Westerns: A Women's History

by Victoria Lamont

At every turn in the development of what we now know as the western, women writers have been instrumental in its formation. Yet the myth that the western is male-authored persists. A Women’s History debunks this myth once and for all by recovering the women writers of popular westerns who were active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the western genre as we now know it emerged.

Victoria Lamont offers detailed studies of some of the many women who helped shape the western. Their novels bear the classic hallmarks of the western—cowboys, schoolmarms, gun violence, lynchings, cattle branding—while also placing female characters at the center of their western adventures and improvising with western conventions in surprising and ingenious ways. In Emma Ghent Curtis’s The Administratrix a widow disguises herself as a cowboy and infiltrates the cowboy gang responsible for lynching her husband. Muriel Newhall’s pulp serial character, Sheriff Minnie, comes to the rescue of a steady stream of defenseless female victims. B. M. Bower, Katharine Newlin Burt, and Frances McElrath use cattle branding as a metaphor for their feminist critiques of patriarchy. In addition to recovering the work of these and other women authors of popular westerns, Lamont uses original archival analysis of the western-fiction publishing scene to overturn the long-standing myth of the western as a male-dominated genre.
 

Genres: History

210 pages, Hardcover

Published August 1, 2016

Reviews

[Elizabeth A.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Westerns: A Women's History was a more scholarly, academic book than I anticipated. None the less, it proved to be an interesting and informative book about female western authors who were actively writing in the genre in the late 19th century and early 20th century, along with their male counterparts. In academic fashion, the author introduces the reader to the object/purpose of her writing much as a treatise would be presented and the multiple source references in the text, while helpful to a researcher, became obstrusive for this general reader. It is of interest how the western genre included both male and female authors early on and that the idea that westerns were the domain of male authors alone is debunked.

Virginia Lamont presents early female authors and their writings that were foundational to the western genre and demonstrates that the western played a significant role in women's literary history in the early 20th century. She cites detailed studies of some of the women and their works that included the basic elements of the western - cowboys, gun violence, schoolmarms, lynchings, and cattle rustlers and branding - but also put their female characters at the center of the adventures in unconventional ways. In some cases, the women characters disguise themselves as male cowboys or sheriffs to seek revenge for a wrong or to come to the aid of a defenseless female; other western authors used their writings as feminist commentary/critique of the patriarchal systems in society. Lamont focuses on authors B.M. (Berth Muzzy) Bower, Emma Ghent Curtis, Caroline Lockhart, Frances McElrath, Mourning Dove (pen name of Christine Quintasket, a Native American of the Okanagan Nation), and Muriel Newhall. In order to elucidate her case about women being foundational to the western genre and that women could and did write strong stories equal to their male counterparts, Lamont provides extensive summaries of some of these authors' books which are unfortunately "spoilers" to those who may want to read the books. Lamont's scholarly study challenges the myth that the western is the stronghold of American manhood and a rejection of women's sentimental influence.

Lamont's research has also displaced Owen Wister as the supposed originator of the western with his book, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains published in 1902, as she notes that Emma Ghent Curtis's 1889 book, The Administratrix, had the elements of the western prior to Wister's book. Curtis's cowboy hero, Jim, an advocate of women's suffrage, is killed and his wife, Mary, dresses as a man and uses a gun to avenge Jim's murder. Lamont also cites Wister's contemporary, Frances McElrath, as a challenge to Wister's pioneering status of the western with her book, The Rustler: A Tale of Love and War in Wyoming (1902).

Lamont's discussion of how publishers' decisions to break down the western into separate genres after WWI (about 1924) impacted the masculinization of the western: one genre was designated as the male dominated adventure-based stories and another genre breakdown into female oriented romance-based stories. The magazines started to look at different gender readerships in the novels they published thinking that would expand their readership. It came to be that the adventure male oriented western was considered the original and the female oriented western an innovation or a feminized imitation of the adventure western. Also the degree to which publishers backed male vs. female writers differed with the promotions leaning more toward the male-authored books. Eventually, the female writers faded into obscurity and their books went out of print. Hopefully, with the revelations presented in Lamont's book, a restoration will bring these early female authors to light and the myth of the western as a male domain be uprooted. Lamont states that the women she discusses "represent the undeniable reality that women were active and important participants in the origins of the popular western as we know it." Of the early female authors who are the focus of this book, only books by B.M. Bower are readily available from my local library; however the interlibrary loan system has the Curtis, McElrath, Lockhart, and Mourning Dove books mentioned in Lamont's book which I received through interlibrary loan as well.

[Rachel Sargeant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although academic in its approach, this book is a very readable exploration of women authors of westerns and how they frequently used/subverted the genre to shine a light on the political and social inequalities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century America.
Victoria Lamont sets the writers in the historical context of, for example, the women’s suffrage campaign, the Maverick Law about unbranded calves (1884), the end of open range farming and the Johnson County Rustlers Wars of 1892.
Early female Western writers were social reformers. In her novel The Administratrix (1889), Emma Ghent Curtis used the figure of the cowboy to advocate for female suffrage. A mandate in favour of women getting the vote depended on the support of working-class, Hispanic, black and immigrant men. But supporters of female suffrage were mocked in the press as ‘men in petticoats and women in pantaloons’ (page 15). By creating a masculine cowboy protagonist who championed women’s rights, Emma Ghent Curtis offered working-class men a role model they could identify with and not feel emasculated for supporting women’s rights.
Early twentieth-century women western writers drew analogies between women and cattle as patriarchal property. The branding of cattle was used as a metaphor for the suppression of women through marriage.
In The Rustler (1902), Frances McElrath depicted cattle rustling not as rogue cowboys cheating big, honest ranchers, but as a class struggle of inequality and exploitation, where hardworking farmhands battled to receive cattle and payments to which they were entitled. McElrath also had her female protagonist refuse marriage and highlighted how the right to own property was a masculine privilege.
B.M. Bower didn’t use her first name, Bertha, because the editor of the magazine in which her breakthrough novel was serialized insisted her identity be concealed. And even 17 years later when she was outed as a woman, her publisher Little, Brown didn’t want to promote the fact, although male readers found it funny that she’d fooled them, and women thought ‘good on her’. Bertha’s westerns sold second only to Zane Grey, but archives show the publisher was quite dismissive of her.
Victoria Lamont argues that the whole question of archiving is gendered. During their writing lives, Owen Wister and Zane Grey had wives to keep house while they wrote books and went on extended fishing and hunting trips. Female writers, on the other hand, had household chores and caring responsibilities. After their deaths, the male writers’ archives were maintained by female family members. B.M. Bower’s daughter tried to publish her biography but didn’t have the finances. When late twentieth-century scholars argued for the significance of the western cannon, women writers were excluded. Lamont posits (p158) that scholarship should not downplay the role that material relations play in the production of culture. This just reinforces the ideological, material and institutional obstacles that exclude women from a given cultural field and even makes the effects of these obstacles look natural.
One fascinating chapter in the book is about the indigenous woman Mourning Dove who wrote Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1929). Early female writers were Ango-Americans who aligned themselves to an extent with the ‘frontier club’ – the network of elite white men who were well connected to leading publishers. Mourning Dove was of mixed Okanagan and white ancestry. She spoke Salish and lived on the Colville reservation in Washington State, formed in 1872 to confine nomadic tribes displaced by US expansion into the Pacific Northwest.
In Mourning Dove’s novel, Cogewea is a mixed raced woman who is courted by two men: Jim, an honourable, mixed-blood cowboy; and Densmore from the East. Densmore is after the land settled on her as a result of the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887. He woos her by feigning deep interest in her tribal heritage. They elope but, when she innocently remarks that her land is worthless, her beats her and leaves her tied to a tree. She is rescued by Jim. Mourning Dove used her plot to voice important grievances.
The Dawes Act promised to introduce Native Americans to individual ownership and the Anglo-American economy but, in reality, it drastically reduced Native American land holdings. Mourning Dove mirrors this with Densmore’s evil strategy to seize his new wife’s land.
Mouring Dove depicted cultural assimilation as having the same agenda as cultural violence. In traditional westerns, Native American characters tended to be neutralized either by death or by being married off to white men, which led to the disappearance of their tribal culture. Mourning Dove subverts this convention through her denouement when mixed-blood Cogewea marries mixed-blood Jim. They will go on to have children and continue their Native American culture.
In using the name Densmore, she takes a swipe at ethnography, the study of human culture and societies. A prominent, early twentieth century ethnomusicologist was Frances Densmore. Ethnographical thinking of the time was that researchers had a mission to preserve Native American culture in print before it disappeared. The premise was that oral storytelling was primitive and would be eradicated once Native Americans progressed to literacy. In fact, oral and written traditions had long co-existed in indigenous cultures.
Ethnography presented the native lifestyle as having been conquered, whereas Mourning Dove used the western to show the ongoing resistance to Anglo-American domination. The Native American way of life was in conflict and dialogue with Anglo-Americans and their culture but not vanquished.
Ironically, Mourning Dove was encouraged by her editor, Lucullus McWhorter, to write Cogewea because he saw it as an important work by what he believed to be the first indigenous woman to write a novel. However, he didn’t want her to write more novels; one was quite enough. Instead, he persuaded her to undertake ethnographic fieldwork. Although McWhorter considered himself pro-Indigenous rights, it was through the Anglo-American lens that oral storytelling needed recording before it disappeared. Victoria Lamont argues Mourning Dove would have rather written more novels to further her goals as an activist storyteller.
Early pulp western fiction targeted a general readership of both genders. In the 1920s, new magazines emerged that separated readerships into masculine westerns and feminine western romances such as the serials Ranch Romances and Western Stories. Whereas early westerns by women challenged marriage and domesticity, the Romance Westerns depicted women alone and vulnerable in the West. They might have inherited property from fathers or late husbands, but – whether they were submissive or rebellious - they needed the patriarchal protection of a cowboy to rescue them.
In her conclusion, Victoria Lamont points out that, despite being largely forgotten, the early women western writers who subverted the genre paved the way for what came later. She quotes from The Happy Family, a short story by B.M Bower (page 159), where the cowboy protagonist had previously been a graceful circus performer in spangled tights. Bower’s softening and rounding out of the macho protagonist was adopted by later filmmakers.

This book is a fascinating insight into women writers of westerns, now largely and wrongly forgotten. In describing the social and political context in which they wrote, Victoria Lamont explains much about early twentieth century America. Well worth reading for anyone interested in seeing history and literature through a feminist lens.

[MSJLibrary]

Western fiction is often perceived as something that is primarily male-authored, which tends to place women in minor and/or subordinate roles. This is actually a myth, however, as Victoria Lamont shows in this nonfiction work on the instrumental role women authors played in the shaping of the genre during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They tended to place female characters at the center of their work, and wove plots that improvised upon genre conventions in new and ingenious ways.

[Mills College Library]

813.0874 L2346 2016