Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 2005 | Page 74

70 Popular Culture Review cattlemen and farmers {The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Extended to personal behaviors, Westerns stress culture over nature {Destry Rides Again) or corruption versus honor (all of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns). Women figure prominently in these pictures. Some films deal with schoolteachers versus dancehall girls, wives versus prostitutes, and godly versus heathen women {Ehiel in the Sun, Johnny Guitar). Within this context, filmmakers must deftly construct alternate interpretations of icons wiio are, fi’om the start, unorthodox.^ Calamity Jane presented a paradox for filmmakers during conservative times. Her legend rests on the life of a woman named Martha Jane Canary Burke who lived in the Dakota territory during the 1876 Gold Rush."* She was a legend during her own lifetime because dime novelist Ned Wheeler named a female character “Calamity Jane,” allegedly after making Canary’s acquaintance. Although biographer Richard Etulain argues persuasively that the “real” Calamity Jane sought to fashion herself as a dress-wearing fi*ontier woman, the legendary Calamity dressed like a man and performed the same tasks as men. According to her larger-than-life legends, she rescued the Deadwood stage fi’om warring throngs of Indians, scouted for General Custer, married Wild Bill Hickok, and rode for the Pony Express.^ A woman named Jean Hickok McCormick, who claimed to be Calamity Jane and Bill Hickok’s daughter, produced some forged letters and created a stir in a 1941 radio program. McCormick’s letters spawned a litany of books and movies, including Jane Alexander’s Calamity Jane and Larry McMurtry’s book, Buffalo Girls., subsequently the subject of a film starring Anjelica Huston as Calamity.^ Recently, a group of revisionist scholars claimed that Martha Canary was a lesbian. How could such a flamboyant figure be tamed for tradition-minded audiences? Films encouraged and enforced gender-appropriate behaviors and condemn behaviors considered inappropriate for women during the 1930s and 1950s. In order to achieve this, filmmakers used a popular cultural icon to fit the needs of American society and government during years of conservative backlash to significant social change.® As Samuels said, films create ideology by applauding some actions and condemning others. Filmmakers used Calamity Jane to exemplify bad behavior for women and to show what rambunctious women needed to do to gain acceptability. The Plainsman and Calamity Jane reveal much about the social construction of gender during the pre- and postWorld War II years in the United States. An examination of these films’ denigration of gender deviation, alternative courtship practices and family structures, and the resolution that monogamous heterosexual marriage is the only acceptable forum for romantic love and sexual desire classifies both films as conservative. The thirties were a decade of economic desperation and clinging to traditional values. The United States government encouraged women to stay at home and leave available employment for male heads of households. Eleanor