Cowgirls

While women in a number of countries in North and South America and in places like Australia and New Zealand compete in rodeos, the competition or display of lassoing, bronco-riding, calf-roping, and steer-wrangling is most closely associated with the United States and the American West. Male riders, called cowboys, and female riders, called cowgirls, compete in the rodeo, but cowgirls are not just relegated to this world. The term cowgirl encompasses women in the rodeo, wild west shows, commercial portrayals, women of the frontier, and pioneering women in the more general sense.

Cowgirls are associated primarily with the rodeo, and that is where female riders first received their name. Supposedly, President Theodore Roosevelt bestowed the cowgirl name on Lucille Mulhall, one of the best-known rodeo competitors in the early 20th century. Since then, the term has been used to describe any number of women, but most often for women in ranching and rodeo. As working cowgirls on ranches, women rarely held official positions like the male cowboys. However, female relatives of ranch owners and employees often worked alongside their male relatives. The ranching cowgirls may not have been paid, but they often completed the same tasks as their male counterparts.

As ranching led to the formation of rodeos in the late 19th century, women moved from the ranching world to the rodeo arena. Until the 1930s, rodeo cowgirls competed almost equally with male riders and at times even competed directly against them. Following a restriction in the events available to them, women formed their own professional organization in the late 1940s and since then, have worked to regain more equal footing and recognition as rodeo cowgirls.

In addition to competing in rodeos, women also appeared as cowgirls in the many wild west shows that were popular in the 1910s and 1920s, the most famous of which was the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, which toured the United States, Australia, Europe, and South America. Some of the cowgirls rode horses and performed riding and roping tricks, but others like Annie Oakley were sharpshooters or other types of performers. With the popularity of cowgirls in rodeos and wild west shows, television and movies soon commercialized the cowgirl image. Women like Gail Davis, who played Annie Oakley on a television show from 1954 to 1957, and Dale Evans, who married and performed with Roy Rogers in more than 20 films, popularized the genre of the western.

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The term cowgirl encompasses women in the rodeo, wild west shows, commercial portrayals, women of the frontier, and pioneering women, as well as modern women working on ranches and farms.

Although not considered to be cowgirls in the traditional sense because they do not ride horses, work on ranches, or compete in rodeos, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame includes “trail-blazers” of the American West like Sandra Day O'Connor, who grew up in Arizona and was the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, and female artists in and of the west, like Willa Cather, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of O Pioneers. Even as ranching and the origins of cowgirls have faded in the 21st century, this updated definition of a cowgirl allows the traditional image to live well beyond the borders of ranching and rodeos.

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