Wrangling Women is the culmination of the author’s lifelong fascination with cowgirl characters like Dale Evans, Annie Oakley, and Calamity Jane, in which McAndrews considers the position of women in the historical, contemporary, and imagined American West. McAndrews approaches these iconic figures through their modern inheritors: the community of women who work with horses around the Western-themed town of Winthrop, Washington. Her ethnography examines the complex status these women occupy in their community and how they negotiate their gender roles through jokes and storytelling.

This book’s slim treatment of contemporary female “wranglers,” “cowgirls,” or “horsewomen” (words McAndrews tends to use interchangeably after laying out the historical shifts and misconceptions vexing the vocabulary) at times comes off as a student thesis rather than as a sustained ethnography in its own right. The introduction seems like a “round-up” of familiar folklorists, included more for their aura of authority than for their bearing on the text. This would be less problematic if not for McAndrews’ apparent lack of confidence in her own voice; she seems reluctant to write what she could instead quote, and there is a somewhat distracting dependence on the words of others--even for straightforward historical facts--that detracts from the fluency and cohesiveness of the work.

Several interesting themes underlie McAndrews’ research, beginning, in the first chapter, with the tourism industry and how the stereotypical image of the American West shapes modern Western life. The horsewomen of Methow Valley (where McAndrews locates her research) are not only packers, ranchers, outfitters, cooks, cowboy poets, and horse trainers, but also inevitably performers. They are called upon by the tourists who hire them to enact a particularly “Western” identity and to meet common stereotypes of accent and attitude. This involves negotiating between gender roles and between time periods, as the horsewomen struggle to represent contemporary women with traditional voices and to reconcile modern sensibilities with their own ingrained ideas about women’s place. Though McAndrews discusses how tourist expectations have changed the actual face of the town, with enforced guidelines for appropriate architecture, store names, and decorations, she seems to have an uncomfortably easy acceptance of “authenticity.” The author explains how even the attractions that emphasize their authenticity can be highly contrived. However, the chapter lacks a focused engagement with how such “inauthentic” representations can be internalized by their enactors as part of an “authentic” identity.

McAndrews finds her stride in the second chapter, “A Woman’s Code of the West,” seeming more comfortable with the often-discussed gender-studies issue of women’s speech and silence. Voice plays an interesting role in the gender dynamic of the West, since the lack of voice usually associated with powerlessness here is reversed: the authority rests on the stoic silence of the cowboy hero, while the comic garrulousness of women demonstrates their unimportance. Similarly interesting is the male cowboy’s identification with nature and the land, juxtaposed to the domesticating civilization of women (in Western films, often represented by that epitome of civilization, the schoolmarm). McAndrews cogent analysis of gender roles in the imagined construct of the West is thorough and confident.

The third chapter, “Tools of the Trade,” analyzes personal narratives from McAndrews’ informants, particularly how they assume and hold authority subversively, through joking and humor. McAndrews again invokes all the best-known humor theorists who had anything to say about women, from Freud on down, but uses them here to better effect. McAndrews explores how her informants use humor to straddle boundaries between stoic cow(girl) and comic female, genuine horsewoman and paid performer. She succeeds admirably in conveying the energy and appeal of her subjects--though more in spite of the stories’ presentation than because of it.

The author admits that she struggled to find a balance between a thorough and complete transcription and a more streamlined, literary presentation of the horsewomen’s narratives. Though she settles for the more traditional approach, smoothing away the false starts and stutters that make her narrators appear less skilled and fluent than they in fact are, McAndrews also reflects with regret that the intensity of the performance is not captured in her texts: “in abstraction Marva’s stories were bland for a reading audience” (87). The reader, unhappily, might agree with her--something that could be remedied with a little more imagination and less of an “all or nothing” approach to the material. I’m not willing to say, with McAndrews, that “Nor could this flatness be avoided” (87). Discard the distracting repetitions and elaborations, by all means, but describe the tone, gestures, and facial expressions that make a performance personal and immediate. It would be a selective judgment call, but one that no one but McAndrews is in a better position to make. I would have appreciated more of the story of the storytelling. McAndrews frames her informants’ voices within her own fieldwork narratives of learning to ride, get dirty, and gain the respect of her subjects, and these passages are among the most appealing of the book. The fourth and final chapter, “Nothing to Lose,” makes a case for women as tellers of tall tales, a historically male-dominated genre.

Despite McAndrews’ sincere love of her subject matter and her (inescapably) demonstrated familiarity with relevant literature, the ethnography is unoriginal. Some passages are repeated word for word (59, 134), as if the chapters were written at different times for different projects and belatedly cobbled together. Wrangling Women is an interesting but flawed contribution to the study of humor, gender, and the American West.

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[Review length: 909 words • Review posted on June 28, 2007]