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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