Overview

Women, we are told, should not own guns. Women, we are told, are more likely to be injured by their own guns than to fend off an attack themselves. This ""fact"" is rooted in a fundamental assumption of female weakness and vulnerability. Why should a woman not be every bit as capable as a man of using a firearm in self-defense? And yet the reality is that millions of American women--somewhere between 11,000,000 and 17,000,000--use guns confidently and competently every day. Women are hunting, using firearms in their work as policewomen and in the military, shooting for sport, and arming themselves for personal security in ever-increasing numbers. What motivates women to possess firearms? What is their relationship to their guns? And who exactly are these women? Crucially, can a woman be a gun-owner and a feminist too? Women's growing tendency to arm themselves has in recent years been political fodder for both the right and the left. Female gun owners are frequently painted as ""trying to be like men"" (the conservative perspective) or ""capitulating to patriarchal ideas about power"" (the liberal critique). Eschewing the polar extremes in the heated debate over gun ownership and gun control, and linking firearms and feminism in novel fashion, Mary Zeiss Stange and Carol K. Oyster here cut through the rhetoric to paint a precise and unflinching account of America's gun women.

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9780814797600

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""A lively mix of memoir, cultural and historical analysis, statistics, and cross-generational profiles of women who shoot --blasting the notion that feminism and firearms are incompatible."" --Peace News

"""A lively mix of memoir, cultural and historical analysis, statistics, and cross-generational profiles of women who shoot --blasting the notion that feminism and firearms are incompatible."" --Peace News"

(<p> What should people do when they must face a criminal by themselves? Passive behavior is certainly not the safest course of action. Stange and Oyster take on the hard questions about women's fears of--and use of--guns, in virtually every imaginable context. They convincingly show that these fears are more likely to endanger women's lives and those they love than they are to save them. -John R. Lott, Jr., )-(John R. Lott Jr.), (Senior Research Scholar, School of Law, Yale University, and author of More Guns, Less Crime)

<p> A lively mix of memoir, cultural and historical analysis, statistics, and cross-generational profiles of women who shoot<br>--blasting the notion that feminism and firearms are incompatible.

Author Information

Mary Zeiss Stange is Associate Professor of Religion and Women's Studies at Skidmore College and author of Woman the Hunter. Carol K. Oyster is Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse and author of Groups: A User's Guide.

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