The Sally Hemings Story: Paternity and Patriarchal Power
In a society in which male descent is important for passing on property and power, making the "belief" in a particular paternity nearer to "knowledge" is crucial to the continuation of the whole system.
A "women's history" perspective on Sally Hemings' relationship to Thomas Jefferson would have us look at questions relating to the different roles men and women were expected to occupy. In this particular situation, where Sally Hemings was a slave of mixed racial heritage, a more complete picture of the "truth" of the situation also requires looking at the ways in which race and slavery were part of the context of their relationship.
One certainty is that Jefferson was male and owned Sally, a female slave of mixed descent, both African and European.
One noteworthy aspect of this story, looking at issues of "male descent": Sally had a last name because her white grandfather acknowledged his children by a slave mistress. Most children with free white fathers and slave mothers were not acknowledged, and did not carry a last name to signify their descent from a particular male line. Children of a slave father also did not carry last names, generally speaking. This placed the children outside the normal white-male-oriented society, one in which power passed through the father to legitimate sons: patriarchy.
Women=Private, Men=Public
Women belonged to the private sphere. We don't know much about Jefferson's relationship with his wife, nor about her life as Jefferson's wife and as the mistress of Monticello plantation, because Jefferson, like many men writing in that time, did not write much of private matters. When the private side of life touched the business side -- as when documenting the birth dates of slaves who were, after all, additions to the list of family property -- or documenting expenses of the household, such as the purchase of fabric for Jefferson's daughters and their maid, Sally -- do the private matters of the household show up in the preserved documetation.
Women generally didn't write, and many of the time didn't know how to. Many states forbid teaching slaves to read or write. Fortunately, we have a few letters and journals from women, and even a few from slaves. Because women didn't generally write "important" documents, and because slaves rarely wrote at all, learning about the ordinary lives of women in slavery, from their own perspective, is difficult.
