page_title: Sarah Livingston Jay
section_title: Society and diplomatic role
hierarchical_section_title: Sarah Livingston Jay / Society and diplomatic role
caption_attribution_description: English: Official Gubernatorial portrait of New York Governor (and United States Chief Justice) John Jay.
context_page_description: Sarah Van Brugh Livingston Jay was an American socialite and wife of founding father John Jay, in which capacity she was the wife of the President of the Continental Congress, of the Chief Justice of the United States, and First Lady of New York.
context_section_description: Following her wedding to Jay in 1774, she spent the early years of their marriage at her father's house in Elizabethtown, New Jersey.  Her husband  would visit her there when he was not serving as a state official in New York.  In 1779, he was appointed commissioner to Spain and Sarah joined him, moving abroad.
  Her role as a society lady was equally important once this post was secured.  In Spain, Sarah Livingston Jay's role in diplomacy was sufficiently important that she would receive one diplomatic visitor in her bedroom when she was too ill from morning sickness to rise. In France, she would plan and host the Americans' celebration of the signing of the Treaty of Paris, albeit in absentia because she had only just given birth (in Benjamin Franklin's house) when the event took place. History leaves too few traces of women, but if one's role in society smoothed the way for the diplomatic process (as Benjamin Franklin believed it did) then Sarah Livingston Jay can be credited with aiding in the ratification of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Sarah Livingston Jay regularly attended salons and the Monday night dinners hosted by the Marquise  and Marquis de Lafayette. Participating in Parisian society was part of Benjamin Franklin's strategy for tightening the bonds of French-American relations.
  Sarah Livingston Jay played her part in society so well that she was once mistaken for Marie Antoinette by the audience of a theatre in Paris, "on the entrance of the American beauty, [the audience] arose to do her homage." Her social circle included Adrienne de La Fayette, Angelica Schuyler Church, Abigail Adams, Abigail Adams Smith, and Anne Willing Bingham, and the connections forged by these linkages were crucial to future diplomatic successes (Angelica Church, for example, would assist John Jay socially when he traveled to London to negotiate what would become the Jay Treaty).
caption: Gubernatorial portrait of John Jay
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