Westerns

Victoria Lamont’s Westerns: A Woman’s History, follows a literary trail to unravel the question of how the American West developed a masculine “his-story” myth, examining women authors who wrote western fiction from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Only in the mid-1910s and 1920s did women who wrote in the western genre experience marginalization as the male-dominated publishing industry began gender segregating magazines into adventure stories for men and separate, romance-focused pulps for female readers. Lamont argues that the shift led to a rapid decline in the status of western women in general, and women authors in particular, helping to promote the erroneous notion of the American West as masculine enterprise with women serving only in supporting roles. In six, tightly argued chapters, Lamont guides readers through the rise of western women writers as part of an increasingly popular genre by focusing on leading women authors, the popularity of their work, and the relationship the writers had with their publishers. As with male authors, each of the women writers needed to establish their authentic western identity with readers, yet the women often provided a perspective on the frontier experience not found in the works of male authors. The importance of authenticity, argues Lamont, trumped gender, and the themes women writers introduced did not diminish their popularity. In the first chapter, for example, Lamont focuses on the works of Emma Ghent Curtis, a nineteenth-century Colorado suffragist. Curtis’s book, The Administratrix (1889) incorporates contemporary issues of cowboys self-identifying as exploited members of the working class with Colorado’s second campaign for suffrage; Curtis constructs the cowboy hero, Jim, as the novel’s proponent for women suffrage.

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