Centering Sally Hemings as a Founding Mother exposes how American democracy was built through the unrecognized, racialized and gendered labor of Black women whose lives made its ideals possible.
This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy. Taking the form of essays, audio, poetry and original art, historians and scholars revisit the nation’s origins to center those written out of the founding documents and reimagine what a truly inclusive democracy requires.
The history of Sally Hemings (1773-1835) is shaped by erasure, dispute and belated recognition.
Indeed, her more than 200-year journey in the historical record went from Thomas Jefferson’s contemporaries dismissing the “scandal” involving her during his presidency, to abolitionist William Wells Brown linking her history to the “fancy girl” trade with his tragic novel Clotel; or The President’s Daughter (1853), to Jefferson historians discounting her status as mother of his children, to the same historians questioning the DNA tests confirming Jefferson’s paternity through one of her children in 1998.
However, Sally Hemings has since been recuperated, with the important work of historian Annette Gordon-Reed and the establishment of Sally Hemings’ room at Monticello, which opened in 2017.
These are all aspects of Hemings that we should grapple with, in terms of how we can situate her in the “making of democracy.” Such a reckoning demands that we view Hemings’ life through a matrix of complex decisions shaped by power, negotiation and survival.
Sally Hemings is rarely situated within the United States’ democratic legacy, despite her central role in the material conditions through which democracy was made possible. American democracy is traditionally narrated through the language of rights, representation, and elite white male political authorship.
Black feminist thought challenges this narrative by locating political power in intimacy, reproduction and the labor of survival under domination.
Reading Hemings through this framework, she emerges not as a peripheral figure in the founding of democracy, but as a Founding Mother.
Hemings’ strategic negotiations secured her and her children’s futures within a political order that both denied her legal personhood and depended on her labor. Centering Hemings unsettles liberal democratic origin stories by revealing that the United States was founded not through declarations of equality, but through the labor of Black women whose political work reproduced the nation even as it was erased from the democratic archive.
Black feminist thought provides a critical framework for rethinking what constitutes political action within the history of American democracy, particularly beyond formal rights and institutions.
Drawing on The Combahee River Collective’s articulation of interlocking systems of oppression, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theorization of intersectionality and Patricia Hill Collins’ formulation of Black Feminist Thought (1990), Black feminist scholars have emphasized how power operates through intimacy, reproduction and survival under conditions of racialized gender domination.
This body of work insists that the lives of enslaved Black women cannot be dismissed as apolitical, even in the absence of legal personhood or political voice, and foregrounds how agency emerges within constraint. By attending to reproductive labor, kinship formation, and negotiated survival, Black feminist analysis expands the archive of democracy beyond its canonical texts and actors, allowing figures like Sally Hemings to be read not as exceptions to the founding narrative but as central to the material and social reproduction of the democratic order.
Hemings is situated at the core contradiction of the United States’ democratic founding, in which proclamations of universal equality were sustained through racialized enslavement and the gendered exploitation of Black and mixed-Black women.
Hemings herself was a woman of one-quarter African descent who followed the trajectory of her half-Black mother (who had children with her enslaver John Wayles, the father of both Hemings and Jefferson’s wife Martha) and African grandmother (who was impregnated by a slave-ship captain).
The sexual politics of chattel slavery, which relied on laws establishing hereditary slavery for the children of enslaved mothers, also placed Hemings within a racial order that hinged on even the smallest trace of African ancestry.
From its inception, American democracy rendered enslavement as compatible with claims of universal equality. Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal” functioned as a mechanism of exclusion, foreclosing the political inclusion of the enslaved and specifically denying Black women citizenship, consent and bodily autonomy. Yet the democratic project Jefferson helped author depended materially on enslaved labor, including the reproductive labor of Black women (the essential work of bearing children, caregiving and sustaining daily life), even as liberal political thought disavowed that dependence.
Hemings’ intimate proximity to Jefferson, as an enslaved woman and the mother of six of his children (four of whom reached adulthood), renders her indispensable for exposing this contradiction, making visible how the nation’s founding principles were sustained through forms of racialized and gendered domination that democracy itself refused to name.
As a teenager, Hemings accompanied Jefferson and his daughters to France during his diplomatic appointment from 1787 to 1789, where the illegality of slavery meant that both Hemings and her older brother James Hemings could claim legal freedom. This legal status has frequently been used to frame her return to the United States with Jefferson as puzzling or paradoxical, casting her decision as an anomaly rather than a site of political negotiation.
A Black feminist analysis complicates the assumption that legal freedom alone constituted meaningful liberation for an enslaved woman abroad.
While in Paris, Hemings occupied a position of profound vulnerability: She was young, economically dependent and navigating a foreign society shaped by racial difference, linguistic barriers and uncertain protections for women of color. It was during this period that her sexual relationship with Jefferson began, a relationship that must be understood as structurally unequal and shaped by the asymmetrical power relations governing intimacy between an older white slaveholding man and a much younger enslaved mixed-race woman. When Jefferson prepared to return to Monticello and requested that Hemings accompany him, her decision was neither passive nor unthinking, but a constrained political calculation shaped by survival, care and the management of futurity.
Hemings prioritized intergenerational security over the fragile freedom available to her in France, agreeing to return on two conditions: First, that her children, herself and her brother would eventually be emancipated, and second, that she would receive extraordinary privileges.
Hemings’ negotiations with Jefferson constitute a form of political labor that exceeds survival and can be understood through “reproductive governance,” a term that I distinguish from what Lynn M. Morgan and Elizabeth F. S. Roberts have identified as the mechanisms of state control over reproductive behaviors. I use the term here to instead suggest the limited reproductive choices that Hemings may have carved out for herself.
By securing the future emancipation of her family while delaying her own manumission, Hemings shaped the conditions under which freedom, lineage and belonging could be claimed within a system that denied her legal personhood. These arrangements were not merely personal but deliberate interventions into the organization of kinship, inheritance and political membership within a slaveholding republic.
In shaping the conditions of her children’s freedom, Hemings exercised a form of maternal political authority that governed who could move beyond enslavement. This labor stands in sharp contrast to Jefferson’s authorship of democratic ideals, which articulated freedom in abstract and ambiguous terms, while Hemings produced freedom materially through the governance of reproduction and kinship under constraint.
Reframing Hemings as a Founding Mother clarifies that the democratic project depended not only on political authorship and public speech but on the intimate, gendered labor of enslaved women whose strategic actions structured the reproduction of the nation even as they were erased from democratic recognition.
Feminist invocations of the United States’ “Founding Mothers” have most often centered on elite white women whose political influence operated through proximity to power rather than structural exclusion from it, a framework that renders figures like Hemings unintelligible as political actors. While this scholarship has been crucial in challenging male-dominated narratives, it frequently equates political agency with literacy, legal status and recognized political influence, thereby obscuring forms of political labor exercised under conditions of enslavement.
Positioning Hemings as a Founding Mother disrupts this liberal feminist narrative: She is neither a symbolic inclusion nor a celebratory figure of progress, but a foundational actor whose reproductive governance shaped how freedom could be claimed, preserved and passed on under the constraints of slavery.
A feminist account of democratic legacy that excludes Hemings is therefore not simply incomplete but analytically incapable of explaining how the nation was founded and materially reproduced.
To center Hemings as a Founding Mother is not to redeem the United States’ democratic origins, but to expose how democracy was constituted through unfreedom. Hemings’ life demands a reorientation of how political power is recognized, insisting that democracy be understood not only through formal institutions and declared ideals but through the lives and practices that made those ideas governable. It also reshapes democratic memory by challenging celebratory origin stories and insisting on the centrality of those whose lives sustained democracy while remaining excluded from its promises.
To teach and narrate the founding of the United States through the life of Sally Hemings is not merely to correct the historical record by inclusion, but to fundamentally alter how democracy itself is understood. It reframes democracy not as a project born fully formed through abstract ideals or elite authorship, but as one sustained through the unrecognized, racialized and gendered labor of those it refused to name as political subjects. Centering Hemings thus demands a rethinking of democratic origins that takes seriously enslaved lives and the practices through which freedom was structured and enabled, even as it was systematically withheld.
Explore the entire FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists essay collection:
- The main Founding Feminists page contains original art and a historical timeline and invites readers to submit original poetry.
- America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story, by Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany.
- Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America, by Michelle Schenandoah, founder of Rematriation, a Haudenosaunee women-led nonprofit organization.
- ‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America, by Allyson M. Poska, professor of history emerita at the University of Mary Washington, translated by Antonia Delgado-Poust, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington. Lea este artículo en español aquí.
- Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776, by Charles Upchurch, professor of British history at Florida State University.
- Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project, by Dana Elle Murphy, assistant professor of Black studies and English at Caltech.
- The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity, by Jacqueline Beatty, associate professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.
- Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America, Jen Manion, Winkley professor of history at Amherst College.
- She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance, Dr. Vanessa M. Holden, associate professor of history, director of African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky, and director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative.
- Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy, Jessina Emmert, doctoral candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.
- The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism, Manisha Sinha, Draper chair in American history at the University of Connecticut.
- The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging in the U.S., Anne Anlin Cheng, Louis W. Fairchild class of ’24 professor of English at Princeton University
- Making Disability Visible in History: A Conversation With Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany
- Educating Women: A History of Access, Exclusion and Backlash, Nimisha Barton, lecturer at Cal State Long Beach and a DEI consultant in higher education
