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.

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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!).