Janice Woods Windle

True Women is an ambitious labor of love on the part of the author. Windle seeks to record and share her family's colorful heritage with the world, and she accomplishes this by utilizing the perspectives of three ancestors - Euphemia, Virginia, and Bettie - as well as herself on occasion. Where Windle succeeds is by highlighting these pioneering women and the often dangerous environment they grew up in, and she doesn't shirk on her duty to highlight just how harrowing life was back in Texas's early days. However, this ambition is a double-edged sword. While there are poignant and revealing moments, there are also sweeping generalizations that pull the reader out of the narrative and make it difficult to sink back into it.

For each of her heroines, Windle starts in their childhood. For Euphemia, in particular, this is a particularly volatile time for both the character and the state of Texas, so it makes sense. However, the narrative around Euphemia's older life is cut off, even though there are strong hints that her pioneering ways aren't over yet. Honestly, the whole book could've been about Euphemia, her life was that interesting. As a result, readers only get a glimpse of this extraordinary woman, and the tail end of Euphemia's story loses its relatability and poignancy because Windle has to cover larger swathes of years, and this criticism holds for the other two heroines, as well.

Virginia is, I would say, Windle's most complicated heroine. She is the one who most directly deals with the topic of slavery compared to the other ancestors, and Virginia certainly seems conflicted by the practice. However, she and Windle pretty much avoid addressing the topic directly. There's a scene where Virginia meets with a lawyer to free some slaves of hers, but the resolution of that conversation is vague. It's not clear if Virginia succeeded in her aim or not. Coinciding with that is her husband's desire to bring on slave labor to help on their farm. Virginia opposes this, but it's not clear what actually happened. By avoiding the topic while having it simultaneously serve as a backdrop was confusing and felt like a sanitization of history. That said, reading about how her fortunes went up and down with the times felt like a great peek into the South's Reconstruction history, which was complicated in its own right. You empathize with Virginia, and you root for her. But it would be a disservice to history to not read between the lines as to what's not being shared on the page.

Compared to Euphemia and Virginia's lives, Bettie's life was devoid of life-threatening drama. At first, her story unfolds the same way: we begin with a traumatic early childhood experience, but unlike with Euphemia and Virginia, Bettie's trauma doesn't seem to dictate her life to the same extent. Euphemia and Virginia had to overcome enormous obstacles just to survive. Bettie's trauma is certainly the stuff of nightmares, but then she goes on to live a relatively normal life in comparison. In a way, she felt like a gentle come-down from the previous heroines. Bettie's life also just sort of happens to her, and while she meets all these historical people and witnesses massive historical events (the Great Depression, WWII), she seems to have less agency in her story. She provides for her community, but she doesn't outright challenge it. I'm not at all suggesting that makes her a bad person. Her life is comfortable, and she doesn't want to jeopardize that. One can hardly blame her. It does make Windle's job harder because she has to portray a character's inner world when that inner world doesn't want to be challenged and suffering by being compared to the other two heroines.

Overall, this was a wild ride, which you should be able to expect from a novel about Texan women. It's often a tough read, in the sense that there are a lot of gruesome scenes from a brutal time. However, it's still enlightening and even inspiring. That said, it suffers greatly, I think, from stuffing the lives of three women into one book. Readers establish an early connection with the heroines, but then through the massive passages of time, readers just as quickly lose that connection. There's also a very uncritical look at these women in the name of honoring a family legacy, which cannot be ignored, given the time period these stories took place in.

One final thought: I was often struck by the principle of luck in family legacies. Throughout everything these women endure, there's an element of luck that makes their survival possible: the tornado decimated another farm instead of theirs, their sons made it back from the war but not their neighbors', their friends were kidnapped by Native Americans but not them. There's no question these women are strong, capable, and resilient, but they are also incredibly lucky. I just find that fascinating.… (altro)