{"id":79211,"date":"2017-03-17T16:50:20","date_gmt":"2017-03-17T20:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/?p=79211"},"modified":"2023-02-21T11:08:25","modified_gmt":"2023-02-21T16:08:25","slug":"five-women-provocateurs-and-touchstones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/?p=79211","title":{"rendered":"FIVE WOMEN\u2014Provocateurs and Touchstones"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Five Flowers by Mike Gabelman via Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I started out to write a book about a man. By the time I finished my novel, Provenance<\/em>, it had become the story of five women\u2014distinctly different in age, outlook, and objective\u2014and how they uniquely shaped their lives as they changed the life of one man. Mother, Grandmother, Caretaker, Counselor, Lover\u2014these women became provocateurs and touchstones in the life my primary character, Lance Henry Withers. They also shaped me as a writer as I came to understand the complexity of each character and the role they played in the arc of Lance\u2019s life. Several factors informed the actions of each woman in Provenance<\/em>\u2014when and where they lived, marital status, social restrictions, age and most importantly, aspirations. These were key in how each woman acted and reacted in a story that surprisingly \u2013 even to the author\u2014gave them equal footing with the primary character.<\/p>\n

I begin Provenance<\/em> in the early 20th<\/sup> century and followed my characters through five decades\u2014a period of remarkable change in the lives of the women in the book as well as women in the real world. My character,\u00a0Charlotte<\/strong>, was born in 1881 with a burning ambition to change her circumstances and, the sobering fact that she needed the complicity of men to make her dreams reality. Maggie<\/strong>, Charlotte\u2019s daughter and Lance\u2019s mother, was the opposite of her mother. She sought dependence\u2014first on her husband and then her son\u2014suffering betrayal and loss that she was not equipped to deal with without a man. Del<\/strong>, who managed the Whitaker household, became a study in wisdom, determination, and dignity during a time and place, the 1930s in the segregated south, when these were attributes not afforded people of color. Belle<\/strong>, was a woman before her time. During the 1930\u2019s to 50’s, she was as sexually and socially unconventional as she was independent, intelligent, and beautiful teaching Lance how to live fully and successfully. And Emma<\/strong>,\u00a0who embraced the emerging independence of women in the 60s and 70s, taught Lance about true love, and how it thrives when a man and a woman are equals.<\/p>\n

Five women\u2014provocateurs and touchstones\u2014who changed a life as they, and the world around them,\u00a0changed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I started out to write a book about a man. By the time I finished my novel, Provenance, it had become the story of five women\u2014distinctly different in age, outlook, and objective\u2014and how they uniquely shaped their lives as they changed the life of one man. Mother, Grandmother, Caretaker, Counselor, Lover\u2014these women became provocateurs and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,202],"tags":[124,203],"class_list":["post-79211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-womens-history-month","tag-provenance-by-donna-drew-sawyer","tag-womens-history-month"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79211"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83389,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79211\/revisions\/83389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donnadrewsawyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}