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Authors: Glenda Riley

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Women, #History, #United States, #19th Century, #test

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Page 134
amused than they had been previously" when she captured the prize money. "It kind of galled me," Annie continued, "to see those hulking chaps so tickled in what was no doubt to them my impertinence in daring to shoot against themand I reckon I was tickled too when I walked away with the prize."
Oakley similarly maintained her composure at a shooting exhibition she gave in 1886 at the Middlesex Gun Club in Dunellen, New Jersey. Members set the trap as tight as they could so that, according to Annie, they could "have a good laugh" at her. But, when the weather turned blustery and cold, Annie took heavy shells along and loaded her guns for fast clays. When the traps spewed out the first two try-out birds, Annie said that she just grinned and smashed them both. During her exhibition, she performed rifle and revolver stunts, then shot at fifty clays. In her last stunt, Annie sprang the trap herself, ran twenty feet, jumped over a table, picked up her gun from the ground, and aimed at two clay birds. Even when she slipped on the wet grass and landed on the ground, Annie reached down and caught her gun anyway. In her words, she "banged from a sitting posture" and hit one bird but missed the other. She picked herself up and tried again. This time she hit both birds. "That club was all right," Annie concluded. "They gave me a handsome medal and stated that the joke was on them.''
The pressure on Oakley as a woman shooter abated somewhat during the 1890s, but she still disassociated herself from "new" women because of the public's and her own disapproval of them. In 1897, for example, a young woman diverted attention from the Wild West's opening parade in New York City because she sat mounted astride a handsome black horse. Agents of the show at first frowned at her, but then, according to one bystander, they "realized that she was one of the new women and they were all bound to see if she would flirt." In that same year, Annie was herself mistaken for a new woman while hunting in Crowson, Tennessee. One observer reported that when she first appeared in her "hunting suit," the others thought she was a new women. Annie soon proved them wrong but was nonetheless outraged by their mistake.

 

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Despite her disavowals of suffrage, new women, and other women's issues of the day, Annie Oakley was what today many Americans would call a feminist. During her top career years of 1885 to 1913, Annie increasingly worked on behalf of women. As she matured and prospered, Oakley tried to use her success to open the way for others.
Surely Annie's childhood would have instilled in her a respect for women's contributions and abilities. Although as an adult, Annie either attended whatever Protestant church happened to be nearby or missed services, she prayed nightly and always maintained allegiance to such Quaker principles as a belief in women's essential worth. Too, she well remembered the strength the women of her family had exercised in various crises.
Annie herself had also demonstrated that women could achieve and excel. And because she had fought against prejudice and discrimination to earn a living, Annie recognized the constraints on women who wished or needed to work for wages outside their homes. Thus, in both example and word, Annie supported the advancement of women in certain areas of life. Rather than laboring in the political sphere for woman suffrage, Annie focused on economic rights and freedoms. Year by year, as she enhanced her own economic stability and earning power, Annie became increasingly vocal and adamant about women's right to hold employment, especially in arenic and other sports.
Oakley pursued her own brand of feminist reform under difficult conditions. Because she traveled regularly she could not join such women's clubs as sewing societies, where women discussed issues meaningful to them. Nor could Annie participate in women's rights groups or attend rallies, which would have given her information, purpose, and support. For most of the year, Annie operated in a predominantly male society of shooters, performers, and entrepreneurs. Even when she settled temporarily in Nutley, Annie continued this pattern by joining a gun club rather than a woman's group and by inviting shooters and showpeople to her home rather than reaching out to local women.
Only when her friend Amy Leslie or her niece Fern visited or when Annie returned home to see her mother, sisters, and neighbors did she experience a woman's culture. Susan's neighbor, Lela

 

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Border Hollinger, recalled that during these visits, Frank often went hunting while Annie sat and chatted with the women. Although hardly liberals in their thinking regarding women's issues, Susan and the others offered Annie a sense of self, strength, and courage.
Gradually, Annie turned into a reformer for women's rights in the economic realm and in sports. The presence of a sympathetic and encouraging male in the person of Frank helped move Annie along the road toward activism. And freedom from domestic trivia and an appealing public persona gave her the opportunity to speak her mind.
Annie Oakley did this in a way that appealed to women and men alike. Alternately strong and self-effacing, Annie reached out to all who would listen. Annie especially proclaimed that she wanted "a fair chance" for her "sex" and gradually developed a tactic that might be termed subtle subversion. Like Sarah Josepha Hale, who as a well-educated lady and editor of
Godey's Lady's Book
gradually and tactfully initiated numerous reforms for women during the mid-nineteenth century, Oakley increasingly yet judiciously protested the boundaries of woman's accepted sphere during the latter part of the century.
Oakley worked her subtle subversion by charming both men and women with her ladylike demeanor and skill at firearms. As one viewer remarked in 1891, Annie entranced the "ladies" who had thought they would dislike the shooting in the Wild West show. She handled her guns with the same grace and dexterity "shown by themselves when yielding their less warlike weapon, the needle." Oakley especially captured the hearts of young women. In an 1892 letter from Sampson Morgan, editor of
Horticultural Times
, he described how his daughter enjoyed Annie's shooting and tried to emulate her. In England as well, Annie caused people to revise their opinions of women shooters. In 1892, one London newspaper announced that Oakley "won the hearts of the ladies'' with her remarkable shooting and her demure appearance. "Where, after this, is the opponent of women's rights?" the article concluded.
Oakley picked an auspicious time to initiate a career in shooting and to reshape people's ideas concerning women in show business

 

Page 137
and in sports. The closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decade of the twentieth marked many firsts for women in every field. Among the achieving women were Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who in 1883 received a law degree from Howard University and established a successful practice in Washington, D.C., and Ella L. Knowles, who passed the Montana bar examination with distinction in 1889, thus becoming the state's first female attorney. During the 1890s, the names of such reformers as Jane Addams, Frances Perkins Gilman, Mary Elizabeth Lease, Mary Church Terrell, Lillian Wald, and Ida Wells-Barnett became well-known.
As a result, changes in women's status abounded in the United States. By 1890, almost four million women, approximately one out of every seven, worked for wages outside their homes. Then, Washington Territory gave women the right to vote in 1893 and Idaho followed in 1896. By 1900, the figure of employed women jumped to five million, or one out of every five. The Gibson Girl, a healthy, sensual, and rebellious female image first created by Charles Dana Gibson in 1890, captured many Americans' hearts and inspired some women to take unheard-of liberties. When Alice Roosevelt smoked in public, President Theodore Roosevelt simply shrugged and replied that he could do one of two thingsbe president or try to control Alice.
Obviously, times were changing for American women, and Oakley stood in the forefront of those changes. Her example encouraged a number of young women to leave home and join the show circuit as riders and shooters. As early as 1886, Cody and Salsbury added several women riders and shooters, besides Oakley, to the Wild West. Between then and 1900, probably more than a dozen women toured with this or other shows either partor full-time. Many of them came from rodeos and local riding contests. Two of the more famous during the 1890s were bronc riders Annie Shaffer and Lulu Belle Parr, who left the rodeo to become full-time performers. But the best-known of the era's "cowgirls," other than Annie Oakley, was Lucille Mulhall, who made her debut in 1897 at age thirteen and by 1900 had proven herself a seasoned performer both in the arena and on the vaudeville stage.

 

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During the early 1900s, many more young women followed the lead of these women. The pull of the circus and Wild West arenas on young men has been widely recognized, but women fled their homes as well. The influence of Oakley and others like her on the nation's women was widespread and not to be underestimated. A representative case was Jane Meekin, who in 1911 left her family in Wisconsin to take her chances on the show circuit. She called herself "Little Jean" and fired two pearl-handled revolvers. When Meekin's first season ended, she sought refuge with a St. Paul family who were longtime friends of her parents and whose sons had first taught her to shoot. When word of her whereabouts reached the Meekins, Jean's father and her older brother Austin went to fetch her. Jean arrived home in time for Christmas 1911; she married on February 22, 1912. The matter was never spoken of again except when she once confided her great adventure to her daughter.
As a role model and reformer, Annie must have occasionally felt lonely. Frank encouraged Annie, and her small community of women, including her mother, sisters, neighbors, niece Fern, and friend Amy Leslie, gave her what limited and intermittent support they could. But women's rights leaders of the day seemed oblivious of Annie and the changes she first modeled, then urged.
They spoke neither against her nor for her, nor did they include her in their accounts of suffrage and women's rights. Presumably, they regarded Annie as an entertainment star and little more. Even in the 1990s, few women's history handbooks and biographical collections include Annie Oakley. Those that do continue to overlook or undervalue her feminist impact.
Yet Oakley influenced the lives of thousands of women. One of her quieter campaigns was to encourage the 1890s fad of riding bicycles, which she considered an excellent sport for women. In 1892, Annie herself ordered a Premier Safety bicycle with solid tires from a firm in Coventry, England. She pedaled the thirty-five-pound vehicle around the streets of London for exercise and shopping, causing more than one eyebrow to raise as she passed. Annie later claimed that she was the first woman to ride a bicycle in London. When she prepared to return to the United States, she

 

 

Page 139
ordered her bike crated up. Annie maintained, "I am equally as fond of it as of my horse." In her view, both bicycles and horses provided pleasant and healthy exercise.
Concerned with maintaining her ladylike appearance, Annie soon devised a special outfit for cycling. In 1894, she explained that she "abominated" the bloomer costume that many women bicyclists wore; she considered bloomers both inconvenient and ungraceful. Oakley preferred instead the five-piece costume she had designed herself. On her legs, she laced gaiters about six inches above the knees. She then added a pair of knickerbockers (short, loose trousers gathered at the knee), a skirt extending halfway below the knee, a loose-fitting bodice of white silk, and an Eton-style jacket. Annie completed the tan-and-white outfit with matching tan shoes and tan gloves. Although this outfit may not sound unusual, Annie's special contribution to it lay hidden beneath the skirt. She sewed an eyelet to each gaiter and a corresponding elastic with a hook on the underside of the skirt. When mounting her bike, she gracefully hooked her skirt to the gaiters. While she rode, the elastic provided sufficient room for movement of the skirt but prevented it from rising above Annie's knees.
A few years later, in 1897, Oakley credited the cycling craze with opening the way for women shooters. Women who refused to shoot in their cumbersome Victorian outfits and feared wearing short skirts now had examples on nearly every street in the nation. "Ladies can be seen on the most crowded streets of our largest cities wearing dresses short enough to get through any brush or briars where man can." Annie hastily added, however, that she was not advocating the bloomer costume, for she thought "nothing so detestable."
By the end of the decade, Oakley had succeeded in drawing attention to the benefits of outdoor exercise for women. In 1900, one supporter pointed to her as a splendid example of "what athletic exercises and out-door life" was "doing for the American girl of this generation." He concluded that as a bicycle rider, Oakley had few equals. But cycling was not Oakley's major campaign. Rather, she intended to draw women into shooting. Annie used two arguments: that shooting provided fine sport
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