Hunting

Contemporary Women as Hunters

Nonetheless, it is clear that while hunting has in most times and places been a predominantly male activity, women have also been among the ranks of hunters, sometimes hunting cooperatively with men, sometimes hunting on their own. The most frequently cited examples of female hunters include those women in the ancient world “to whom” the Greek historian Xenophon commented “the goddess has given this blessing (i.e., a love of hunting)”; a long line of royal aristocratic European women stretching from Elizabeth I of England and Sweden's Queen Christina to the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, a renowned 19th-century fox hunter; pioneer women on the American frontier; female adventurers who hunted in Asia and Africa during the period of Empire; women of contemporary indigenous populations like the Tiwi Aborigines in Australia, central Africa's Mbuti Pygmies, and the Philippine Agta peoples; and, most recently, the dramatically increased numbers of female hunters in North America in the last decades of the 20th century.

Reckoning the precise number of American women afield today is an inexact science at best, since several states do not specify gender on hunting licenses, and even states that do often neglect to track that information. But according to figures released by the National Shooting Sports Foundation in 1995, between 1988 and 1993 the number of women hunting with firearms in the United States increased by 23 percent, with women accounting for roughly 10 percent of hunters in the United States, a percentage that appears to have remained fairly consistent since then. Currently, 15 percent of Canadian hunters are female. In the United States, rural women are three times more likely to hunt than their urban counterparts. The six U.S. states with the highest percentages of women hunters are, not surprisingly, also states with predominantly rural populations: Wyoming and Montana (states where one in five hunters is female), Wisconsin, Arkansas, Minnesota, and Texas. The pattern of higher rural hunting participation is similar in Canada.

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