Women in the Western
Edited by Sue Matheson
- Pioneers new avenues for research on the Western and includes a bibliography of the extant criticism on women and Western to encourage further scholarship
- Charts significant shifts in Hollywood’s transmission of American gender values and expectations
- Examines the common Western tropes of women homesteaders, soiled doves, masculinised and erotically dangerous women and female characters bent on revenge
- Traditional and intertextual representations of women in the Western are considered
As the Western matured, women’s roles became more complex and modern – transmitting a subtle cultural coding about the nature of westward expansionism, heroism, family life, manliness and American femininity. In Women in the Western, a range of international scholars explores the changing roles of women in the genre through case studies of classic films like Broken Arrow (1950) and The Searchers (1956), and contemporary films and TV series like Wind River (2017) and Justified (2010–15). Considering traditional and intertextual representations of women in the Western, the book charts the significant shifts in Hollywood’s transmission of gender values and expectations.
Introduction, Sue Matheson
Roles on the Range
1. Silent but Rowdy: Stuntwomen of the Early Frontier
Cynthia J. Miller
2. Suffering Heroines on the Frontier—Melodrama and Pathos, 1914-39
Sue Matheson
3. When East Goes West: The Loss of Dramatic Agency in DeMille’s Western Women from the 1910s to the 1930s
David Blanke
4. The Virginian and the Rose: Two Key Female Roles in Western Films and Comics
David Huxley, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
5. Freud, "The Family on the Land," and the Feminine Turn in Post-war Westerns
Gaylyn Studlar
6. Clytemnestra and Electra under Western Skies
Martin M. Winkler
7. ‘Never seen a woman who was more of a man’: Saloon Girls, Women Heroes, and Female Masculinity in the Western
Christopher Minz
8. Gender Politics in the Revisionist Western: Interrogating the Perpetrator-Victim Binary in The Missing (Howard 2003)
Fran Pheasant-Kelly
Women’s Issues in Post-war, Revisionist, and Feminist Westerns
9. Trading Places—Trading Races: The Cross-Cultural Assimilation of Women in The Searchers (1956) and Unforgiven (1960)
Kelly MacPhail
10. Western Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Native American Women in Wind River (2017)
Robert Spindler
11. Mostly Whores with a (Very) Few Angels: Asian Women in the Western
Vincent Piturro
12. "We been haunted a long time": Raped Women in Westerns
Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho
13. "My body for a hand of poker": The Belle Starr Story in Its Contexts
Erin Lee Mock
14. The Female Avenger in Post-9/11 Westerns
Martin Holtz
15. You’ve Got Something: Female Agency in Justified
Paul Zinder
16. Eastward the Women: Remapping Women's Journeys in Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman (2014)
J Paul Johnson
17. Women Gotta a Gun? Iconography and Female Representation in Godless
Stella Hockenhull
18. Wagon Mistress
Andrew Patrick Nelson
Filmography and Bibliographies
19. Women in the Western Filmography and Bibliography
Camille McCutcheon
Contributors
In 1992 Jane Tompkins in West Of Everything raised the disturbing question of why there had not been a focus on women in the Western genre when they were obviously such key characters. Thankfully, Women In The Western, with its eighteen articles, selected filmography and two selected bibliographies about film and television Westerns provides the first sustained, scholarly answer to that important question almost thirty years later.
