THE MANY LIVES OF ELIZA SCHUYLER

She lived for 97 years. Only 24 of them were with Alexander Hamilton.

- BY JANE KAMENSKY | ILLUSTRATION BY VIVIAN DEHNING

Monticello was Thomas Jefferson’s home in retirement, after decades of public service, including as the nation’s third president. It was also, on any given day, crowded with women and young people—Jefferson’s daughters by his wife, Martha; their 12 surviving children (six of them girls); his sister. Female visitors, including First Lady Dolley Madison, often popped by. Among the plantation’s large enslaved workforce, women and children outnumbered men by roughly two to one. Some of those enslaved children were Jefferson's own, by Sally Hemings, who was also the half sister of his dead wife. Throughout the Age of Revolution, families made Monticello run.

And so the site, where I serve as president, debuted a tour called “Women at Monticello” in 2024. Our guides prepared with customary rigor, reading widely in the ever-growing scholarship on women in the early republic. They devised a premise as sound as it was simple: The extraordinary stories of ordinary women, free and enslaved, would take center stage. And areas where women mostly spent their time, which guests are moved through quickly on regular tours, would claim pride of place.

Reviews were glowing. “I have been coming to Monticello for fifty years. This was in the top three best experiences ever,” one visitor wrote. Yet only a third of the tickets sold. At year-end, we made the difficult decision to concentrate the tour in the ghetto that is March: Women’s History Month.