Thomas Jefferson's Gender Frontier

Abstract

But, as he was quick to remind anyone who would listen, there was more to Europe than high culture. In Jefferson's imagination American values and cultural practices uniquely embodied universal standards. And that outlook frequently clashed with cultural practices of other nations, practices that he took to be "unnatural" and that heightened his skepticism about the ability of other peoples to create enlightened societies. The overwhelming burden of Jefferson's correspondence from his years in France emphasized American difference from, and superiority to, the Old World and his fears of the potential corrupting effect of European mores on American people and institutions.These concerns manifested themselves in many areas, but in none more strikingly than in discussions of gender. Jefferson's correspondence from France suggests that his conception of gender and sexuality was not merely tangential to his republicanism or to his understanding of America's uniqueness. Jefferson's ideal society embraced female domesticity as part of the natural order of things-an order, he came to believe, realized only in America. The shock of his encounter with difference in France clarified this conviction and compelled Jefferson to make explicit the gendered underpinnings of his nationalism. 3 Although Jefferson's embrace of domesticity as essential to the new republican order should not surprise any student of revolutionary America, historians have been conflicted about Jefferson's views on gender relations, particularly his representations of women. Some have identified a pattern of misogyny in Jefferson, a lack of comfort with women, if not worse-Kenneth A. Lockridge, for example, depicted a frustrated Jefferson full of a "patriarchal rage" triggered by his mother's legal control over his property and destiny after his father's death. Fawn M. Brodie also suggested that Jefferson's preferences for women who were "gentle, feminine, and yielding" originated with a deep hostility to his mother. Winthrop Jordan described a Jefferson fearful of women, whose uncontrolled passion and sexual aggression, he believed, threatened his masculine self-control. 4 Other scholars have shown, by contrast, that although he tended to recoil from women he considered unreserved or aggressive, Jefferson enjoyed the company of particular women whose friendships he cultivated, women who, in turn, generally enjoyed his attention. Far from being uncomfortable in their presence, such scholars have suggested, Jefferson believed women were essential to the social life that made the world of politics workable and endurable. He clearly saw his wife, Martha, as a crucial (and fully engaged) figure in the salonlike Jefferson's Library and the French Connection," Eighteenth-Century Studies,

Developing Freedom: Thomas Jefferson, the State, and Human Capability

“…Women, Jefferson believed, were intellectually and morally equal to men, but women's sphere was the home. 92 In Jan Lewis's words, Jefferson and others of his generation "shared one of the contradictions of republican thinking": while the domestic sphere was imagined as a site of profound satisfaction and private happiness, it was premised on female "selfeffacement." 93 Although this analysis makes sense to modern ears, Jefferson's generation believed that women and men were by nature different, and thus designed for different roles.…”