“Our Lady Sportsmen”: Gender Class, and Conservation in Sport Hunting Magazines, 1873-1920

Abstract

In 1968Outdoor Liferan a retrospective piece that examined the turn-of-the-century origins of this popular sportsmen's magazine. In the article, editor William Rae noted, with some dismay, that two out of the first three stories in the December 1905 issue featured women hunters, including the tale of a “tireless Diana” who left her corset at home in order to take to the fields. “One wonders,” Rae commented dryly, “whether men really were men in those days, as we have been led to believe.” Clearly, Rae found the spectacle of sport hunting women unusual, and he assumed that their presence in the pages of a hunting periodical called into question the masculinity of earlier sportsmen. The connection that Rae andOutdoor Lifereaders made in 1968 between hunting and masculinity remains a commonplace. As feminist scholar Mary Zeiss Stange argues, hunting “might be, in the popular mind, the most male-identified cultural pursuit.”