SEMINAR: Modern Diana: Women and the Making of Sport Hunting, 1870-1920

CHICAGO SEMINAR ON SPORT AND CULTURE

SPONSORED BY NORTHEASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY AND THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY


Oct. 17, 2008

Modern Diana: Women and the Making of Sport Hunting, 1870-1920

Andrea Smalley,
Dept. of History
Northern Illinois University


We are pleased to invite you to the Chicago Seminar on Sport and Culture at the Newberry Library, co-sponsored by Northeastern Illinois University and North Central College. All sessions begin at 3:30 PM. The lectures are open to the public at no charge. The Newberry Library is located at 60 W. Walton, Chicago, IL. Copies of the paper are available for people planning to attend. Please contact Steve Riess, co chairman of the seminar (s-riess@neiu.edu).


Precis:

The connection between hunting and masculinity has become a commonplace. This paper, however, contests that notion by arguing that hunting advocates feminized recreational hunting as part of a turn-of-the-century project to reform the sport’s public image. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century sport hunting appeared doomed both by declining wildlife populations and by widespread public criticism of hunters and their methods. Responding to these challenges, outdoor writers spotlighted female hunters and linked their feminine qualities to recreational hunting, thus providing the most visible marker of difference between legitimate field sports and the other forms of wildlife killing that sportsmen wanted to prohibit. Simply put, the “Modern Diana” made hunting a sport.


Andrea Smalley is an instructor in the history department at Northern Illinois University where she completed her Ph.D. in 2005. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled “The Liberty of Killing a Deer,” considers a broad range of human-wildlife interactions and examines conflicts over wildlife use in early America. She also has studied women’s participation in sport hunting from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, and her articles on this topic have appeared in Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and in Gender and History. Currently she is developing a book project designed to bring together her research on wildlife use in the colonial and early national periods with her previous work on sport hunting and gender.