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by Jill George (Author)
Powerful stories of unforgettable women featured on monuments across Virginia
They were sold on university lawns and auctioned in the shadow of the state capitol. They built relief networks the federal government would not provide and made legal arguments in courtrooms designed to silence them. They operated as spies inside the Confederate White House, transformed slave jails into schools, and confronted armed soldiers with nothing but clarity and nerve. And then Virginia forgot their stories.
*Daughters of Stone and Grace* recovers the stories of more than twenty enslaved and formerly enslaved women across four Virginia cities - Charlottesville, Richmond, Alexandria, and Arlington - from the late eighteenth century through Reconstruction. Jill George walks the ground where these women lived, labored, resisted, and died, and she listens for what the monuments cannot say on their own.
Here is Emily Foster, sold from Monticello and separated from her children after making a name for Jefferson's social life. Lucy Goode Brooks, who turned grief into an orphanage that outlived the institutions that tried to break her. Mary Richards Bowser, who read documents inside Jefferson Davis's own dining room and carried what she learned to the Union. Mary Lumpkin, who survived captivity in a slave trader's house and then transformed it into a place of learning. Rachel Findlay, who walked into an 1790s courtroom and argued for her own freedom and won. Selena Norris Gray, who stared down the Union Army at Arlington House with a calculation so sharp it changed what was preserved and what was lost.
These women operated at the highest levels of courage and intelligence under conditions designed to make both impossible. Their ingenuity shaped the commonwealth. Their influence is the inheritance of every Virginian.
This book is for anyone who has stood before a memorial and wanted to know the stories.
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**Jill George, Ph.D.** is a leadership consultant, behavioral scientist, and author of eight books. *Daughters of Stone and Grace* grew from her research into the women whose stories are carved into Virginia's memorial sites but rarely told in full. Her work leverages allyship to illuminate women's survival skills under institutional constraint.
