Because the American West was dominated by men, the frontier seldomly addressed the role of women, while also minimal developing overall femininity. However, the embodiment and existence of femininity itself was a precursor to the cowboy’s success within Westerns. After All, the cowboy needed the female in order to be married and keep his masculine figure in tact. Although the industrialized East created an allure of the liberation for the cowboy, the intensity of the Old West grew as the East came to alter its form. Thus, manhood was becoming re-established within both sexes.
As demonstrated within Deadwood Dick the Prince of the Road by Edward L. Wheeler, the critique of the manhood is presented with Calamity Jane, who exerts her femininity in the form of a rugged masculine persona. Jane, whose reputation for dressing like a man and being able to shoot like a cowboy, often makes her audience question her sexuality, but not in terms of merely preference, but as a role within the Western society. Ultimately, in Wheeler’s novel, Deadwood remains unmarried and without an inherited fortune--automatically denouncing his success
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The Western genre was invented in 1902 by Owen Wister with the publication of his novel, The Virginian, at roughly the same time that the women’s suffrage movement was in its most heated period. With the formation of a national headquarters for the National American Woman Suffrage Association and 19th amendment allowing women the right to vote, the female gender began to witness a new light within society. And with the popularity this novel, masculinity combined with the attention drawn toward feminist arguments and led to cultural changes in sex roles. Men reacted against granting women more equal rights at the turn of the century primarily because they themselves felt threatened in what they had come to understand as their gender