Women: protectors of the homestead

The position of women within the Western was always slow to adapt to changes in wider society. Issues of masculinity have been central to the genre, and though this need not preclude strong roles for women, they have in practice been few and far between. Again, one can find examples of feisty heroines in some early silent films, far in advance of women's roles in films of the 1940s or 1950s. Unfortunately, just at the time in the later 1960s when race and gender became key social issues which mainstream social institutions ignored at their peril, the Western, perhaps not coincidentally, entered its long decline. The genre now appears a threatened species, preserved only in occasional self-conscious attempts to retool it for contemporary audiences, Brokeback Mountain being a case in point.

Nigel Arthur, bfi Stills Curator