From the earliest days of storytelling, the courageous man has been celebrated in myth and legend. Every culture develops stories about dauntless adventurers, valiant patriots, fearless warriors, and heroic leaders. These stories teach as well as entertain and set up positive role models to inspire future generation. And sometimes, these dauntless, valiant, fearless, and heroic individuals are women.
Stories about women in the American West illustrate the depth of courage, the physical bravery, and commitment to a cause that impelled them to throw off the constraints of nineteenth century conventions and plunge into situations that many men of their era would not, and did not, face.
I wish young women were aware of the sacrifice lady settlers made. It would be refreshing to hear any teenage girl today say they wanted to be like frontier author and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote or pioneer Nancy Kelsey. Ask most little girls what they want to be when they grow up and chances are they’ll say “Supermodel.”
Models and movie stars are the aesthetic benchmarks against which we measure ourselves, regardless of how unattainable their beauty may be without access to personal trainers, extensive cosmetic surgery, and pharmaceutical speedballs. That’s why people go to plastic surgeons asking for Angelina’s lips and Kim’s cheekbones. I guess I’d be able to bear this phenomenon a little better if an edict would be passed forbidding any “Supermodel” from ever uttering the words “Modeling is hard work.”
Pick up a women’s magazine and you’re privy to the kind of brainwashing that would make the director of The Manchurian Candidate envious. A glance through one of those tony tomes and you’re introduced into a no-win, parallel universe populated by spindly, overpaid nineteen-year-olds in thousand dollar frocks, and hair and makeup tips so intricate they would confound Oppenheimer. And the biggest irony is, in every single one of these magazines, there are at least five articles about how important it is to like yourself just the way you are.
Now there’s nothing wrong with not wanting to go gently into that saggy night. I’m certainly fighting it using every wrinkle cream advertised by those twenty-something girls that interrupt my time watching Justified, but I’d like to think young women want more for themselves than to appear on the cover of Glamour magazine. I’d like to think they’d want to explore rugged, uncharted territories barefoot and carrying a one-year-old baby on their hip like Nancy Kelsey did in 1841. It wasn’t that long of a walk from Independence, Missouri to Sacramento, California. Then there was the inhospitable terrains and weather, searching for water, making a fire with cow chips, washing your clothes in a stream….
Okay. I can see why “Supermodel” is a popular option. I bet Nancy Kelsey would have preferred that to living in a cave for a weeks and fighting off wolves.
Pioneer Nancy Kelsey
