Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (review)

This fascinating, compact book tells "a long, complicated American story" about women, gender, and gun culture in the United States (x). Lucidly written and clearly argued, Her Best Shot draws from a wide range of print sources, including fiction, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, and advertisements. Its topic—women and guns in American history, from the Civil War era to the present—makes the author's episodic approach entirely defensible, if not necessary. Rather than attempting a comprehensive portrait of women soldiers, armed women, or even gun–carrying female celebrities, Browder focuses on a few paradigmatic cases to examine the influence of guns on images of women as well as on debates about citizenship, gender stereotypes, and female capacity. Her subtle arguments focus on the ways in which guns have helped to define women's relationship to the state, and how armed women have often embraced female stereotypes even as they challenged expectations in breaking down the link between violence and masculinity.

Her Best Shot is organized chronologically with a primary theme in each chapter. It begins with the Civil War and female soldiering, turns to the late nineteenth century and the women of the wild west, and follows with a study of female criminality during the interwar years. Then it shifts to assess the role of guns in overt political action, studying the culture of arms in the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s and in the militia and white supremacist movements of the late twentieth century. The last substantive chapter is a brief analysis of recently published women's gun magazines.

Browder's case studies explore many memorable figures, real and fictional: the idealized Prairie Madonna; war hero Deborah Sampson Gannett; criminals Celia Cooney (the "bob-haired bandit" of 1924 New York), Bonnie Parker, and Ma Barker; and militia movement icons Vicki Weaver and Carolyn Chute. Through both close textual readings and attention to broader cultural contexts, Browder analyzes the memoirs of Confederate spy Belle Boyd and Union secret agent Pauline Cushman, the images of the dissolute Calamity Jane and the ladylike Annie Oakley, the mass marketing of firearms, and the goals of the National Rifle Association's consumer outreach. Browder also adds new figures to our pantheon of armed American women. She discusses the prowess of Elizabeth Servaty "Plinky" Topperwein, a record-setting sharpshooter who toured on behalf of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company for nearly four decades with her husband, and of the casual racism of big-game hunter and filmmaker Osa (Leighty) Johnson.

Her Best Shot fits into the American studies tradition of Gibson and Slotkin by illuminating a culture of violence through the study of popular culture, media representations, and political spectacle.¹ Browder's previous books relied on interdisciplinary methods to assess ethnic and racial impersonation and radical culture in America during the 1930s; predictably, this book is especially insightful about radical politics, feminism, and gun culture. Browder traces the gun-laden journeys of Weatherwoman Susan Stern, Patty Hearst—kidnapping victim turned bank robber—and Black Panther Elaine Brown. Browder is also attentive to the role of armed women as symbols of both female capacity and sexual danger. As befits a subject that embraces multiple contradictions, Browder's conclusion leaves unanswered the question that she poses herself—"Is the armed woman a powerful force or a seductive fantasy?" (13)—in favor of a nuanced look at racial politics and spectacle, violence and sexuality, and arms and revolution in the gun cultures of American womanhood.