Critical studies of Westerns in film and fiction not uncommonly describe the genre as anti-feminist or even misogynistic in its representation of men and women of the frontier. John Cawelti in his monumental study of the genre The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel says that only two types of women appear in Westerns, the schoolmarm and the dance hall girl (31), and that the genre rejects âinterchangeability of genderâ roles because in order for the genre to âaffirm the new values of mobility, competition, and individualism , the female must remain feminineâ (153). âThus, despite some surface changes,â Cawelti says, including those seen in Westerns like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman featuring female main protagonists, âthe Western genre has always had a basically sexist orientationâ (123). In West of Everything , Jane Tompkins argues that from their inception Westerns were âsecular, materialist, and antifeministâ (32) because they repudiated âthe cult of domesticity â (41) emerging after the Civil War as women moved âout of the home and into public lifeâ (42). Thus âthe women and the children cowering in the background [âŚ] legitimize the violence men practice in order to protect themâ (41). Likewise, Janet Thumin concludes that with the exception of a few Westerns such as Westward the Women and The Ballad of Little Jo , âthe western and feminism seem to be contradictory termsâ (353).
To make such arguments, however, is to desert a comprehensive description of the genre, especially in film and television, where exceptions like Dr. Quinn, Westward the Women , and The Ballad of Little Jo exist in far greater numbers than these authors suggest and thus require some explanation. Some critics, like Jenni Calder and Sandra Kay Sohakel , have noted that there are Westerns that do present Western women who are independent and who raise hopes that the genre can evolve to reflect womenâs changing roles in American society. Nevertheless, even these writers suggest that masculinism is the operative norm for Westerns. Calder says, âOccasionally the courage, determination, independence and incredible capacity for endurance [of frontier women] is allowed to contribute richly to the Western , but not as a ruleâ (158). Indeed, womenâs âpositive contributions to the [Western ] myth would be a welcome experimentâ (173). Likewise, Sohakel recognizes that independent women do emerge in Westerns but she maintains, âThe male perspective dominates the genre in ways in which womenâs roles are played in accordance with male expectations of female behaviorâ (196).
Nevertheless, as Blake Lucas argues, it is unwise to dismiss the importance of women characters even in more traditional masculinist Westerns. As Lucas says, the Western is ânot a masculine genre but one supremely balanced in its male/female aspectâ (301). The genre does typically distinguish the two genders: âthe man is the restless wanderer and figure of action, while the woman is physically more passive and can embody the values of civilization while standing in the doorway of the homesteadâ (304). Thus âthe woman in the Western can act on its narrative with a subtle but real forcefulness, helping the hero to his destiny while finding her own.â Indeed, âin the process [gender] archetypes often intriguingly mergeâ in the Western (310â311).
However, this process of blurring traditional gender roles is more widespread and complex than Lucas can fully attest to in his brief essay. This blending of gender roles, and even more radical gestures regarding gender in Western films and television, has its roots in the earliest traditions of women writers in the frontier that predate and help lay a foundation for the Western on the large and small screen. Annette Kolodny âs 1984 study The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630â1869 , which is briefly alluded to but not discussed in depth by Tompkins (42), provides insight to the developing cultural countercurrents in America that would formulate the matrix for subverting the masculinist paradigm of the classic Western . If the iconography of the frontier in its masculine conception represented a virginal Eden to be forcibly possessed by dispossessing its native inhabitants and exploiting its natural resources, for frontier women writers this land was as an Edenic garden to be cultivated and shared by men and women in harmony with nature. Kolodny traces a âtradition of womenâs public statementsâ about the frontier in diaries, letters, essays and even fiction, including the writings of early settlers like Rebecca Boone and philosophers like Margaret Fuller (xi). The women project âan idealized domesticity â where gardens âimplied home and community, not privatized erotic masteryâ of a virginal landscape (xiii). This new kind of human community âinvites sharing instead of competition, generosity instead of greedâ (196). 1
Interestingly, Kolodny concludes that these womenâs fantasies of a better America âleft no lasting imprint on our shared cultural imaginationâ (225). Meanwhile, Christine Bold âs more recent 2012 study The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880â1924 paints a slightly more complex portrait of the interactions between masculine and feminine cultures in the genesis of the Western . The Frontier Club was a group of Eastern aristocrats including such notables as Theodore Roosevelt , Frederic Remington , Henry Cabot Lodge , and Owen Wister (author of the first Western , The Virginian ) who, linked through the medium of print, âcreated the western as we now know it, yoking the genre to their interests in [âŚ] mass publishing, Jim Crow segregation, immigration restriction, and American Indian segregationâ (xvii).
Nevertheless, the club was less successful in excluding women than other marginalized groups. This was partly because women married to club members exerted their own influence on the groupâs print culture. These women âclaimed and protected imaginative space in the Westâ and influenced the rise of âthe women-centered western â in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in print (97) where âfamily remained an organizing narrative principleâ (104). Still, Bold concludes, much as Kolodny does, that this legacy is less palpable than the masculinized Western paradigm. In the end, the Western hero is the individualistic, competitive male, whose âviolence is represented as unavoidableâ with the women ending up âin the maleâs armsâ (238).
Jane Johnson Bube similarly describes this feminine culture of the womenâs Western as something lost that needs to be reclaimed. She cites women writers of dime novels at the turn of the century whose stories âplace womenâs experiences and womenâs characters as agents and main actors of westernsâ (68). These writers âquestioned and destabilized conservative gender idealsâ (69). They also criticized the idea of manifest destiny and the âmistreatment ofâ other marginalized groups like âIndians and Mormonsâ and âclaimed womenâs right to [âŚ] discover careersâ (82). Nevertheless, Bube also implies that these alternative Westerns ended by the early twentieth century and left little to no impact on our popular culture.
It is the contention of the present study, however, that these subversive gestures continued to exert an influence on the Western genre in film and television, from the inception of the sound era Western in the 1930s to the early twenty-first century . Cawelti, Thumin and Tompkins underestimate the significance of the impact of women characters in Westerns that so strongly emphasize the agency of women characters, that they can indeed be called pro-feminist Westerns. As all of these critics attest, the polarities of civilization and savagery define the ideology , themes and values of protagonists and antagonists in the Western . Typically, women are identified with civilization to which the frontier hero, dwelling between these polarities, must be drawn if he is to succeed as a protagonist . Women often play a role in that process. The typically dark-haired dance hall girl will be rejected for the lighter-haired schoolmarm who teaches the frontier hero to balance his violent savage side with civilized attributes such as compassion and respect for the social order that must someday prevail if law and order are to be established to secure the domestic tranquility that the heroine stands for.
Nevertheless, there are counter gestures to this in film and television that provide alternative ways to establish order. The masculinist Western accepts the traditional distinction whereby the public realm is masculinized and the domestic or private realm is the site of feminine influence. The pro-feminist Western rejects this premise, arguing that even in the world of the Western , women can function as agents in both the private and public realms. As a result, the more progressive women Western heroes develop and signify somewhat different sets of values from their sisters in the traditional Western . Typically, while they sometimes embody domestic values that women are often identified with in traditional Westernsâthings like love, compassion, respect for the individual and for the laws needed to secure their rightsâthey also can embrace values embodied by the men. Many show reluctance to adopt violence as a way to establish justice on the lawless frontier, but most will use it in order to protect human rights and the rights to domestic peace and security. Some (primarily in televisual Westerns) also believe in harnessing the forces of nature but only to benefit society as a wholeânot solely for profit. In short, they often seek to extend the values of the domestic realm to the public realm to ensure that the potential for exploiting the land and its people will not be pursued. Violence is justified only when it unswervingly serves benevolent ends. And, increasingly, as we move from the 1930s to the post war era, women protagonists show a capacity not only for the self-sacrifice associated with the traditional Western heroine but also for self-gratification and professio...