A Tragic End to a Classic Cowgirl
Fox Hastings excelled in the bulldogging arena (but not so well outside of it).
By: Jana Bommersbach 06/01/2007
You have to wonder if it was the sexy cowboy or the opportunity to break out of the “woman’s world” that most prompted young Eloise Fox to run away from a convent school at the age of 14.
But run she did, marrying the cowboy who would help her reach stardom in the rodeo world.
Paul Raymond “Mike” Hastings was a noted bulldogger and took his wife to Irwin Brother’s Wild West Show, where she started out competing on bucking broncs and in trick riding matches. Eventually he’d show her the ropes—literally and figuratively—of bulldogging, making her a superstar.
Even the choice of her new name gives a clue that she knew she was going to be special—she dropped Eloise and went by Fox Hastings, a name the press adored.
She joined a world unlike her own. Outside the rodeo world, women couldn’t even vote. The few who worked outside the home—waitress, clerk, school marm—made less than half that of men. And the idea of a “woman athlete” was comical. But in the rodeo world, things were different. North America’s first professional female athletes were rodeo performers. They earned far more than women in traditional fields, and they openly complained when that pay was still less than that of the cowboys. “Whatever disadvantages they may have suffered relative to the men ... cowgirls were nonetheless the first significant group of professional women athletes in North America and the first to be taken seriously by the public and the press,” notes Candace Savage in her 1996 book Cowgirls.
Women trace their entry into professional rodeo life back to 1897 at the Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming (a territory that also was the first, in 1890, to give women the right to vote—30 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified). By 1916, about 240 women were competing in the rodeo circuit. Fox Hastings was one of them.
But the rodeo world wasn’t totally insulated from the outside—there were rules and taboos to consider, and one taboo was women appearing “masculine”—not only was it “un-ladylike,” but it suggested what was then called “perversion” and today is more simply known as lesbianism.
So female rodeo performers were careful to show off their feminine side. For years, they competed in skirts, sometimes split, but still skirts. Fox often wore ribbons in her red hair and was known for the bandanna she draped around her shoulders. Consider how the press described her: “To the rodeo crowd she is Fox Hastings, cowgirl extraordinaire. To neighbors she is Mrs. Mike Hastings, a good cook and tidy housekeeper.”
Or notice the surprise of The New York Times reporter who admitted, “We went behind the scenes expecting to interview half a dozen tomboys, but found ourselves in the presence of six mistresses of dignified deportment.”
The cowgirls had a powerful new message to convey, as Savage reports: “Maidenly dignity would have to look after itself when there were bucking broncs to conquer, steers to wrestle and ‘suicide drags’ to perform. Nice girls, the cowgirls’ performances said, were tough and courageous. Nice girls could get physical.”
But this was a double-edged sword. “No matter how hard they tried, rodeo cowgirls couldn’t quite get it right,” Savage notes. “Had they refused to act feminine, they would have been outcasts. By happily agreeing to do so, they marked themselves as specialty acts. In 1924, when a group of women [Fox among them] asked to enter the men-only events in Pendleton, and thereby get into the official running for the All Round Cowboy award, their request was promptly turned down. Cowgirls were not cowboys. It was only natural that women should have fewer opportunities to compete. It was only natural that they should compete for smaller purses than the guys.”
Comments (1)
Fox Hastings should be in the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame.
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