Women in the Western

'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.' Michael Marsden, St Norbert College
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.
Sue Matheson is Associate Professor English at University College of the North, Canada
Cover image: Jean Arthur in The Plainsman, Cecil B. DeMille, 1936 © Paramount Pictures/Photofest
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Sue Matheson is Associate Professor of English at University College of the North, Canada. She teaches American literature, Canadian literature, and film and popular culture. Her many interests in film, culture, and literature may be found in more than fifty essays published in a wide range of books and scholarly journals. Currently, she specializes in the Western. She is the author of The Westerns and War Stories of John Ford (Rowman & Littlefield 2016) and the John Ford Encyclopedia (Rowman & Littlefield 2019), as well as the editor of Love in Western Film and Television (Palgrave 2013) and A Fistful of Icons: frontier fixtures of the American Western (McFarland 2017).

Introduction, Sue Matheson; PT Roles on the Range; Silent but Rowdy: Stuntwomen of the Early Frontier, Cynthia J. Miller; Suffering heroines on the frontier-melodrama and pathos, 1914 to 1939, Sue Matheson; When East Goes West: The Loss of Dramatic Agency in DeMille's Western Women from the 1910s to the 1930s, David Blanke; Home on the Range: The Role of Female Western stars in film, television and comics, 1946-1962, David Huxley; Freud, "The Family on the Land," and the Feminine Turn in Post-war Westerns, Gaylyn Studlar; Clytemnestra and Electra under Western Skies, Martin M. Winkler; 'Never seen a woman who was more of a man': Saloon Girls, Women Heroes, and Female Masculinity in the Western, Christopher Minz; Gender Politics in the Revisionist Western: Interrogating the Perpetrator-Victim Binary in The Missing (Howard 2003), Fran Pheasant-Kelly; PT Women's Issues in Post-war, Revisionist, and Feminist Westerns; Trading Places-Trading Races: The Cross-Cultural Assimilation of Women in The Searchers (1956) and Unforgiven (1960), Kelly MacPhail; Western Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Native American Women in Wind River (2017), Robert Spindler; Mostly Whores with a (Very) Few Angels: Asian Women in the Western, Vincent Piturro; 'We've been haunted a long time': Raped Women in Westerns, Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho; 'My body for a hand of poker': The Belle Starr Story in its Contexts, Erin Lee Mock; The Female Avenger in Post-9/11 Westerns, Martin Holtz; You've Got Something: Female Agency in Justified, Paul Zinder; Eastward the Women: Remapping Women's Journeys in The Homesman (2014), J. Paul Johnson; Women Got a Gun: Iconography and Female Representation in Godless, Stella Hockenhull; Wagon Mistress, Andrew Patrick Nelson; PT Women in the Western Filmography and Bibliograph, Camille McCutcheon; Contributors