Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Restraining Masculinity on the Texas Frontier

The Clements Center for Southwest Studies invites you to bring your brown bag lunch to a lecture by Clements Center Fellow, Jacqueline Moore who will explain how historians have often documented efforts of ranchers to control their workers economically, but the attempt to control ranch hands also reflected a gender hierarchy. Cowboys and cattlemen had differing, and ultimately competing, ideas of masculine behavior. While the rest of the country may have viewed cowboys as the ideal masculine image, early cattlemen treated their employees with paternalistic concern. Their “boys” were just that, in a stage of arrested development, less educated and in need of a firm hand to mold them into men. While they respected the cowboys’ abilities, they nonetheless infantilized them. As the ranching industry became more impersonal, the corporate owners believed that the unrestrained masculinity of the cowboy was a challenge to their authority as well as a liability to their profits. Through a series of regulations and laws they attempted to bring the cowboy firmly under control. In particular, they tried to downplay the cowboy’s masculinity by marginalizing his work skills and restricting his behavior at play. Ultimately, faced with little opportunity to control their lives in reality, the cowboys clung to fictionalized versions of cowboy masculinity to defend their reputations. Moore is Professor of History at Austin College and received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Maryland in 1994. She will spend the '07-'08 academic year at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies as a Summerlee Foundation Research Fellow for the Study of Texas History completing her manuscript, “Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Nineteenth Century Masculinity and Class on the Texas Frontier," for publication.

Information from the venue’s website