Women in the Western

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

Roles on the Range

1. Silent but Rowdy: Stuntwomen of the Early Frontier

Cynthia J. Miller

2. Suffering Heroines on the Frontier—Melodrama and Pathos, 1914-39

Sue Matheson

3. When East Goes West: The Loss of Dramatic Agency in DeMille’s Western Women from the 1910s to the 1930s

David Blanke

4. The Virginian and the Rose: Two Key Female Roles in Western Films and Comics

David Huxley, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

5. Freud, "The Family on the Land," and the Feminine Turn in Post-war Westerns

Gaylyn Studlar

6. Clytemnestra and Electra under Western Skies

Martin M. Winkler

7. ‘Never seen a woman who was more of a man’: Saloon Girls, Women Heroes, and Female Masculinity in the Western

Christopher Minz

8. Gender Politics in the Revisionist Western: Interrogating the Perpetrator-Victim Binary in The Missing (Howard 2003)

Fran Pheasant-Kelly

Women’s Issues in Post-war, Revisionist, and Feminist Westerns

9. Trading Places—Trading Races: The Cross-Cultural Assimilation of Women in The Searchers　(1956) and Unforgiven (1960)

Kelly MacPhail

10. Western Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Native American Women in Wind River (2017)

Robert Spindler

11. Mostly Whores with a (Very) Few Angels: Asian Women in the Western

Vincent Piturro

12. "We been haunted a long time": Raped Women in Westerns

Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho

13. "My body for a hand of poker": The Belle Starr Story　in Its Contexts

Erin Lee Mock

14. The Female Avenger in Post-9/11 Westerns

Martin Holtz

15. You’ve Got Something: Female Agency in Justified

Paul Zinder

16. Eastward the Women: Remapping Women's Journeys in Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman　(2014)

J Paul Johnson

17. Women Gotta a Gun? Iconography and Female Representation in Godless

Stella Hockenhull

18. Wagon Mistress

Andrew Patrick Nelson

Filmography and Bibliographies

19. Women in the Western Filmography and Bibliography

Camille McCutcheon

Contributors