Strong Women Of West Make Compelling Story

Almost every woman can tell stories about the women of her family. But they were her stories, not histories, and they rarely ended up in print.

Still, it’s not every woman whose real-life family saga is produced for television. Janice Woods Windle is an exception.

“True Women,” the tale of Windle’s great-grandmothers, Euphemia Ashby King and Georgia Lawshe Woods, and King’s sister, Sarah Ashby McClure, airs Sunday and Tuesday nights on CBS.

In a May sweeps week of dueling miniseries, the lines are drawn between this set of feminine heroes and the swashbuckling “Odyssey.” It’s a good time to fire up the VCR. The end of the first episode of “True Women” is one you won’t want to miss.

Annabeth Gish plays Euphemia, whose childhood friendship with Southern belle Georgia (Angelina Jolie) is a bit of fiction that introduces the characters. Aside from that device, there isn’t much in the two-night miniseries that isn’t true, Windle said.

“True Women” started out in 1984 to be a wedding gift for Windle’s son. She and her mother, Virginia Woods of Seguin, Texas, traveled around the state doing genealogical research. Windle intended to collect recipes of her relatives and add photographs and single-paragraph summaries of their lives. The project grew into a 451-page book, published in 1994 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. A second story about her family, “Hill Country,” is due out this month.

Virginia Woods, who lives in the house that was built as a wedding gift for her own mother, now leads tours of the houses, churches and graveyards mentioned in her daughter’s first book.

Except for Craig Anderson, executive producer of the miniseries, this is largely - and unapologetically - a women’s project. Director Karen Arthur, who carried pages torn from Windle’s book as she worked, called it “one of the singular wonderful experiences in our lives.

“It was challenging and provocative and filled with people who realized they were making something wonderful, and that changes the entire atmosphere. All of the actors read the book. The first person to sign on was Dana (Delany), then Annabeth, then Angelina. What we eventually came away with was a solid piece.”

The story had to be trimmed to fit CBS’s two-night format with commercials. “There’s another solid hour” of footage, Arthur said. “What we’re trying to do is get Hallmark Entertainment to distribute a version for home video.”

Covering the years from the Texas Revolution through Indian uprisings and the Civil War to the early stages of the women’s-suffrage movement, the story gets its title from a report made to the 1868 Texas Reconstruction Convention:

“We believe that the good sense of every true woman in the land teaches her that granting them the power to vote is a direct open insult to their sex by the implication that they are so unwomanly as to desire the privilege.”

When, in the movie, that line is quoted on the floor of the Texas Capitol, the balcony is full of women who have chosen Georgia Lawshe Woods to deliver their retort. As the scene was being filmed, Windle said, former first lady Lady Bird Johnson, her press secretary Liz Carpenter and Texas Gov. George W. Bush and his wife, Laura Bush, watched.

The large cast - 67 speaking roles, hundreds of extras - is headed by Delany, who was in Toronto when she received the script.

“I read it on the way home to L.A., and I was weeping all the way home,” she said. “I said to my boyfriend (actor Henry Czerny), ‘I have to do this.’ I thought of (Sarah) as doing everything that John Wayne does, but she did it pregnant.”

Sarah Ashby McClure was often pregnant, bearing nine children. But eight of them, as well as her husband, Barrett, died during her lifetime.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: TV PREVIEW “True Women” airs tonight and Tuesday at 9 p.m. on Spokane’s KREM-TV, Channel 2.