…I think it is more to the point to understand the legends about frontier historical personalities reveal almost nothing about the ‘period’ in which they were composed and a great deal about the ‘moral ideas’ of those who worked in manufacturing the legends (Tuska 215).
In a number of Westerns in the Fifties it became fashionable for women to undergo something of a transformation…At the beginning they ride roughshod over men, owning and operating successful ranches or saloons; only for them, by the fade, to have to be saved by a man, or at least come under the spell of a man and have to admit that they are somehow still the weaker sex (Tuska 229)
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One thing that occurs to me is that Calamity Jane exhibits the tension between women's experiences of WWII on the home front (where their labor had to replace that of men, and where they experienced a kind of radical freedom for the time) and men's expectations of women's roles upon returning from the front lines.
I realize this observation is probably nothing at all new.
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