Westerns: A Women's History (Postwestern Horizons) by Victoria Lamont

Author:Victoria Lamont [Lamont, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebooks.wtf, LIT004290 Literary Criticism / Women Authors
ISBN: 9780803290310
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2016-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

5

Cattle Branding and the Traffic in Women

While early twentieth-century women’s westerns put the genre to diverse uses, they show remarkably little interest in reinventing women in the cowboy hero’s image à la Sharon Stone in Sam Raimi’s 1995 film The Quick and the Dead. Instead, these texts are more interested in drawing analogies between women and cattle as objects of patriarchal exchange. Such tropes were also taken up by early twentieth-century feminist thinkers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman, who used them to highlight the ways in which women’s bodies were caught up in patriarchal relations of ownership, a departure from woman/slave analogies popular in nineteenth-century feminist rhetoric. In this chapter I argue that cattle and branding tropes link women’s westerns to a broad and significant shift in American feminist discourse as it became disassociated from its nineteenth-century anti-slavery roots. My larger aim is to suggest that women’s westerns are loosely linked by a set of shared concerns about women’s position in postfrontier American society. The links are loose because women writers of popular westerns were not connected by the close-knit social networks that characterized the male-dominated frontier club. There is no evidence that Caroline Lockhart and B. M. Bower ever met, and Lockhart was greatly annoyed when an editor advised her to write more like Bower (Clayton 125). Curtis, McElrath, Bower, and Lockhart all worked in relative isolation from each other in a print culture that, broadly speaking, was structured by male-centered social networks. Mourning Dove’s few contacts with broader print-culture networks consisted of her friendship with an Anglo-American orphan adopted by her family, who introduced her to pulp magazines, and her editor, whom she met by chance at a community event. That their westerns share a distinct figurative pattern despite their loose social and cultural affiliations makes this pattern all the more significant.

This pattern is exemplified in Frances McElrath’s The Rustler when the orphaned teenager Mavvy is dragged to a local dance by her adoptive father, a notorious cattle rustler, who forces her to accept the sexual advances of another rustler. To Mavvy’s rescue comes Horace Carew, fresh from rejection by his beloved, the genteel easterner Hazel Clifford. As these courtship dramas play out, the square-dance caller instructs the male dancers to “lock horns with your own heifers, and rassle ’em to their places” and to “corral the fillies, rope your own, and back to your claim with her!” (McElrath 63–64). The square-dance call aptly summarizes a powerful and reoccurring motif in women’s westerns of the early twentieth century as well as marking a significant shift in mainstream American feminist discourse more broadly: Such analogies between cattle roundups and marriage markets resonate with analogies between patriarchy and slavery in feminist abolitionism and anticipate the argument of later feminist thinkers from Emma Goldman to Gayle Rubin that marriage enslaves, objectifies, and commodifies women.

A more well known model of feminist intervention in early twentieth-century popular western discourse is the liberal-feminist individualism of figures such as Annie Oakley, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, and the rodeo cowgirl.

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