Jefferson's Women: Sexual Enlightenment and Racism in the Life of a Secular Hero‪.‬

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THOMAS JEFFERSON was a private man who kept his personal life to himself, and yet today 18,000 of his letters exist in the public forum. In them, this farmer, architect, inventor, philosopher, politician, attorney, and "man of letters"--learned in all disciplines, a true visionary--expounded upon everything but his love life. This we know of Jefferson: he was a deist, a moralist, and a revolutionary. He wrote the Declaration of Independence and, in a letter to James Madison from Paris, suggested adding a Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. He held positions of prominence within the newly formed United States (secretary of state, vice president, and president). He also wrote the book, Notes on the State of Virginia, and edited the New Testament into a volume he considered more believable, leaving out all the miracles and keeping what he considered the moral teachings of Jesus. He was proudest of founding the University of Virginia. And like all of the Founding Fathers, he's become an icon, above the hoi polloi. But historians have had to connect the dots to give us a real picture of Jefferson the man--one who has become the model, not only of our intellectual and democratic ideals, but, inadvertently, of the often subtle racism that exists today.