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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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