their bellicose relatives, normalizing two figures who have been sharply criticized by most world leaders for their ruthlessness (Kim) and pugnacity (Trump). In a clever sleight of hand, the smiling faces of the women replaced the menacing visages of the men they represented.
This is not a new strategy. Male leaders have deployed female family members for their own strategic purposes before. But what should we make of the ways that these women willingly complied? Reflecting on the experiences of another presidential daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, helps us to recognize the costs exacted by these women’s political service.
Reflecting on the experiences of Martha Jefferson Randolph can help us recognize the costs exacted by women’s political service.
Stung by reports in late 1802 that he had “kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves . . . by [whom] our president has several children,” an embattled Thomas Jefferson begged his daughters, Martha Jefferson Randolph and Maria Jefferson Eppes, to join him in Washington.[1] Flanked by his daughters, he presented the nation with a family tableau designed to render the story unthinkable to white Americans. In a calculation that Kim and Trump might recognize two centuries later, Jefferson hoped to muzzle his critics by showcasing the love of his brilliant older daughter and beautiful younger one. A father cherished by such women, he hoped onlookers would conclude, could not possibly be capable of such an egregious moral failing as sex with a slave.
He was right; it was a public relations coup. One Washington society matron declared, “his life [as a doting father] is the best refutation of all the calumnies that have been heaped upon him.”[2]
Of course, this political theater depended on women willing to play their parts. Three years later, a pregnant Martha Jefferson Randolph gathered up her five children and once again climbed aboard a coach bound for Washington. This time, she remained for the entire Congressional session, attending state dinners to help court a Tunisian envoy, for example, or to diplomatically smooth over the bitter disagreements among extended family members who opposed Jefferson’s policies.[3] “It is truly the happiness of my life,” Martha once wrote to her father, “to think that I can devote the remainder of it to promote yours.”[4]
Ten years after Jefferson’s death, she was still working to protect him from his detractors. Martha asked her sons Jeff and George to consult their grandfather’s records, directing them to notice that Jefferson had not been at Monticello for a full fifteen months before the birth of one of Sally Hemings’s children (Jefferson’s records actually show precisely the opposite.)[5] But in bidding her children to “Remember this fact,” (a forerunner of today’s “alternative facts”?), she taught them to follow her own example.[6] Martha’s daughter Ellen was an astute pupil. “There are such things, after all, as moral impossibilities,” she declared in a flat denial of Jefferson’s accusers.[7]
Martha reaped rewards for her service: visitors traveling to Monticello to seek out Jefferson universally admired her. She basked in her father’s reflected glow when she dined with his old ally, the venerable Marquis de Lafayette, during his triumphant 1824 tour of America, and when she was escorted to the seat of honor at the tables of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.
Ivanka Trump has done more than just dine at her father’s state dinners. She has literally claimed her place at the table during White House policy meetings and even at the 2017 G20 Summit, when she temporarily took the president’s chair between British Prime Minister Theresa May and Chinese President Xi Jinxing. Her world travels, meetings with the planet’s most powerful leaders, and glamorous presence on the global stage are several of the many rewards that accrue to her connection with a famous and influential man.
But when asked about the reports of her father’s incidents of sexual assault, Ivanka Trump tried to take refuge in their familial relationship. As a loyal daughter, she accepted his denials. Martha Jefferson Randolph had done much the same thing, accepting Jefferson’s laughter as a denial of the reports of his relationship with Hemings.
Martha Jefferson Randolph reaped rewards for her service to her father, but wound up virtually homeless and penniless.
These women willingly played political roles, but their access to power hardly advanced what today we would call feminism. Instead, both Randolph and Trump embraced the patriarchal privileges that accompany wealth, power, and position. For their service, each earned their father’s love, approval, and promises of protection. Relying on these connections to offset the disadvantage of being female in America comes at a steep price, however, even if it is not immediately visible.
Randolph and her daughters used their privileged position to assert their racial superiority over their enslaved workers. In her disdain of the “yellow children,” as she called the progeny of white men and female slaves at Monticello, we can see Ellen’s conviction that slaves were inferior to her — even those born to her grandfather. So sure was she of the rightness of that view, when she weighed the relative freedoms of American and English women, she cut enslaved women entirely from her calculations. “Putting domestic slavery out of the question,” she wrote, unceremoniously excising them from consideration, “it has never been my lot to see any thing like oppression of the many by the few.” [8] Just as Jefferson had been able to proclaim that all men were created equal without any sense of contradiction, so too could his privileged granddaughter. Claiming that American women were the freest in the world, she remained blind to her part in maintaining that structure of racial oppression.
Ivanka Trump’s attempt to deflect the questions about her father’s sexual relationships as inappropriate to ask a daughter demonstrates that women can reinforce gender oppression as well. Believing herself comfortably immune from sexual assault in her protected status as the president’s daughter, Ivanka refused to jeopardize her comfort to speak for more vulnerable women. Her evasion was no less complicit in the maintenance of gendered patriarchal structures than Ellen’s full-throated declaration had been for racist ones.
Patriarchal privilege may appear to offer advantages to well-placed women, but it is a false promise. Rather than offering security, it can increase female dependence. After Jefferson’s death, Martha lived the remaining years of her life virtually homeless and penniless, his estate too encumbered by debt to support her. Her life makes clear for women today both the benefits and perils of relying on men — even wealthy, well-intentioned men — for one’s life’s meaning and livelihood.
Two centuries apart, these daughters devised similar strategies: staking their claims to positions of power and status, they also turned their backs on women infinitely less privileged than they. As the storm clouds continue to swirl about President Trump, Martha’s experience could serve as a cautionary tale for Ivanka (and indeed, for all women today). Signing on to the patriarchal project of their fathers cannot guarantee that they will be saved from the consequences of being a woman in America.
Catherine Kerrison is Associate Professor of History at Villanova University.
[1] James Callender, Recorder (Richmond, Virginia), September 1, 1802.
[2] Margaret Bayard Smith’s Account of a Visit to Monticello, [Jul 29 — Aug 2] 1809. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, ed. James P. McClure and J. Jefferson Looney (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008–2018).
[3] Cynthia Kierner, Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 128–132.
[4] Martha Jefferson Randolph to Thomas Jefferson, May 31, 1804, in Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear, Jr., eds., The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 260.
[5] Fraser D. Neiman, “Coincidence or Causal Connection? The Relationship between Thomas Jefferson’s visits to Monticello and Sally Hemings’s Conceptions,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d Ser., Vol. 57, №1 (January, 2000): 198–210.
[6] Henry S. Randall to James Parton, June 1, 1868, in Annette Gordon Reed, Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings: American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 256.
[7] Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge Correspondence, Letterbook; in the hand of Ellen W. Randolph Coolidge. Published in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society as “Mr. Jefferson’s Private Life,” Dumas Malone (1974); New York Times, May 18, 1974. Available online at: http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1266.
[8] Diary, January 30, 1839. Ann Lucas Birle and Lisa A. Francailla, eds., Thomas Jefferson’s Granddaughter in Queen Victoria’s England (Boston and Charlottesville: Massachusetts Historical Society and Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2012), 198.
