Free Cowgirl Up! by Heidi Thomas Page A

beginning of the end for the rodeo and Wild West show cowgirls across the country.
    But according to Steve Wursta in his documentary film From Cheyenne to Pendleton , the tide had begun to turn against cowgirls many years earlier. Wursta cites “difficulties with” Mabel Strickland of Washington, a ninety-eight-pound steer roper who set the world’s record at Frontier Days in Cheyenne in 1924. Apparently she was too talented for her male competitors’ taste. Cheyenne and Pendleton subsequently banned this cowgirl from competing against the men, and in 1926 Pendleton announced that it had eliminated competition for women in favor of paid exhibitions.
    Pendleton’s East Oregonian explained it this way: “Women now swim the English Channel and they can ride about as swiftly as can any man who ever walked, hence they do not require nor do they desire the same degree of attentiveness [as] when the Round-Up was young.”
    Wursta writes, “While on the surface this statement may not make much sense, it fits quite well with the pattern of social and economic changes that pitted the now conservative rural farming communities against the more liberal urban cities of the east after World War I.
    â€œWhile it was the environment of the west that allowed young girls to escape the restrictive urban culture to develop the skills to be called ‘cowgirls’. . . it was also the changing environment of the west that would remove women from the rodeo arena in favor of the cowboy.”
    Protective “knights-of-the-saddle syndrome,” men’s egos, and changing social mores, along with the following factors, contributed to the demise of women’s rodeo by the 1940s:
The formation of the all-male Rodeo Association of America (RAA)
Financial difficulties resulting from the stock market crash and the Great Depression
World War II
    Following the 1929 incident, an article in the Yakima Republic represented the national sentiment: “Here is an instance of human injuries and death that impels the question of whether such a show is worth such a sacrifice.”
    The age-old question reared its ugly head once again: Should women be doing something so dangerous and physical as competing in rough-stock events? Only fifty years earlier, social attitudes had shifted to allow women to enter professions and engage in activities previously open only to men. Modernists argued that everyone would benefit by women’s independence, while traditionalists insisted that marriage and domesticity were the core of women’s identity—a debate that was revived by McCarroll’s death.
    Pendleton’s rodeo board immediately ended women’s bronc riding, even as an exhibition sport, and as one of the country’s largest rodeos, that decision set a precedent other rodeos soon followed.
    According to Milt Riske, author of Those Magnificent Cowgirls , at least one veteran promoter was of the opinion that the protective cowboys’ arguments for women riders’ rights actually worked against them and contributed to the demise of women’s events.
    The second factor that contributed to the decline of women’s participation in rodeo was the Rodeo Association of America (RAA). Formed in 1929 to standardize events and regulations, its founding members made an effort to eliminate the “bloomers” and “fake rodeos” where the contests were staged and the promoters rotated the “victories” among themselves.
    Part of this standardization included selecting which events would be included in all RAA-sanctioned rodeos, which had to include men’s bronc riding, steer bulldogging, steer roping, and calf roping. This list did not include women’s bronc riding. The organization did not specifically prohibit women riding, and left it up to local rodeo committees to include the event. But when the RAA later increased the list from four to eight sanctioned events, many