Women in the Western

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.

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).