‘Lady Wildcats and Wild Women’: Hunting, Gender and the Politics of Show(wo)manship in the Nineteenth century American West

Drawing on codes of Victorian manhood, hunting narratives on the nineteenth century West typically broadcast a hegemonic vision of “hunter heroes”—survivalists, skilled in woodcraft, armed with sharp-shooting skills and a penchant for adventuring. Such men collectively advanced the expansionist ambitions of the American nation in assimilating landscapes and animals while maintaining a gentlemanly moral code. According to this teleology, the frontier was conquered by independent and vigorous frontiersmen, paragons of American manifest destiny and masculinity as exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody.

Significantly, as this article contends, alongside the masculine “hunter-hero” of the plains and mountains, women emerged as willing and competent participants in shooting adventures and also embraced the thrill of the chase. They also hunted for reasons of environmental subsistence, the securing of meat an essential part of the mechanics of household economics. Some saw hunting as a hearty recreational activity that assisted their sense of belonging in terms of selfhood, space and community. As I argue, here, the allure of the West and its associations with adventuring, strenuous activity and escapism held appeal for some women as well as men. Moreover, in the domain of performance, theatre and storytelling, ideas of the “lady adventurer” and the “armed western woman” gained sizeable popular currency.