Being Annie Oakley: Modern girls, new world woman

Frontiers

Volumn 28, Issue 1-2, 2007, Pages 203-231

  McGrath, Ann ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34547530088     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2007.0032     Document Type: Review

References (128)

1. Seminal works on the topic include Rayna Green, "The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe," Folklore 99, no. 1 (1988): 30-57;
2. and Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). The "cowboys and Indians" game evolved from a more orderly form promoted by the Boy Scout Movement; "scout" was the term used for some U.S. frontier militia, as it was during the South African Imperial wars in which Scout founder Baden Powell fought.
3. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 208.
4. Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London: Routledge, 1994), 1.
5. Ann McGrath, "Playing Colonial: Cowgirls, Cowboys, and Indians in Australia and North America," Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2 (2001): 1-27.
6. Maria Nugent, Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2005);
7. C. Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
8. The Powerhouse Museum Collection, particularly the Lindsay Collection, and the author's private collection included a range of outfits from the 1950s and 1960s.
9. The "Cowboys and Indians Survey" was posted on a University web site on May 11, 2000, and ran until September 28, 2002. Responses were sent via a moderator at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University. The survey comprised sixty-six questions. Respondents had the option of providing either brief or more expansive comments and details. Most questions concerned the game-play, out-fits, accessories, and participants. Biographical questions aimed to create a class, educational, and national profile of the respondent. The survey's self-selective nature meant that most respondents interested in the questionnaire had actually played the game of cowboys and Indians, and the social group was neither a random nor cross-section sample. The survey was advertised in Australia and the United States via history and indigenous studies e-lists usually accessed by academics and students. Nine samples were rejected because they were incomplete or frivolous. With fifty-three questionnaires accepted in all, the survey was relatively small; however the details provided and the relish with which many spoke of their experiences provided some rich data. The internet survey was a much more time-effective technique of obtaining information than oral interviews, and it facilitated some international participation. Respondents came from a range of age groups, with birth years ranging from the 1930s to 1980s, although over 50 percent were born in the 1940s and '50s; two-thirds of the respondents were female. Most resided in Australia at the time they answered the questionnaire, followed by the United States and Canada. Most had white Anglo, English/Anglo-Celtic, Anglo-Scottish, or European backgrounds and most were English-speaking; over 81 percent had tertiary education backgrounds, and over half held a higher degree. Oral interviews were also conducted, and several others who did not wish to participate in the questionnaire sent in e-mails explaining their memories of playing the game. In order to encourage participation, provision of name and other identification details were optional, as were contact details. Respondents who provided names were asked if they agreed to their name being used in the event of publication of results. Several respondents were known to the moderator and other investigators, however no checks were carried out to ascertain identification details. When survey information was used in this article, the author decided to refrain from using names. However, where quotes were used, permission was granted from the authors. Hereafter the survey will be cited as McGrath, C & I Survey.
10. Although European conquest of the Americas is traced back to 1492, occupation of the American West, the popularized locale of United States frontiers and of conquest stories, took place less than a century earlier, during the 1850s and '60s. Australia's frontier wars ranged from British arrival in 1788 at Port Jackson through the 1920s in Central and North Australia, yet Australian frontiers are also more popularly associated with gun battles that took place in the mid- to late nineteenth century.
11. McGrath, "Playing Colonial."
12. Stolen Children enquiry, Gunner and Cubillo v Commonwealth of Australia, Federal Court hearing, 1999. This document, no. 1996, was cited in Cubillo v Commonwealth of Australia; Gunner v Commonwealth of Australia, Federal Court of Australia (O'Loughlin J) 11 August 2000 [2000] Federal Court of Australia, 1084.
13. McGrath, C & I Survey.
14. It was also played on "vacant lands" distant from adult view, and its locale varied in rural areas, where it was equally popular.
15. Discussions with Dawn Casey, former director, National Museum of Australia. At the National Museum of Australia, the Society and Nation gallery featured a "backyard" theme with an interactive installation, and an exhibition of the "Hills Hoist" or clothesline, juxtaposed with the indoors of mother's housework and modern appliances. The exhibition came under attack from right-wing commentators who viewed it as a trivialization of "white" Australian history; they accused the NMA of only taking Indigenous history seriously. Ian McShane, "Living Dangerously at the National Museum of Australia," Museums Australia Magazine 12, no.3 (February 2004): 13-15;
16. John Carroll, Richard Longes, Philip Jones, and Patricia Vickers-Rich, Review of the National Museum of Australia (Canberra: Australian Government, 2003), http://www. nma.gov.au/about_us/ exhibitions_and_public_programs_review/review_report/
17. C&I Survey, overall trend analysis.
18. Riley, Life and Legacy, 235.
19. Graeme Davison, "Frontier" entry, G. Davison, J. Hirst, S. Macintyre, eds., The Oxford Companion to Australian History (Melbourne: Oxford, 1988), 269-270;
20. W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians-An Anthropologist's View (Sydney: ABC Books, 1968), 22;
21. John Greenway, The Last Frontier: A Study of Cultural Imperatives in the Last Frontiers of America and Australia (London: Davis-Poynter, 1972), 122;
22. McGrath, ed., Contested Ground (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994).
23. Robert W Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
24. McGrath, C&I Survey, overall analysis of key themes, unpublished in author's possession; see also McGrath, "Playing Colonia."
25. This historical interpretation only started to receive significant critical scrutiny for its raced and gendered exclusions from the 1960s; for a more recent critique, see Kerwin Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
26. Gary Nash, Creating the West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991);
27. Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and James R. Grossman, eds., The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
28. Jack Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill's Wild West (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1976);
29. James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985);
30. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
31. It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1991).
32. Louis S. Warren, "Cody's Last Stand: Masculine Anxiety, the Custer Myth, and the Frontier of Domesticity in Buffalo Bill's Wild West," Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 49-69.
33. Warren points to an exaggeration of Cody's links with Custer, and of the relatively few performances of the "Last Stand" historical event. Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna;
34. Joy S Kasson, Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.)
35. J. D. Martin, "Cosmopolitan Object Teacher: Buffalo Bill's Wild West and the Politics of American Identity 1883-1899," Radical History Review 66 (1996): 92-123;
36. Sam Hood Photographic Collection, Pieman Database, State Library of New South Wales (http://www.slnsw.gov.au/picman/picman.htm). This collection contains images of visiting American Indians and of local cowgirls and cowboy performers in Australia. The same series also includes the following image: "A schoolboy wearing cowboy chaps and vest over his school uniform," ca. 1930s, Frame Order No. 3932, "Home and Away." The National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, has a range of music recordings of these performers. See also Clinton Walker, Buried Country: the Story of Aboriginal Country Music (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000).
37. Jenny Hicks, Australian Cowboys, Roughriders and Rodeos (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 2000.)
38. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, ed. Ray Allen Billington (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 10-11, 6, 1-2, 9-10, 16.
39. George Taylor, ed., The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History (Lexington: D.C. Heath and Co., 1956);
40. John Mack Faragher, "The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West," American Historical Review 98, no. 1 (1993): 106-17;
41. Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
42. Rosemary K. Bank, "Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition," Theatre Journal 54, no. 4 (2002): 589-606, 602;
43. Richard White, "Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill," in The Frontier in American Culture, An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, ed. James R. Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7-65;
44. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
45. Deloria, Playing Indian, 191.
46. For a discussion of the convergence and differences between Turner and Cody's representations of the West, see White, Limerick, and Grossman, eds., The Frontier in American Culture, 1-64.
47. Axtell, Invasion Within;
48. White, Middle Ground;
49. White, Limerick, and Grossman, eds., The Frontier in American Culture. Roosevelt's 1880s Western outfit was displayed in the 2001 Smithsonian Exhibition on the American Presidency.
50. Peter Iverson, When Indians Became Cowboys (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).
51. Early British arrivals were transfixed by the "nudity" of Aborigines; see Ann McGrath, "The White Man's Looking Glass: Aboriginal Colonial Gender Relations at Port Jackson," Australian Historical Studies 95, no. 24 (October 1990): 189-206.
52. Ann Curthoys and John Docker, "Whose Home? Expulsion, Exodus, and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology," Journal of Australian Studies 61 (1999): 1-18;
53. Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination.
54. See also Historical Studies 18, no. 71 (1978), for numerous relevant articles on the theme of "The Australian Legend Re-visited";
55. Richard White, Inventing Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981);
56. Wayne Hudson and Geoffrey Bolton, Creating Australia: Changing Australian History (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1997).
57. Michelle Dewar, In Search of the Never-Never: Looking for Australia in Northern Territory Writing (Casuarina: Northern Territory University Press, 1997);
58. Victoria Haskins, One Bright Spot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
59. R. E. N. Twopenny, Town Life in Australia, 1883 (1883; repr., Ringwood: Penguin, 1973), 197;
60. Beverley Kingston, "The Lady and the Australian Girl: Some Thoughts on Nationalism and Class," in Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives, ed. N. Grieve and A. Burns (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), 27-41.
61. For another argument about the fusion between the New Woman and the Australian girl, see White, Inventing Australia, 77.
62. Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
63. See also the foreword to the 1997 edition of Cott's book for a discussion of related literature. See also Frances B. Cogan, All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989);
64. C. Nelson and L. Vallone, eds., Girl's Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830-1915 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994);
65. Carolyn L. Kitch, Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
66. Lisa Johnson, "Daisy Miller: Cowboy Feminist," The Henry James Review 22, no. 1 (2001): 41-58.
67. Susan H. Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women's West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987);
68. Susan H. Armitage and E. Jameson, eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women's West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997);
69. Katherine G. Morissey, "Engendering the Past," in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
70. Desley Deacon, personal communication, July 2005.
71. Poster, "Annie Oakley: The Peerless Wing and Rifle Shot," 1901, Poster 1898, in Rennert, 100 Posters, 80, 83.
72. E. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985);
73. Craik, Face of Fashion, 17.
74. L. G. Moses, "Interpreting the Wild West, 1883-1914" in Margaret Connell Szasz, ed., Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 158-178. Sitting Bull's spectacular show outfits were on permanent display at the Gene Autry Museum in 2001. A special case displayed one of Oakley's rifles and a range of her ornate "western style" pistols. Some controversy surrounds the first date of their meeting. It is likely Annie Oakley's presence helped persuade Sitting Bull to tour with the Wild West show in 1885. His story was told year after year, irrespective of his absence. At the National Museum of the American Indian, many items belonging to Sitting Bull are of such spiritual significance that they cannot be readily placed on public display.
75. Buffalo Bill Cody exaggerated connections with General Custer and with Sitting Bull, which is explained well in Warren, "Cody's Last Stand."
76. Howard R. Lamar, ed., The New Encyclopedia of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 808;
77. Glenda Riley, The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 26, 145-52.
78. M. Barnard, Fashion as Communication (London: Routledge, 1996);
79. Photograph collection, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming. Note that Native American peoples wore a wide range of fashions, but that colonizers came to see Plains Indian costumes, fringing, and elaborate feathers as particularly authentic. Native Americans came to adopt these markers at various times. See Deloria, Playing Indian; S. Elizabeth Bird, ed., Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).
80. Lindsay, personal communication, 2000. See also Lindsay Collection, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; ABC Radio National Hindsight Program, Australian Toy Story, June 22, 2006.
81. Calamity Jane is sometimes confused with Annie Oakley. See Riley, Life and Legacy, 206-7.
82. For a discussion of the impact of World War II on Australian women, see Joy Damousi, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia (Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
83. see also P. Grimshaw, M. Lake, A. McGrath, and M. Quartly, Creating a Nation (Ringwood: Penguin, 1994).
84. Eighty-one episodes of the television series were produced between April 1953 and December 1956 and first released in America in January 1954. It played in Australia during the day in the 1960s. Video copies are available. Adventures of Annie Oakley, vol. 3 (Eugene: Dastar Corp/Marathon Music & Video, 1999).
85. Riley, Life and Legacy, 215; A condensed version and the 1990s version of Annie Get Your Gun also omitted that song.
86. Adventures of Annie Oakley, vol. 3 (Eugene: Dastar Corp/Marathon Music & Video, 1999). According to Riley, Life and Legacy, 219, the show was also known as Annie Oakley and Tag.
87. See also Clare Bratten, "Shootout at the Gender Corral: Annie Oakley Deconstructs Gender," Children's Literature Association Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1997): 5-12.
88. See Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1975.)
89. Adventures of Annie Oakley (1999); Bratten, "Shootout at the Gender Corral."
90. Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Random House, 1994). Douglas refers to the sexist imagery of many other female stars but does not discuss Oakley.
91. McGrath, C&I Survey, responses 13, 32, 41. Almost half of respondents mentioned television and the others noted movies, comics, books, radio, music/songs, circuses, and local rodeos. The Melbourne Olympic games of 1956 influenced the timing. As it was a luxury and novel product, families took up television gradually and unevenly, and country areas had access later than the metropolitan centers. Nonetheless, many middle-class homes had televisions by the early 1960s.
92. Powerhouse Museum Collection; Lindsay Family, personal communication with author, May 2000.
93. About half of the C&I Survey respondents owned a hat or two, and this was most likely to be the sole item of the outfit owned; while this survey also applied to "cowboys," over two thirds of respondents were female. Evoking the successful business story of its television merchandising, it declared "Copyright 1959 - Annie Oakley Enterprises Inc. All Rights Reserved."
94. Hat in author's possession.
95. Lesley Johnson, The Modern Girl: Girlhood and Growing Up (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1993).
96. Marion Iris Young, "Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality," in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. J. Allen and I. Young (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 51-70.
97. Other likely factors for hard wear included being passed down to younger siblings or neighbors.
98. K. Dunseath, ed., A Second Skin (London: The Women's Press, 1998);
99. R. Barthes, The Fashion System (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 125-6, 120-1.
100. Johnson, Modern Girl.
101. Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes (London: Bloomsbury, 1992);
102. Joanne Finkelstein, The Fashioned Self (Oxford: Polity, 1991), 192-3;
103. Craik, Face of Fashion, 16, 4-17.
104. See also Amy de la Haye and E. Wilson, eds., Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning, and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
105. Mike Featherstone, "Lifestyle and Consumer Culture," Theory, Culture and Society 4, no.1 (1987): 55-70;
106. Craik, Face of Fashion, 4.
107. Craik, Face of Fashion, 16.
108. Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 191.
109. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991);
110. Barnard, Fashion as Communication.
111. Patrick Fagan telephone interview with author, May 1999.
112. Richard Chalfen, "Cinema Naivete: A Study of Home Movie Making as Visual Communication," Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 2, no. 2 (1975): 87-103.
113. Chalfen, "Cinema Naivete," 100.
114. Rodney Harrison, Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004).
115. Chalfen, "Cinema Naivete," 100.
116. Sunny Ridge Station: Family and Friends; Putta Bucea: Children Play Cowboys and Indians (Canberra: Australian Film and Sound Archive Collection, 1955).
117. After watching the movie, I contacted a family member, Patrick Fagan. He was one of the three- to four-year-old boys in the movie whose mother was helping him get his gun out of the holster. His mother, Loralie Kelly, had won the Miss Australia contest of 1948. She had acted in commercial movies. They were a prosperous family, and both the father and grandfather of the children owned Zeiss movie cameras. The now middle-aged son from the movie had kept his Davy Crockett hat, though was disappointed to tell me the one-foot long fox-tail had fallen off; Fagan, personal communication, 1999.
118. C. Hoffer and J. Canton, "Perceiving and Responding to Mass Media Characters," in Responding to the Screen: Reception and Reaction Processes, ed. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillman (Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 63-102.
119. Fagan, personal communication, 1999;
120. and John Mulvaney, personal communication, 2001.
121. McGrath, C&I Survey, 22 responses regarding freedom, sex, and power. Key finding 4 and 5 in survey report summary-some respondents also indicated cases of bullying and the ways they avoided it.
122. McGrath, C& I Survey, response 13.
123. McGrath, C& I Survey, response 32.
124. Carolyn Strange, personal communication, 2005, from her experience in Canada, 1960S-70S.
125. McGrath, C&I Survey, response 41. Members of this "Annie Oakley generation" were to become significant in the feminist movement of the 1970s.
126. McGrath, C&I Survey, 22 responses regarding freedom, sex, and power. Key finding 4 and 5 in report summary.
127. See Susan Sheridan, Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women's Writing, 1880S-1930S (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995). The actual Annie Oakley performer rode sidesaddle.
128. McGrath "Playing Colonial," 17, 10-11.