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Monday, September 27, 2010

Historian roots out the women in pasts of Jefferson, the West

By David Steinberg
Journal Staff Writer
          "Home Lands: How Women Made the West" by Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken
        University of California Press, $24.95, 184 pp.
        "The Women Jefferson Loved" by Virginia Scharff
        Harper, $27.99, 397 pp.
        One of the most prominent presenters at next weekend's New Mexico Women Authors' Book Festival writes under two names.
        Virginia Swift is her nom de plume that appears on popular thrillers. Virginia Scharff is her real name, and it can be found on the covers of two readable nonfiction history books out this year.
        One is "The Women Jefferson Loved," which is about the women — including his mother — in the life of Thomas Jefferson. (In the context of this book, Scharff discusses "How Seeing Women in History Makes History Different" on Friday, Oct. 1, at the festival.)
        "This is a book I've wanted to write my whole life," said Scharff, a professor of history and the director of the Center for the Southwest at the University of New Mexico. "I was a little kid, and the first chapter book I remember reading was a biography of Jefferson. I'm a longtime admirer of Jefferson. Like everybody who admired him and who has a brain, I've had to come to terms with his complicated life and legacy — the Declaration of Independence written by this slaveholder."
        Now it is known that he had a shadow family, made by his relationship with the slave Sally Hemings.
        "I talk about all the women, partly because I see them as part of one larger family, but a family that is a house divided — divided by race, divided by caste, because they're half slave and half free — and divided by gender because of what men can do and what women can do is different in these circumstances," Scharff said.
        There were, in fact, three generations of men in Jefferson's family who had relations with Hemings women, Scharff said.
        So basically what Jefferson did was a family tradition. If you think of it that way, then "families are where lies, secrets and silences go to live. It's up to historians to find out what's going on," Scharff said.
        The way the white folks in Jefferson's family dealt with the men's extramarital relations "was to pretend it wasn't real. And the way the enslaved dealt with it was that they kept the memory alive but they kept quiet about it in front of their masters, and they did this because they were promised they'd be free. ... And (Jefferson) kept the promise."
        Scharff co-wrote the other book, "Home Lands: How Women Made the West," with Carolyn Brucken.
        That book, Scharff said, is a companion volume, not a catalog, to an exhibit of the same name that the two women curated. The exhibit was at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, where Scharff is Women of the West chair. It moves to the Missouri History Museum next and will be at the New Mexico History Museum next summer.
        "What we've done is take three places and look at the ways women have claimed these places as home," she said.
        The three places the book spotlights are Puget Sound, Colorado's Front Range and the Rio Grande Valley above Albuquerque known as the Rio Arriba.
        "The important thing is when we talk about home we aren't just talking about putting up curtains. (Women) used resources of how to make a community," Scharff said. "In the case of northern New Mexico, the resource is earth and we're looking at everything from pottery to adobe to real estate, going back 2,000 years."
        The West was home to many people, she said, "before it was anybody's West. If you want to understand that, you have to know what women were doing ... what Pueblo women were doing, what Salish women were doing in the Pacific Northwest, what Cheyenne women were doing, what Spanish and Mexican women were doing when they came up from the south.
        "The history doesn't start when Anglo Americans came westward."
        Virginia Scharff discusses, signs "The Women Jefferson Loved" at 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 24, at the Women Authors' Book Festival's History and Biography Tent at the New Mexico History Museum, downtown Santa Fe, and discusses, signs "Home Lands: How Women Made the West" at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 25, in the Meem Community Room of the museum.
       

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