“A Life Without Men… Not!”
A Review of A Family of Good Women by Teddy Jones
By Cynthia Leal Massey
Owner of a boarding house in the burgeoning oilfield town of Borger, Texas in 1929, Imogene Good, one of the hardest working women I’ve ever read about in any book, has plenty of time to think while she is preparing for and cooking three meals a day for the town’s oilfield workers. Mostly, she thinks about her upbringing—why she grew up without a father or brothers, in fact, without male support or companionship at all—and why she so acutely feels the lack of something she never had.
She never thought to question her mother about the absence of males in their lives; now that her mother has died, all Imogene has is an old trunk filled with her mother’s things, including some old journals kept by her grandmother. Too busy, and even a bit fearful, to find out what the journals will reveal about her mother and her own childhood, Imogene waits until her curiosity can no longer be contained.
A Family of Good Women is inspired by the true story of the Belton Woman’s Commonwealth in Belton, Texas, a religious sect of women, mostly wives and mothers, who felt their lives were unfulfilled and who wanted to get away from domineering husbands or fathers. The sect, also known as “Sanctificationists,” had its beginnings in 1867 when Belton farm wife and mother Martha White McWhirter experienced a vision during which she felt “sanctified” by God. She founded a group for those willing to live under four major tenets: a commitment to celibacy, non-denominationalism, dream interpretation, and communal living. Many women joined the sect believing in McWhirter’s vision.
Several decades later, most of the original members of the religious sect have died, and the group has splintered into different directions. A Family of Good Women takes readers to Prohibition-era Texas, with the finely wrought characters of Imogene Good and her “cousin” Sue Ellen Good, descendants of early members of the sect, slowly peeling away the layers of their past lives. We learn how profound communal living amongst the “sisters” was, and yet, how sterile it had become without the opposite sex. In the boarding house they run, Imogene and Sue Ellen find themselves surrounded by the very thing their female ancestors felt compelled to shun—men. What they learn is both scary and wonderful.
Book release date is September 9, 2025.