Sport-Hunting Women in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Agents of Cultural and Political Change

Preserving wildlands and conserving wildlife encouraged a shift from subsistence and market hunting to sustainable recreational or sport hunting in America at the end of the nineteenth century. Publications such as Forest and Stream (1873–1930), Field and Stream (1895–), and Outdoor Life (1898–) led the way as venues for illustrated covers and articles, advertisements, and letters that advanced the conservationist cause. Among the featured subjects, the female hunters who emerge in the pages of these magazines model attitudes and actions that promote sport hunting and safeguard sustainable hunting. Most of the female hunters who appear in published images and texts are middle- and upper-class white women. They are educated, elite women whose outdoor passions are tied to good health and physical activity. Their hunting activities are closely related to their appreciation of wilderness and their individual agency in the outdoors. This chapter analyzes the pictorial and textual evidence in these publications to reveal the significant role of female hunters as agents of cultural and political change regarding American attitudes about hunting and the environment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.