Baby on Hip, Rifle in Hand

PETER: We’ve spent some time looking at gun owners in early America, and at the role of guns in the African American community. We’ve covered the Wild West. Really, we’ve covered a lot of ground in this episode.

LAURA BROWDER: Except for Sarah Palin. Can we talk a little bit about Sarah Palin?

PETER: This is Laura Browder. She’s a Professor at the University of Richmond. And for her, Sarah Palin is one of the first people to come to mind when thinking about guns in America today. The former governor, and Vice Presidential candidate famously hunted and killed a caribou on television.

She was heavily criticized when she put former Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords on her target list. A list of lawmakers Palin wanted to see unseated. Giffords, of course, was later shot in an unrelated incident in Arizona. But what interests Laura Browder most about Sarah Palin is that, despite her gun toting persona. She’s also seen as the quintessential hockey mom. Good with guns, and good with kids.

Browder wrote about the history of women and guns in her book entitled, Her Best Shot. And she says that Sarah Palin fits perfectly into a late 19th century trope of armed mothers, an image Browder calls the prairie Madonna.

LAURA BROWDER: You know, this super tough, pioneer mother, out there on the frontier with a baby under one arm and a rifle under the other, who was ready for anything. There’s a very popular book by William Fowler, which was all about these early American women. And some of the stories he includes are just amazing in all senses of the word.

Women who will get their hands stuck in a tree in the middle of the winter and use a dull knife to saw it off, because they’re so tough. Or biting a bullet into several pieces with their teeth so they can shoot bears and Indians more effectively.

I mean, these are hard core tough women. And the images of these women were supposed to both inspire and maybe intimidate and daunt American women into saying, why can’t I be like that? Why can’t I believe that kind of super mom who can protect my children and my homestead with my gun, rather than sitting around in my little city parlor reading novels all day long, and wasting away?

PETER: Browder says this anxiety about weak women was mainly felt by upper class whites, a group of people who felt under siege by massive waves of immigration.

LAURA BROWDER: We’re talking about a period, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when there were many, many prominent people writing eugenics themed books. The Rising Tide of Color, books like that by Lothrop Stoddard. Books that suggested that our very national identity was being threatened by all of this alien blood pouring in and contaminating our racial identity.

And so white womanhood became very, very important in this construct. How do we keep white women strong, fertile, popping out the babies as frequently as possible, maintaining their traditional gender roles? And hunting was an important part of this.

Shooting was seen as a great activity for women, because it required self-control and discipline, something that women were supposed to be very, very good at. And as you move towards the turn of the 20th century, shooting and hunting seemed like great ways to get women out of the cities, to strengthen them, to get them out into nature, and active.

Because there was a tremendous cultural fear at that time native born white women were getting sickly, weak, over-educated, not having enough children. Leaving it to the immigrants to have overly large families that would dilute pure white Anglo-Saxon Protestant bloodstreams.

PETER: Right. So at least in this collective, symbolic sense, we’re talking about self-defense and being armed to meet the imminent enemy. Does that connect to with conceptions of law and order, and crime waves? Do we have the beginning of the idea that you need to protect yourself in your home?

LAURA BROWDER: Well, that comes just a little bit later, in the early 20th century and on into the 1920s, when the law and order element is starting to promote the idea that there’s a national crime wave. And that many of these criminals, again, are immigrants or people who are not of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage. And that it’s necessary for native-born Americans to protect themselves.

And that’s when you begin seeing gun ads that are all about safety in the home. And incidentally, one of my favorite ads featuring a little girl, is shown from the early part of the 20th century. It’s an ad for a new safety device on a revolver. And the image is of a little girl in a frilly nightgown in bed. And she’s pointing a .38 caliber gun at her face. And the handwritten slogan says, don’t worry, Papa, with this new safety device you can leave your gun lying around, loaded.

PETER: Ugh! Great! But what’s remarkable is it was acceptable to depict women in these settings with guns.

LAURA BROWDER: Abosolutely. No one blinked an eye when they saw those advertisements of adorable little girls with big guns. It was just normal.

PETER: Laura Browder teaches at the University of Richmond. She’s the author of Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America.

BRIAN: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, BackStory goes to the gun show.

PETER: You are listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.