Shootout at the Gender Corral: Annie Oakley Deconstructs Gender

Abstract

Shootout at the Gender Corral:Annie Oakley Deconstructs Gender L. Clare Bratten (bio) From 1954 to 1956, television's Annie Oakley (played by actress Gail Davis) competed and won effortlessly in a rough-and-tumble man's world that valued skilled shooting, riding, and toughness of mind. A spunky, pigtailed young blonde woman in a fringed buckskin outfit, Annie was fearless, truthful, unflirtatious, and determined to oppose law-breakers, immorality, and selfishness wherever they arose. Although a pie on the kitchen table might be identified as one that she had baked, within seconds of learning about trouble Annie would leap onto her horse and gallop off to interrupt another round of criminal behavior. Tender hearted and warm toward her kid brother, Tagg, she was flinty-eyed and unruffled after shooting the gun out of the hand of a villain or surveying the carnage of a gun battle. And in the weekly introductory credits, Annie was shown overtaking a runaway stagecoach, stealthily climbing in a window, and doing trick riding, including one breathtaking sequence in which she stands on the saddle of her horse while the horse is moving at a full gallop and shoots the center out of a target held by a cowboy—the ace of spades from a deck of cards. Although the character of Annie Oakley had been popularized in 1946 by Ethel Merman in the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun, she remained innovative as a network heroine because she was so different from other representations of femininity on television in the 1950s. Prime-time shows such as I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Our Miss Brooks, Mama, and Private Secretary generated images of women as homemakers, mothers-in-law, teachers, and secretaries. In sharp contrast, Annie Oakley, an altered vision of the original historical person, was portrayed as a hero—not a sitcom mother but the star of her own action-adventure series. By the standards of the time, the vision of femininity this series presented was radical, the show itself an anomalous variation on the ubiquitous children's adventures and Westerns that television aired over that decade. Annie Oakley was both entertainment and profit-generating medium at a historical moment when program formats and scheduling were changing quickly as networks, programmers, and advertisers sought ways to secure viewership and stabilize the industry. How did the institutional practices of television programming in the 1950s produce a show that challenged some of the dominant myths about gender roles? How and why did the text and genre work to construct Annie as an essentially genderless being whose femininity was so uncertain that her clashing gendered attributes, a pair of pigtails and a buckskin shirt, appeared to be performative iconic accoutrements stuck on like pie dough? This article will examine the show within the context of its genre and children's programming in general in order to illuminate some of the ways in which Annie Oakley destabilized conventional representations of femininity. According to media historian Joseph Turow, early television of the late 1940s to mid-1950s adopted the program formats that governed children's radio. These shows were live and segmented into fifteen-or thirty-minute episodes. Turow claims that by the 1930s, the radio shows broadcast for children changed from storybook or variety-show presentations to "thriller dramas," often adapted from popular sources such as newspaper comics, pulp magazines, movies, or juvenile novels (17). These serials used open formats with "cliff-hanger endings" that, like soap operas, were designed to encourage repeat listening. In 1948 the format began to change when ABC developed the episodic half-hour format called a "series," which presented a show with a complete plot but whose characters returned each week. Two afternoon radio series, Jack Armstrong and Sky King, were the first to finish out a story but to return the next week with the same cast of characters in a new adventure. This series format, as opposed to the cliffhanger serial, became the staple fictional format used by television, except for daytime soap operas. The television series of the 1950s also slotted these programs in the late afternoon and early dinner hours, the same hours devoted to children...