“Even in the best and most peacefully civilized countries many occasions arise when a woman versed in the knowledge and use of firearms may find that information and skill of great importance”
“I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how to handle babies.”
“There are always women who will take men on their own terms. If I were a man I wouldn’t bother to change while there are women like that around.”
If anything, Annie Oakley believed in the importance of a well armed woman.
In the early 20th century research I am involved with, I am coming across news bits about women using firearms defending themselves and unfortunately using them also to settle the husband’s infidelity. But what it has left me even more shocked has been the number of wives and lovers whose lives ended tragically at the hands of husbands and boyfriends, some going as far as exterminating a family, babies included.
I wonder what happened that shifted the idea of self-reliance from the late 19th century to one of depending on males and strangers for their security on the 20th. Women had to be aware of their influence and it was them who moved the Temperance movement (yes, a mistake, but they managed to get the Volstead Act passed) and Suffragism.
The Ladies of the time got the country to be dry and they fought for their right to vote, but somewhere along the trip they lost the will to defend themselves? Who started the “Proper Ladies should not carry a gun and just faint in case of danger” bullcrap. This is something I would love to find out.
I am gonna close with another Annie Oakley quote:
“I ain’t afraid to love a man. I ain’t afraid to shoot him either.”
Preach it, girl!
The early 20th Century saw the ‘real’ beginning of the Progressive Movement, where those within it with an ulterior, statist, political agenda saw the Temperance ‘subsection’ of it as a vehicle and morphed it into the idea into the Fascist “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”.
People who didn’t have to depend on the state for their personal security were seen as dangerous to the statist political agenda.
Bring the ladies who the Temperance Movement indoctrinated with “The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine” to consider that ‘gunz is badz’ and you get the same effect.
Women do have an amazing way to influence men.