Contains biographies of the following Western women: Jessie Benton Fremont--Abigail Scott Duniway--Sarah Winnemucca--Fanny Stenhouse--Ann Eliza Young--Belle Starr--Nellie Cashmen--Jeanne Elizabeth Wier--Helen Jane Wiser Stewart and Grace Carpenter Hudson.

Rough, tough, and in skirts! These turn-of-the-century gals entered a man's world with a vegeance, many of them conquering it.

Legendary actress of the past are brought front and center in this lively, entertaining book ... From the Victorian era of the 1800's through the turn-of-the-century.

In Westerns, women transmit complicated cultural coding about the nature of westward expansionism, heroism, family life, manliness and American femininity. As the genre changes and matures, depictions of women have transitioned from traditional to more modern roles. Frontier Feminine charts these significant shifts in the Western's transmission of gender values and expectations and aims to expand the critical arena in which Western film is situated by acknowledging the importance of women in this genre.

Today's women enjoy such opportunities for success and prestige in all facets of life, that one tends to forget the sisters of the past who made it possible. A century ago, women were subjected to ridicule, prejudice, bigotry and persecution when they tried to better themselves.

Read the mini-history of the women who lived through the mass migration from the East to Oregon and California in the 1840s. Learn about these lively and unique women and their survival, incredible tenacity and raw courage that enabled them to cross 2,000 miles of an alien, hostile land.

The small Methow Valley community of Winthrop, Washington, has reinvented itself as a western-theme town. Winthrop women function as trail guides, wranglers, horse trainers, packers, and ranchers and work in an environment where gender stereotypes must be carefully preserved for the sake of the tourist-based economy. Yet these women often subvert and undermine traditional gender images with humor. How the wrangling women of Winthrop accomplish this challenging balancing act is a fascinating study of women’s manipulation of language and gender stereotypes in the modern West. Kristin McAndrews states that she “began to suspect that the reason there was so little scholarship on women’s humor was that male researchers didn’t understand it, or perhaps they didn’t recognize it.” To examine the humor of one group of women, she conducted interviews with Winthrop’s female wranglers, collecting stories about their lives as workers and as members of their community. For all these women, professional success depends on courage, ingenuity, a sense of humor, and a facility with language—as well as on an ability to perform within the traditional gender stereotypes evoked by their town’s Wild west image.