Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. 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.The fate of “Women at Monticello” hinged, in large part, on men. We built it; they didn’t come. Barely one in five people who took the tour was male, though roughly 40 percent of our visitors are, which illustrates a long-standing problem: The general public doesn’t much care about women’s history. In the world of nonfiction best sellers—those wide-spined histories and biographies sold at airports—the wielding of public power remains the big story. The kitchen, the marriage bed, and the cradle are sideshows at best, and women’s thoughts rarely make it onto the page.Once upon a time, Abigail Adams hoped that America’s Revolution might shift perspectives and priorities. “In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies,” she famously urged her husband in March 1776.“I cannot but laugh,” John Adams replied.In the quarter millennium since, scholars and activists have in different ways done their damnedest to wipe the smirk off his face. From the Revolution to the suffrage movement to the campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment and beyond, advocates have worked to wedge women’s lives into the laws of the land. For decades, academic historians have painstakingly documented those efforts and their mingled successes and shortcomings. Field-altering books have deepened scholars’ understanding of the domestic turmoil of Revolutionary America, among other moments.Yet there has been no women’s-history equivalent of Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (2004), which has sold more than 2 million copies, much less of David McCullough’s John Adams (2001), reprinted 19 times during its first three months, reaching 1 million copies well before the acclaimed HBO miniseries. In 2006, Publishers Weekly wondered whether a “Distaff David McCullough,” as a headline put it, might appear on the horizon. First ladies and other women close to male power seemed likeliest to break through. Yet PW ’s candidate, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation, by the historian Catherine Allgor, fell short of high sales expectations. Women read novels, men read about influential men, and the world goes round.Now, nearly two decades later, Amanda Vaill’s Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution has a chance to inspire some welcome crossover. Vaill has an impressive track record as a biographer (character!) and a screenwriter (plot!). She need not plead, “Remember the ladies”; her trio of luminous sisters is lodged in public memory already. Thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Eliza Schuyler (the middle sister who married the musical’s eponymous hero), fiery Angelica Schuyler Church (the eldest), and clear-eyed Peggy Schuyler Van Rensselaer (the youngest) come with their own playlist. America’s 250th anniversary makes securing their position on the country’s patriotic bookshelf an especially worthy challenge.But for Vaill to take her place as the “Distaff David McCullough” demands more than familiar protagonists and narrative brilliance. The core premise of women’s history has long been that when we reorient the inquiry, we not only introduce new characters but change the story itself, upending ideas about what lies at the margins and what at the center. One mustn’t, as the saying goes, simply add women and stir. Half the human race aren’t mere chips in the batter; their inclusion calls for a whole new cake.The colonial struggle against the British Crown began in the household, over taxes on home goods. One of the earliest artifacts of what would become the independence movement is a teapot, produced in London circa 1766, emblazoned with the motto No Stamp Act. Tea was consumed chiefly in private; Mother poured out. Newspapers were filled with columns urging women to boycott imported items. “Love your country much better than fine things,” exhorted an “Address to the Ladies” in The Boston Post-Boy. Many women did so, forswearing British wares, spinning flax on town greens, and swapping handwritten patriotic verse while drinking herbal-tea substitutes.Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, women spoke the language of American liberty. The poet Phillis Wheatley, whose literary renown had helped secure her freedom from slavery, addressed George Washington, praising America’s struggle on the battlefield as “freedom’s cause,” which any reader would have recognized as her own. “And be it known unto Britain, even American daughters are Politicians & Patriots,” Boston’s Hannah Winthrop told her friend Mercy Otis Warren, who would become, in 1805, the author of one of the first comprehensive accounts of American independence. In a preface to her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, Warren said she had written it because “every manly arm was occupied,” a convenient fiction.Abigail Adams was hardly alone in raising what soon came to be called “the woman question.” Her husband’s laughter was the nervous sort. “We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where,” he explained: “Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.” But women, he continued, were a “Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest.” He feared “the Despotism of the Petticoat.” Thomas Jefferson was likewise discomfited by the revolutionary possibility of female citizenship. He understood Warren as a political ally, and helped fund the publication of her trilogy, which he placed on a list of recommended titles by authors including Herodotus, Voltaire, and Benjamin Franklin. Yet he counseled Angelica Schuyler Church, with whom he had grown quite chummy in Paris, that the “tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion.” Angelica had been reading up on the struggles of the Federalists, especially her brother-in-law Alexander Hamilton’s, to ratify their blueprint for the nation. The “question on the new Constitution,” so consuming for men, “need not agitate you,” Jefferson wrote. She mustn’t imitate Parisian salonistes: “French ladies miscalculate much their own happiness when they wander from the true field of their influence into that of politicks.”At home as in society at large, the Revolution really did threaten to turn the world upside down. Still, what John Adams called “our Masculine systems” mostly held fast.The American Revolution clearly meant something to North American women. Some of them waged it, encamping with the armies, cooking, cleaning, and nursing, and, in a few exceptional cases, grabbing muskets themselves. Many reckoned with its ideals; pervasive talk of liberty held particular portent for women’s lives. And virtually all women east of the Appalachians experienced the violence, sickness, and scarcity of a civil war in which front lines and home fronts were never far apart.But what did women mean to the American Revolution? Modern scholarship on its formative role in women’s lives, and vice versa, took an important turn in 1980, when two young historians published landmark books on the subject—second books, because each had been told that a dissertation on a topic quite so pots-and-pans wouldn’t do. Mary Beth Norton offered a social historian’s answer in Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. She focused on “the constant patterns of women’s lives”—bleeding, marrying, birthing, tending—and the ways the Revolutionary War altered them. The shifts she analyzed were more personal than political: subtle changes in duties, in self-conception, and occasionally in willingness to advocate. Judith Sargent Murray, who in 1790 published the pseudonymous essay “On the Equality of the Sexes,” offered one case in point. In 1798, Murray “confidently predicted the dawn of ‘a new era of female history.’ ” Norton’s own assessment of the Revolution’s “ambiguous” legacy for women was far more sober.John Trumbull’s portrait of Angelica Schuyler Church, her son Philip, and a servant, circa 1785 (The Picture Art Collection / Alamy)In Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, Linda K. Kerber addressed the ideas that remade the political family. Instead of a royal patriarch ruling over voiceless subjects, America would be a fraternity of virtuous (male) citizens, created equal in their potential for self-government. Even those who thought women shouldn’t meddle in government acknowledged that they “could—and should—play a political role through the raising of a patriotic child,” and needed education to do so. The figure Kerber called the “Republican Mother” forged the polity at one step’s remove, “a citizen but not really a constituent.” Kerber underlined the “inherent paradox” of republican motherhood: It thickened the boundary between male and female realms. Yet her book is sunnier than Norton’s, more confident that the Revolution set American women on a road toward equality, however steep and circuitous.Two years after Norton and Kerber launched their revolutionary books, the Equal Rights Amendment went down in defeat. In the ensuing decades, feminism stalled, regrouped, and fizzled again. One major party put forth its first female candidates for president, both of whom lost, consequentially. Women’s rights rolled back, and a new pronatalism—republican motherhood for the 21st century—marched forward.All the while, historians remembered the ladies, broadening the cast of Revolutionary-era female figures to include enslaved and self-liberated Black women, Loyalist women, poor women, Native women, and “female husbands,” who rejected the gender binary altogether. Across their differences, shared status bound most women in the early republic. Their paths to property blocked by law and custom, and their literacy limited by education and expectation, their lives left fewer traces. In other words, they resisted the McCullough treatment.Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin; rinse and repeat: A new life of one of the Revolution’s male heroes appears in bookstores most years around Father’s Day. In the 1990s, a time of crisis for the publishing industry, Founders’ biographies revived an old tradition. At least since 1800, when Parson Weems published his Life of Washington, biography has been the medium through which most Americans have understood the birth of their country. That is not a bad thing: The genre admits nuance, with every human life as patterned yet unique as a fingerprint. And it insists that everyone, past and present, lives in both epochal and personal time, making and made by history.So, too, Amanda Vaill’s Schuyler sisters. Staking a claim not just to the significance of her protagonists but also to her own stature as a portraitist in the grand manner, Vaill builds on some of the most compelling writing about women in early America, which has peered into the households of famous men, drawing on ample records to cast light in otherwise shadowy corners. Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello (2008) made Sally Hemings, from whom not a word survives, a figure crucial to understanding the workings of power in the early American republic. Jill Lepore deftly explored the chiaroscuro nature of famous-man/hidden-woman histories in Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013), her biography of Benjamin Franklin’s sister.The Schuyler sisters’ proximity to male power similarly helps them assert main-character status. Eliza, Angelica, and Peggy may not have been “in the room where it happened,” as Lin-Manuel Miranda puts it. But a lot of things did happen in the elegant rooms where they lived and loved. Born into a wealthy Dutch landowning clan in upstate New York, they led a cosmopolitan and politically connected existence, surrounded from childhood by political ferment. The combination of their privilege and their family’s mobility—scattered by war, public service, and personal ambition—created a rich trove of correspondence, more of which has surfaced since Chernow published Hamilton.The short life of Alexander Hamilton both feeds and fetters Vaill’s project. The book opens with his violent death, in 1804, before he turned 50. By then Peggy was dead, her health having declined after a string of miscarriages. Angelica had barely a decade left, but Eliza lived another half century. Tragic though Hamilton’s early death was, it offers Vaill a rare opportunity: less time to worry about the capital-F Founder dominating the foreground, and more space in which to figure out what flavor and texture that whole new cake might have. It also creates a rare burden: Can Eliza make history on her own?Vaill’s bold choice to narrate the family’s experience in the present tense, as they lived it, while rendering the broader course of human events in the simple past, keeps us close to the action. Indeed, it redefines what counts as action. The sidelining of women’s lives, Vaill argues, leaves readers with the illusion of “two histories”: a vivid chronicle of events without women, and quieter female annals without events. To encompass both, she swaps foreground and background. She muses: What if the painter John Trumbull—a side character in the Schuylers’ lives—had portrayed an exchange of marriage vows with the stylistic gravitas of history painting? Vaill creates that canvas, dismantling the false binary of public and private that Linda Kerber’s work analyzed long ago.Philip Schuyler, the father of Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy, was, like so many others of his day, a marriage-made man. In wedding Catherine Van Rensselaer in 1755, as the Seven Years’ War began, he increased his wealth, acreage, and political standing. He represented his Albany district in the provincial assembly in Manhattan, regularly shuttling between the two cities. As the imperial crisis deepened, he joined the second of the colonies’ Congresses in Philadelphia, in 1775; before the delegates debated independence, he departed to serve as a major general in the new Continental Army. “My heart bleeds as I view the horrors of civil war,” he wrote that spring.Meanwhile, Catherine continued to bear child after child, 15 in all. As fighting began, the three eldest Schuylers—now marriageable young ladies—attended dancing assemblies, on the lookout for mates. For a time, “the war—if it is a war yet—makes little difference in their lives,” Vaill writes. The girls’ second cousin and sometime guardian hoped to keep it that way, noting: “Our Sex are doomed to be obedient in every stage of life so that we shant be great gainers by this contest.” About this, she was both right and wrong.The Schuyler sisters and their friends, not unlike European heads of state, knew that intimate alliances cemented political ones. But Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy participated in a marriage market where young people’s preferences had begun to trump parental wishes. The sisters received gentleman callers, including, in Eliza’s case, the dashing young officer and future British spy John André. In a startling number of instances, women eloped, making their choices before parents could intervene—or even, in Angelica’s case, flying in the face of paternal disapproval. At 21, she ran off with an English émigré calling himself John Carter, a match that set the course of a wild and roaming life.A combination of lusty letters and Vaill’s writerly gifts gives Eliza’s courtship with Hamilton dramatic momentum. How quickly he pivots from assuring his bosom friend John Laurens, in 1779, that he had no use for a wife—“I have plagues enough without desiring to add to the number that greatest of all”—to telling Eliza, the following year, that his love for her has induced “a sort of insanity.” As their wedding nears, Hamilton reminds Eliza, “You are going to do a very serious thing,” because husbands “retain the power of happiness and misery.” As Abigail Adams said, all men would be tyrants if they could.Hamilton was no tyrant, but he wasn’t a very good husband, either. Low-born and yearning, he was in many ways insatiable. He told Eliza she was “a woman I love to weakness,” and he meant it. But to say that he loved women to weakness may have been more accurate. John Adams later attributed Hamilton’s passionate nature to a humoral imbalance: “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find Whores enough to draw off.” The Freudian in me senses an attachment disorder. Deprived of a father, mortified by his mother, he craved the reflection he saw in women’s eyes. Marrying Eliza was, as a friend told him, an epic “conquest” that delivered him riches and family station. His life would have been longer, and happier, had he stopped there.From the start, Hamilton ingratiated himself with Eliza’s sisters, especially Angelica. By 1781, as he fought alongside Washington to win the new country, Hamilton had begun to tuck saucy private notes for his sister-in-law into letters to his wife. In 1783, Carter, soon to be revealed as the absconded and bankrupt John Barker Church, spirited Angelica to Europe. Over the years they spent in London and Paris, Angelica adopted ever more continental manners, playing the coquette with Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Franklin, and communicating regularly, and secretly, with her brother-in-law.Meanwhile, Hamilton drew Eliza into his public world after the war, moving their growing family to Lower Manhattan, where he practiced law and entered government. Vaill places the writing of The Federalist Papers in a busy household context, with Hamilton testing out arguments on Eliza, his “sounding board” and sometime amanuensis. When the essays were published in book form, Eliza dispatched an early copy across the Atlantic to Angelica, but not before she inked her own name on the title page, “giving herself a position of ownership, if not authorship,” Vaill writes. “See? she all but says to her sister, I do important things, too.”In London, Angelica used her private connections to elevate her husband’s public power, scheming to ensure Church’s election to Parliament in 1790. She pitied Eliza, whom Hamilton had by then dragged to Philadelphia, the new seat of the federal government. “Are you obliged to bear the formalities of female circles, and their trifling chit chat?” she asked. But Eliza knew that the role of hostess was political. Angelica, too, helped shape Hamilton’s thinking, sending him Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations from a London bookshop. Men at the time acknowledged such contributions: Noting Eliza’s facility with the household accounts, Secretary of War James McHenry told Hamilton that she “has as much merit as your treasurer, as you have as treasurer of the wealth of the United States.”Would that Hamilton had had a republican mother to teach him the straight and narrow path of self-government! He might have been warier when, in the summer of 1791, a 23-year-old stranger named Maria appeared on his doorstep with a terrible tale. Seduced at 15, she’d been married, abused, and abandoned by a man named James Reynolds. Maria said she needed money, which Hamilton agreed to supply. But no sooner had he repaired to her boardinghouse with a check than he felt moved to offer softer solace. “Some conversation ensued,” he later wrote, “from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.”As any reader of novels should have realized, the ardent Cabinet secretary with a savior complex had wandered into a trap, which James Reynolds soon sprang: He had pimped his wife in a blackmail scheme. Eliza, who had taken the children to Albany for several months, returned and was soon pregnant with the Hamiltons’ fifth child. A block away, the affair and the extortion continued.So far, so wretchedly private.Then, in late 1792, James Reynolds was arrested for fraud. When Hamilton refused him legal help, Reynolds told all who would listen that the Treasury secretary had masterminded his financial chicanery. Maria, doubtless at her husband’s direction, supplied Hamilton’s political opponents with revealing letters that she and Hamilton had exchanged. A delegation confronted Hamilton, who confessed to being an adulterer, but no thief. They took him at his word of honor, and gave him theirs.But five years later, copies of the incriminating letters found their way to the scurrilous newsman James Callender, the same columnist who would soon break the story of Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Hamilton, convinced that salvaging his fiscal reputation required him to air his personal failings, published a lengthy tract, baring all.The Reynolds affair has long been well documented. Chernow lavished pages on it, as Vaill does. His chief concern was the impact on the great man’s career; she cares more about what Eliza experienced. Nothing has surfaced to document her anguish. And so Vaill leaves the disgraced politician and his wife where the evidence does, “alone with their thoughts in the dark.”“A disappointed politician is very apt to take refuge in a Garden,” Hamilton wrote to a friend in 1802 from his new home, the Grange, in Upper Manhattan. Relegated to private life, he was in his mid-40s, father to seven living children. (The eldest, Philip, had died the year before, in a duel.) But his last two years proved anything but an idyll. They swirled with rumors and reckless dares, and, finally, public insults directed at his longtime rival Aaron Burr, whose bullet killed him in 1804. Philip, Eliza’s father, died just months later.Chernow’s Hamilton ends there; widowed Eliza gets a scant nine pages. “For Eliza Hamilton, the collapse of her world was total, overwhelming, and remorseless,” Chernow writes. Vaill has a different project, which demands different proportions. Eliza lived to the astonishing age of 97, having spent just 24 years with Hamilton. Vaill devotes about a quarter of Pride and Pleasure to Eliza’s widowhood, in a section called, fittingly, “Nameless Satisfactions.”An 1851 charcoal sketch of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton at age 94 (Historic Collection / Alamy)Vaill reads Eliza’s widowed years as a kind of breakout: Nora’s life after A Doll’s House. “Until now, she’s been—while not passive—a person to whom things happened,” she writes. “Now she begins to be, as much as her circumstances allow, a person who makes them happen.” Eliza had been enmeshed in world-historical events through the careers of her father and her husband. After their deaths, the headlines receded. And after Angelica’s, so did the family letters.Yet the second half of Eliza’s life remained quietly consequential. She joined the kinds of organizations that American women pioneered in the early 19th century—activism that made claims on the public purse and prefigured demands for formal political rights. Even as she coped with her husband’s debts and her father’s incomplete will, she focused on others less fortunate, becoming a director of New York’s Orphan Asylum Society, which tried to fill with charity the holes in a legal system that had yet to address the lives of women and children. The society had a constitution, written by women, and public meetings gaveled and attended by them. The directors petitioned New York State for an official charter, which they received, like a woman-run bank. They bought land and put up a building, housing numerous poor children.Eliza also lobbied Congress to safeguard the historical records of the Founders. She arranged and preserved Hamilton’s archive, painful though the work could be. Vaill paints a wonderful scene in which Eliza discovers, among her husband’s personal effects, “sheets and sheets of paper covered with Angelica’s distinctive slanting handwriting,” some sent directly to his office. “Suddenly all the hints and whispers and sideways glances Eliza has spent years trying to ignore make sense.” She sets them aside but does not destroy them. Her advocacy shaped Hamilton’s official papers, too. Eliza sued the politician Rufus King to repossess the documents establishing Hamilton’s authorship of George Washington’s farewell address, which she knew about because she had been in the room where it happened. Every book that has been written about Washington’s administration since—whether scholarly or popular, whether great-man or women’s history, or Vaill’s marvelous fusion of both—owes a debt to Eliza Schuyler Hamilton.In 1848, Congress invited Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, venerable relic, to the ceremony laying the cornerstone for the Washington Monument. She attended, sweltering in widow’s weeds, on July 4, weeks shy of her 91st birthday. She had lived to see the flesh-and-blood brotherhood that waged Revolution turned to marble memorials. She can’t have remembered them that way, and Vaill won’t let her readers do so, either. Her book is an act not only of recovery, but of world building, restoring the connections between home and history that made the American Revolution.Vaill’s historical and literary achievement is to convey what it felt like to be a woman who, as she writes of Angelica, longed “to put her fingertips to history,” even if she touched it only softly. Just as important, she restores the era’s male headliners to the households that nurtured and sustained them. Her Founders were fathers, and mothers, too. But for Pride and Pleasure to escape the fate of “Women at Monticello,” male readers will need to find Vaill’s truths self-evident: that women mattered to the political life of the early republic. And that household life mattered, and still matters, to history.This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “The Many Lives of Eliza Schuyler.”