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.

[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