Although American folklore studies have always considered the roles women play within the folk tradition—the Journal of American Folklore published a bibliography of women’s folklore as far back as 1899—only beginning in the 1970s did folklore scholars begin to openly challenge the folklore canon, insisting on a reevaluation of women’s roles in folklore as both a subject and a source of folktales. Reconfiguring the male-oriented paradigms of folk studies into models that integrate women has enriched folklore scholarship in myriad ways. It allows a deeper insight into the ways women are perceived within their culture, identifies attributes of a woman’s character that are revered or condemned by that culture, and, by extension, illuminates a folk group’s ideas about gender as a whole. It also celebrates the distinct contributions from women’s expressive behavior, including performance, craft, and material culture.
Folk Heroines of the Frontier
Among the most notable women in American folklore are a handful of well-known frontier women from the nineteenth century, including Annie Oakley, Cattle Kate, Calamity Jane, and Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind. America’s notion of folk heroes from this period generally sprang from the male-coded fields of endeavor such as logging, sharpshooting, fighting, and seafaring. Most of these women appropriated at least one of these celebrated traits from their male counterparts.
Annie Oakley, born Phoebe Ann Moses (or Mosey) in 1860, bested the marksman Frank E. Butler in a shooting competition at the age of fifteen. They married the following year and began performing together as professional shooters. In 1885, Oakley and Butler joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show for more than a decade and a half with Butler working as Oakley’s manager.
Cattle Kate, born Ellen Liddy Watson in 1860, was a cattle rustler known for being the only woman hanged in the state of Wyoming. Watson worked in a restaurant owned by Jim Averill. Accounts vary as to whether the two married or not, but they worked together rustling cattle until they were caught and lynched by agents of powerful cattle ranchers. Cattle Kate’s notoriety grew posthumously, and she only developed into a notable Wild West outlaw after her death.
Unlike Cattle Kate, Calamity Jane, born Martha Jane Cannary in 1852, deliberately contributed to her own legend. Known as a compassionate daredevil, Calamity Jane fashioned herself as a rough-talking woman who wore men’s buckskins. She was also famed for her alleged association with Wild Bill Hickok, although her ties to Wild Bill are probably a fabrication. Nevertheless, she was buried next to Wild Bill when she died, forever ensuring an association between the two figures.
Unlike the other notable frontier women, Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind was spun entirely from fiction. She was described as a loud, fearless woman who wore a beehive hat, a bearskin dress, and picked her teeth with a bowie knife. Also recognized for her restraint, she was known for never bragging or picking fights. According to legend, she married American folk hero Davy Crockett.
The symbolic representation of the frontier woman or backwoods belle, to coin a phrase used by folklorist Beverly J. Stoeltje, tended to blend distinctly feminine characteristics with elements of the masculine folk hero. Furthermore, these women are known for their relationships with notable male figures of the West and tend to take on the role of a comrade or helpmate position with a diminished sexual role between the two.
The Quilting Bee
Historically overlooked as a crucial piece of women’s folklore, quilting is now regarded as a sociocultural artifact that extends beyond its graphic qualities, revealing significant expressive form and cultural values particularly among women. If folklore is primarily communicated orally or in the practices of the everyday life, quilting is an expressive practice firmly planted in the female sphere. The quilting bee, or a social gathering primarily of women for the purpose of quilt production, reaffirms the value of family and community, a value system typically attributed as feminine. Quilt patterns shared among women are generally endowed with meaning, and the major milestones in a woman’s life such as birth, marriage, and death are represented in the quilt’s individual squares. The quilt’s material, which is typically pieced together from remnants of other quilts and garments, reinforces the important practice of frugality and recycling materials. Furthermore, the quilt’s piecemeal construct is a way for women to recall their past selves and the way those memories relate to the other members of the quilting group. As an artifact, the quilt carries a message that reiterates the values of the community, but the quilting bee event also allows for the transmission of values and family narratives among quilters.
Legends that feature outlaws are strongly gendered, with mostly male protagonists. However, a few women outlaws populate the genre, including Cattle Kate. She acquired notoriety as a cattle thief in Wyoming, which led to her tragic end in 1889 at the hands of a lynch mob. (Corbis)
Women in Urban Legends
In modern American urban legends, young females are exposed to a variety of dangers. Two of the most famous tales in the teenage horror-legend genre are “The Hook” and “The Boyfriend’s Death.” Both tales begin with a young couple in a car, usually parked in a “Lover’s Lane.” In “The Hook” the couple is listening to romantic music when the radio announcer cuts in to warn listeners that an escaped convict with a hook for a hand is on the loose. Upon hearing this, the female begs to go home, and the male, after several attempts to dissuade her, complies. Only upon returning home does the couple discover a hook dangling from the car door handle. In “The Boyfriend’s Death,” a young man must leave his girlfriend in the car, usually to get help because they have run out of gas. The woman, who hears scratching on the top of the car for several hours, is rescued by police and discovers her dead boyfriend’s body dangling over the car from a tree. Similarly, in “The Killer in the Backseat” legend, an unsuspecting female motorist is saved when a male stranger alerts her that there is a potential assailant hiding in the backseat of her car. These tales reinforce the dangers posed to women venturing out on their own, and, in the case of the first two legends, allude to the potential ramifications of being sexually active.
Another genre of legends warns young women of the hazards of being in strange places or places outside of the home. In “The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs,” a young woman learns that strange phone calls she has been receiving all night are coming from within the house. In most versions of the legend, she discovers the children she has been babysitting have been killed. Another example of a teenage shocker legend is “The Roommate’s Death,” involving two college freshmen who remain in their dorm over a holiday break. After one of the females leaves the dorm to go on a date, the other roommate hides after hearing scratching sounds on the door. The next morning she opens the door to discover her roommate’s body in the hallway. According to folklorist Sue Samuelson, this genre of urban legend “conveys a stern admonition to young women to adhere to society’s traditional values” (Brunvand 1981, 56). Indeed, both legends also warn women of the hazards of being isolated in a strange place. In the case of “The Roommate’s Death,” it potentially serves as another warning against woman being sexually active, as the woman who leaves her dorm room to go out on a date dies.
Urban legends about young brides, labeled by folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand as bungling-brides, have also been the subject of several American urban legends. The most famous includes a new wife cutting a roast or a ham in half—or removing the drumsticks from a turkey—before roasting it. When the groom asks her why she does this, she explains that this is how her mother prepared the meat. Later, the husband asks his mother-in-law about this, and she explains she never owned a pan large enough to accommodate a whole roast, ham, or large turkey. In another variation, the bride reads the direction “leave room to rise” in a biscuit recipe literally and tiptoes out of the kitchen. In yet another version, a bride attaches small cotton balls to her screen door because that is what her mother used to repel flies; the husband later discovers that the bride’s mother used cotton from pill bottles to plug holes in the door’s screen. In a darker variation of the bungling-bride genre, a bride and groom decide to play a game of hide-and-seek on their wedding day. The groom, who must find the bride, never does. He assumes she has gotten cold feet and has run away. Several years later, the decaying body of the missing bride is discovered inside an old trunk where she became trapped while hiding. The sexist stereotype of the naive bride demonstrates her embarrassing inability to operate in adult life. In many cases, the groom is needed for help or clarification. In the first two examples, there is a misunderstanding regarding information passed down from mother to daughter, possibly exposing a social expectation that men are the primary transmitters of important or true information.
New researchers, particularly feminist scholars, have sought to expand the traditional definitions of folklore and to encourage traditional folklorists to reexamine the gendered nature of their research. Before the feminist scholarship of the 1970s, the role of women in folklore served to reinforce a hierarchy based on gender that advantaged boys and disadvantaged girls, perpetuating sexist stereotypes. Not only have feminist scholars uncovered the inherent gender bias that favors male protagonists and folk heroes over heroines, they have also revealed a scholarly bias toward male folklore performers, exposing the fact that in the past female performers were solicited only if there were no male performers available. Research since the 1970s reveals many of today’s canonical folktales were part of published collections compiled by men who obscured many of the stories about strong female characters or tales told from a female’s perspective.
The focus on the woman’s role in folklore has become increasingly interdisciplinary, expanding beyond the traditional confines of folklore scholarship. It has also called attention to the need for greater consideration of women who are doubly marginalized by virtue of other factors, including but not limited to class, ethnicity, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, and being older women who, aside from being depicted as witches or sorceresses, are seldom depicted in folklore research.
Ann T. Torrusio
See also Calamity Jane; Hook, The; Killer in the Backseat; Oakley, Annie; Quilts; Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind
Further Reading
Brown, Mary Ellen. 1989. “Women, Folklore and Feminism.” Journal of Folklore Research 26 (3): 259–264.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: W. W. Norton.
Farrer, Claire R. 1975. Women and Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Frankel, Valerie Estelle. 2010. From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Rosan, Jordan A., and Susan J. Kalcik. 1985. Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.