Wonderful study of all the women intimately associated with Thomas Jefferson. The analysis of the genealogical, personal and political intertwining of the Jefferson lineage with the growth of Virginia and the United States as a whole was fascinating. ( )

A dry, but factual account of some people in Thomas Jefferson's life. It's well researched and thorough while focusing on five women who knew and loved Jefferson. Not a page turner but certainly illuminating--the author is good at facts and doesn't stray from her opinions...defends them well, too. 40% of the book is footnotes and factual artifacts...written by an academic ( )

This is a very different book from Mr. Jefferson’s Women by Jon Kukla (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007). Mr. Kukla’s book is about women that Jefferson loved romantically; Ms. Scharff’s primarily the women in Jefferson’s family and slaves. The Women Jefferson Loved is divided five parts: Jane (his mother), Martha (his wife), Sally (Hemings, his slave and concubine), Patsy and Polly (his daughters), and A House Divided (Jefferson’s later years including his relationship with his grandchildren.) Of necessity there is overlap among the parts since the stories of these people overlap. The book also includes a useful Jefferson-Wayles-Hemings family tree in the front, and lists of the central characters with brief descriptions of them in the back in addition to endnotes, bibliography, and index.

Jefferson’s view of women and their role in life is demonstrated throughout the book. He “believed in a natural law of gender, a separation of the roles and responsibilities of women and men that, ideally, confined women to the protected sphere of domesticity while giving men both the freedoms and the burdens of public life” (p. 195). Jefferson saw “wifely submission as the source of marital happiness” (p. 277). Although his daughter Patsy was a very highly educated woman, she married very young to a man she did not know well and assumed her role of running a plantation (for Jefferson himself instead of her husband). Patsy educated her daughters, but they also, because of their station in life, could not work outside the home.

Ms. Scharff adheres to the current feminist theory that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’ children. Sally “never conceived a child except when the master [Jefferson] was at home. Between the time Jefferson took the office of secretary of state and the time he retired from the presidency, Sally Hemings gave birth to at least six children, at least some of whom bore a stunning resemblance to Thomas Jefferson. Four of these children lived to adulthood [and] … were … set free” (p. 264).

Interracial families were an integral part of life at Monticello. A reason that Jefferson’s wife, Martha, on her deathbed asked Jefferson never to remarry was because she did not like being raised by stepmothers; she “had preferred her father’s slave mistress to her white stepmothers” (p. 381). At Martha’s request, Jefferson had brought the Hemings family, Martha’s father’s mistress and children to live at Monticello. Sally Hemings was his wife’s half-sister. Following Polly’s death, Jefferson’s son-in-law, Jack Eppes, took the slave, Betsy Hemings as his concubine and fathered her children.

There are few documentary sources for some of the characters in the story. Often, Ms. Scharff suggest that a woman felt a certain way – or offers several theories of how a particular woman might have felt concerning a particular situation. ( )