Westerns : a women's history / Victoria Lamont.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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. Westerns: 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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

As revealed on screen by actors from John Wayne to Gregory Peck and Clint Eastwood, the Western has idealized and internalized masculine ideals that critics such as Lee Clark Mitchell, John Cawelti, and Jane Tompkins have expostulated. Lamont (English, Univ. of Waterloo, Canada) offers a compelling revision of the history of literary Westerns by recovering and analyzing the works of germinal women writers who shaped the Western as a genre from its earliest appearance. Examining novels by Emma Ghent Curtis, Frances McElrath, Mourning Dove, B. M. Bower, and Caroline Lockhart, Lamont demonstrates how these writers worked in isolation as they wrote against the generic traditions of the Western, and he connects their work to the burgeoning feminist movement in the US in the early 20th century. The author reveals how these authors found success for their works by deploying a notion of "Western authenticity" rooted in claims that experiential knowledge undergirded their fictional creations. In doing this Lamont exposes the cultural mechanisms that contributed to these writers' exclusion from the Western's history. This volume builds substantially on the work of Mitchell and Tompkins, combining extensive archival research with textual analysis to bring to light the important contributions of these women writers to the Western as an American genre. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --David Earl Magill, Longwood University