"Outlaw Women in the Nineteenth Century West"

Susan Wyle, Stanford Program in Writing and Rhetoric explores how the lurid rhetoric of dime novels and illustrated weekly newspapers glamorized outlaw women like Calamity Jane and Belle Starr. Only by piecing together diaries, letters, parole applications, and court records have scholars of women in the West begun to understand the degree of violence these women endured when caught. How did they find agency in their own writing, and how did some of these women manage to write their way out of prison?