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"Our Lady Sportsmen": Gender Class, and Conservation in Sport Hunting Magazines, 1873–1920
by Andrea L. Smalley, Northern Illinois University
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In 1968 Outdoor Life ran a retrospective piece that examined the turn-of-the-century origins of this popular sportsmen's magazine. In the article, editor William Rae noted, with some dismay, that two out of the first three stories in the December 1905 issue featured women hunters, including the tale of a "tireless Diana" who left her corset at home in order to take to the fields. "One wonders," Rae commented dryly, "whether men really were men in those days, as we have been led to believe." Clearly, Rae found the spectacle of sport hunting women unusual, and he assumed that their presence in the pages of a hunting periodical called into question the masculinity of earlier sportsmen. The connection that Rae and Outdoor Life readers made in 1968 between hunting and masculinity remains a commonplace. As feminist scholar Mary Zeiss Stange argues, hunting "might be, in the popular mind, the most male-identified cultural pursuit."1 |
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This "men-only image" of hunting has influenced historians as well, leading them to interpret the rising popularity of hunting, fishing, and camping at the turn of the century as evidence of an emergent primitive masculinity. Nationally circulated magazines devoted to these outdoor activities such as Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, and especially Forest and Stream made their debuts in this period, and many historians have used these sources to show that upper- and middle-class white men were reformulating their gender identities, in part, through their involvement in recreational hunting. Other historians have probed the same sources to prove that these men culturally transformed hunting through a gendered definition of "sportsmanship," while they legally reformed hunting through conservation. These magazines, historians suggest, provided a forum for the "hunting fraternity" to articulate both their version of masculinity and to build a political group identity as "sportsmen."2 |
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Yet even a casual survey of early sportsmen's magazines reveals that they were never exclusively male spaces. From the start, Forest and Stream embraced women as part of its potential audience, contending that women's "countenance and sympathy" were crucial to the magazine's success. Toward that end, editors introduced a regular "Ladies Department" in 1877 as proof of the journal's commitment to being "a ladies' paper" as well as "a gentleman's paper." Field and Stream followed suit in the 1890s, creating "The Modern Diana" column for women. Nearly every issue of these influential hunting journals—as Outdoor Life's William Rae noted decades later—included women as the subjects of articles, advertisements, photographs, and cartoons. The magazines also invited women's "contributions upon all topics," and women responded by submitting articles, editing columns, and writing letters to the editor. Female editors not only conducted special women's columns, but also wrote regular general interest features, including Cornelia "Fly-Rod" Crosby's "Maine Department" in Field and Stream and Ruth Alexander Pepple's trapshooting column in Outdoor Life. Women's conspicuous presence in these magazines—and sportsmen's apparent advocacy of their participation—complicates the more familiar masculine image of sport hunting and begs explanation.What were women doing in sportsmen's magazines?3 |
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