Women in the Western

Sue Matheson is Full Professor of English at the University College of the North in Manitoba, Canada. Her interests in film, culture, and literature may be found in more than sixty articles published in a wide range of books and scholarly journals. She is the editor of Love in Western Film and Television: Happy Hearts and Lonely Trails, A Fistful of Icons: Essays on Frontier Fixtures of the American Western, Women in the Western and The Good, the Bad and the Ancient: Essays on the Greco-Roman Influence in Westerns. She is the author of The Westerns and War Films of John Ford and The John Ford Encyclopedia.

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.

• Introduction, Sue MathesonRoles on the Range1. Silent but Rowdy: Stuntwomen of the Early FrontierCynthia J. Miller2. Suffering Heroines on the Frontier—Melodrama and Pathos, 1914-39Sue Matheson3. When East Goes West: The Loss of Dramatic Agency in DeMille’s Western Women from the 1910s to the 1930sDavid Blanke4. The Virginian and the Rose: Two Key Female Roles in Western Films and ComicsDavid Huxley, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK5. Freud, "The Family on the Land," and the Feminine Turn in Post-war WesternsGaylyn Studlar6. Clytemnestra and Electra under Western SkiesMartin M. Winkler7. ‘Never seen a woman who was more of a man’: Saloon Girls, Women Heroes, and Female Masculinity in the WesternChristopher Minz8. Gender Politics in the Revisionist Western: Interrogating the Perpetrator-Victim Binary in The Missing (Howard 2003)Fran Pheasant-KellyWomen’s Issues in Post-war, Revisionist, and Feminist Westerns9. Trading Places—Trading Races: The Cross-Cultural Assimilation of Women in The Searchers　(1956) and Unforgiven (1960)Kelly MacPhail10. Western Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Native American Women in Wind River (2017)Robert Spindler11. Mostly Whores with a (Very) Few Angels: Asian Women in the WesternVincent Piturro12. "We been haunted a long time": Raped Women in WesternsMaria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho13. "My body for a hand of poker": The Belle Starr Story　in Its ContextsErin Lee Mock14. The Female Avenger in Post-9/11 WesternsMartin Holtz15. You’ve Got Something: Female Agency in JustifiedPaul Zinder16. Eastward the Women: Remapping Women's Journeys in Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman　(2014)J Paul Johnson17. Women Gotta a Gun? Iconography and Female Representation in GodlessStella Hockenhull18. Wagon MistressAndrew Patrick NelsonFilmography and Bibliographies19. Women in the Western Filmography and BibliographyCamille McCutcheonContributors