Women in the Wild West

They were a heroic lot. (Via Joshua Snyder) To quote from an article in The American Conservative:

I love tales of heroism. They inspire me. And because they do, I am perplexed by those people who are not similarly inspired. As a student and later as a professor, I found professors, teaching assistants, and students who wanted to hear only tales of oppression, repression, and brutality—as long as the oppression, repression, and brutality was perpetrated by white males. I have watched departments of history become departments of victimology, with a kind of competition among various groups for supremacy among victims, leading to an emphasis on stories of those who had suffered and lost, rather than of those who had suffered, endured, and triumphed. The former are worth studying, but the latter are worth emulating.

In 1985, I presented a paper on violence in the Old West at a historical conference. I described how women, other than prostitutes, rarely suffered from violence, were treated with respect, and often displayed extraordinary courage. For this I was attacked by two women professors in the audience. I provided them with a wealth of statistics and dozens of anecdotes. That only made it worse. It was about then that I realized I was confronting the religion of political correctness and that one of the articles of faith was victimhood. These particular women were not delighted to hear of the derring-do and heroism of their frontier sisters. But history is full of such stories..... (Read More)

Share