Women Get No Respect—at least in
Westerns
by Judy Alter
Owen
Wister’s 1903 novel The Virginian set
a masculine standard for the western novel that endured throughout the
twentieth century. Westerns, written by men, featured, among other things,
stereotyped heroines—the schoolteacher, the rancher’s daughter, the dancehall
girl with the heart of gold. These women were rescued by men but never came to
anyone’s rescue.
In Elmer
Kelton’s admittedly formulaic 1955 novel, Hot
Iron, the villain traps the hero and has him at his mercy. Elmer had the
heroine pick up a pair of scissors and run the villain through, saving the
hero. The editor would have none of it—the heroine and her scissors momentarily
distracted the villain, long enough for the hero to grab his pistol and kill
the villain.
The few
women who wrote western novels published under pseudonyms, usually initials. As
early as the first decades of the twentieth century, Bertha Muzzy wrote a total
of fifty-seven novels under the name B. M.
Bower. In 1952, novelist Jeanne Williams wrote Tame the Wild Stallion, a young-adult novel featuring a young boy
who tames a wild horse while captive on a Mexican ranch. Published under the
name J. R. Williams because Prentice-Hall didn’t think boys would read a girls’
book, it won the Texas Institute of Letters Cokesbury Bookstore Award. No one
could find the man who wrote the book. Jeanne missed the award ceremony. Her
later adult western novels were published under her full name or a feminine
pseudonym.
I’ve felt
the brunt of this anti-women bias myself. In 1988 my novel, Mattie, won a Spur Award from Western
Writers of America, Inc., as the Best Western Novel of the Year. A man who
belonged to WWA complained to one of the judges, “That has always been a men’s
action category.” And my 1994 novel, Libbie,
called western historical romance by Amazon today, was damned in a book
review as a soap opera. I like to think a fictional biography of Libbie
Armstrong Custer had more significance.
Of course
there were always exceptions, women who wrote in the literary rather than genre
tradition and didn’t deal with formulas and stereotypes—Mari Sandoz and Willa
Cather come to mind.
Today,
enough women write about the West that they have their own organization—Women
Writing the West. Lucia St. Clair Robson carved out a nice career beginning
with her novel about Cynthia Ann Parker. Others who’ve made a name for
themselves by proudly writing fiction and nonfiction about the West include
Elizabeth Crook, Linda Hasselstrom, Charlotte Hinger, Jerrie Hurd, Cynthia Leal
Massey, Candy Moulton, Jean Henry Mead, Carolyn Neithammer, Carla Kelly, and
many more.
I’ve
written fiction about women of the West most of my career, including books
about Libbie Custer, Jessie Benton Frremont, Lucille Mulhall, and Etta Place.
These ladies have been good to me, and I’m proud to be in their company.
* * *
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Judy Alter has written fiction and nonfiction for
adults and young adults. Her historical fiction titles feature such strong
women as Elizabeth Bacon Custer (Libbie ,
http://tinyurl.com/botzzac), Jessie
Benton Frémont (Jessie), Lucille Mulhall (Cherokee Rose),
and
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