Westerns

At every turn in the development of what we now know as the western,women writers have been instrumental in its formation, yet the myththat the western is male-authored persists. Westerns: A Women's Historydebunks this myth once and for all by recovering women writers ofpopular westerns active durin [...]
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At every turn in the development of what we now know as the western,women writers have been instrumental in its formation, yet the myththat the western is male-authored persists. Westerns: A Women's Historydebunks this myth once and for all by recovering women writers ofpopular westerns active during the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury, when the western genre as we now know it emerged.Victoria Lamont offers detailed studies of some of the many womenwho helped shape the western. Their novels bear the classic hallmarksof the western-cowboys, schoolmarms, lynchings, gun violence, cattlebranding-while also placing female characters at the center of theirwestern adventures and improvising with western conventions in surprisingand ingenious ways. In Emma Ghent Curtis's The Administratrix,a widow disguises herself as a cowboy and infiltrates the cowboy gangresponsible for lynching her husband. Muriel Newhall's pulp serialcharacter, the butch Sheriff Minnie, comes to the rescue of a steadystream of defenseless female victims. B. M. Bower, Katharine NewlinBurt, and Frances McElrath use cattle branding as a metaphor fortheir feminist critiques of patriarchy.In addition to recovering theseand other women authors of popular westerns, Lamont uses originalarchival analysis of the western-fiction publishing scene to overturnthe long-standing myth of the western as a male-authored genre.