As much as I love the Loving Husband Series and the Hembry Castle Chronicles, one of my books that really stands out to me is Victory Garden, a novel of the American women’s suffrage movement. I’ve been so caught up writing about James and Sarah for the past few years that I haven’t given Victory Garden much thought. To remedy that, Victory Garden is currently on sale for 99c through July.
When I began Victory Garden, all I had was a vague idea that I wanted to explore the fight for American women’s voting rights. I had been watching a news show where they discussed the apathy of American voters, and for some reason my overactive brain recalled when I was in the fifth grade and my class read a story about a woman who was arrested for demanding the right to vote. I can’t remember the name of the story, but I remember that she was kept in a squalid cell and force-fed because she refused to eat while she was in prison. I hadn’t thought of that story since fifth grade, but suddenly I wondered what that experience must have been like. Who was that woman? How did she get there? After kicking the idea around a bit, I realized there was a story in there I wanted to explore.
How did I whittle through the excess to find the kernel of the story? First, I did some general research to get a sense of the era. By general research I mean I read books and articles about American women fighting for the right to vote. I wasn’t looking for anything specific because I didn’t know enough to be specific. I wanted an idea of what the American women’s suffrage movement looked like since I knew next to nothing about it.
As I gained knowledge about the what of the era, I began to see a who—a young woman living through the events of the American women’s suffrage movement. I knew she was riled up by how women were treated as second-class citizens. I knew she made the decision to be part of the solution, which meant fighting for the vote. I saw her go to Washington, DC to picket the White House. She too would be arrested and she too would be force-fed.
Once my story had a direction I was able to focus on more specific aspects of the American women’s suffrage movement. What brought the women to Washington, DC? Why did they picket? Why were they arrested and force-fed? Here’s some American history trivia: did you know that there were many American women against the women’s suffrage movement? A surprising number of women believed that women didn’t have the stamina for something as strenuous as forming political opinions and voting. The irony, of course, is that the anti-suffrage women campaigned as hard as their pro-suffrage counterparts, thereby doing exactly what they claimed women couldn’t do. Who were these women working against their own right to vote? The anti-suffrage movement added another layer of interest to my story. I also discovered that the final phase of the women’s suffrage movement coincided with American participation in World War I and the war had an important impact on the women’s quest for votes.
I decided that the story would take place between 1917 and 1920, when women received the vote. Finally, I saw my fictional character moving through these real-life events, participating in the suffrage movement, watching friends come home from the war, and caring for family infected with the deadly flu during the 1918 pandemic. Yeah, I know.
Another inspiration, gleaned from my research, came from my discovery that moving pictures and vaudeville were popular entertainments then. For your reading entertainment, here’s an example of my brain making connections between two unalike things, which happens frequently when I’m writing fiction. My uncle Bruce Arenstein was a huge fan of the old-time vaudeville comedians—Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, W.C. Fields, and Abbott and Costello. My favorites have always been the Marx Brothers. After Uncle Bruce passed, I brought home some of his books, one of which was written by Harpo Marx about his life on the vaudeville circuit with his brothers. Suddenly, my character, Rose, had a love interest, a vaudeville actor who, you guessed it, travels the country in a musical comedy act with his brothers. Thanks, Uncle Bruce.
Victory Garden is available from all major retailers.
