Stange, a teacher and experienced hunter, challenges the traditional assumptions about femininity and masculinity by relating her experiences as a hunter and sharp shooter in the gender debates. It's refreshing to read Stange's arguments about why hunting should be a part of our culture just as it is a part nature, and her ideas about how culture pathologizes female aggression through its theories of evolution, religion, and even feminism. The writing itself eloquently shifts back and forth from cogent critical argument to lyrical descriptions of the hunt, adding to the originality of her thesis. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Woman the Hunter

Politics & Social Sciences

Stange, Mary Zeiss

Social Sciences

Beacon Pr

Over two million American women hunt. By taking up weapons for the explicit purpose of killing, they are shattering one of Western culture's oldest and most firmly entrenched taboos. The image of a woman 'armed and dangerous' is profoundly threatening to our collective psyche--and it is rejected by macho males and radical feminists alike. Woman the Hunter juxtaposes unsettlingly beautiful accounts of the author's own experiences hunting deer, antelope, and elk with an argument that builds on the work of thinkers from Aldo Leopold to Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Exploring how women and men relate to nature and violence, Mary Zeiss Stange demonstrates how false assumptions about women and about hunting permeate contemporary thought. Her book is a profound critique of our society's evasion of issues that make us uncomfortable, and it culminates in a surprising claim: that only by appreciating the value of hunting can we come to understand what it means to be human. Controversial and original, defying easy stereotypes,Woman the Hunter is sure to provoke strong reactions in almost every reader.

Literature & Fiction

Short Stories & Anthologies

Beacon Press

Presents a collection of forty-six stories by female hunters describing their experiences.

Heart Shots

Sports & Outdoors

Hunting & Fishing

Stackpole Books

“A heart shot is what every big game hunter hopes for,” Editor Mary Zeiss Stange explains in the introduction to Heart Shots, “that perfect shot placement, whether of bullet or arrow, which ensures a quick, humane kill. A heart shot is also what the best hunting writing has always aimed for—that certain image, or theme, or turn of phrase that strikes to the core of our flesh-and-blood humanity, piercing the tissue-thin membrane between life and death.”Hunting and writing about it have not commonly been thought of as women’s work, but today women are hunting and writing about it in unprecedented numbers. This collection of stories by 46 hunters who happen to be female shows us that in fact some women have always hunted, and some have written dazzling accounts of their experiences. What you’ll find in k to nature and basics and to express in narrative, image, and metaphor the complex meaning of being predator, such impulses are ageless and genderless.There are differences in the way women go about hunting and telling its story. Some are subtle and some are startling. In this marvelous collection a full range of writers from hard-edged realists to contemplative naturalists express the complex thought and emotion that constitute hunting with intelligence and insight. These women are aware of the fact that they are doing something distinctly out of the ordinary. And this is a book distinctly out of the ordinary as well, to be enjoyed, pondered, and savored by women and men alike, all who appreciate a good story well told.[Stories and essays written by Mary Jobe Akeley, Kim Barnes, Nellie Bennett, Durga Bernhard, Courtney Borden, and many more.]

Heart Shots (Stackpole Classics)

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.

Gun Women: Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America (Fast Track Books)

Oyster, Carol K.

Sociology

NYU Press

Mary Zeiss Stange's story of running a bison ranch with her husband in southeastern Montana--on the outskirts of nowhere and far-from-here--is a narrative of survival in a landscape and a society at once harsh and alluring. In this series of essays she illustrates the realities of ranch life at a time when the "New West" of subdivision, "ranchettes," telecommuting, and tourism collides with the "True West" of too much, too little, too hard, and too harsh. This society is molded by the climate, and both run to extremes, simultaneously unforgiving, often brutal, yet capable of unalloyed charm and breathtaking beauty.Her stories explore the myths and realities of ranch life in modern America--the brandings, rodeos, and demolition derbies that are major events, and the social, environmental, and political factors at work in shaping the land and the people.Less memoir than deep history of people and place, these vivid, naturalistic tales examine the complex relationships that comprise life in the rural West today.

Hard Grass: Life on the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

University of New Mexico Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stange, Mary Zeiss. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Stange, Mary Zeiss

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stange, Mary Zeiss. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Woman the Hunter

Woman the Hunter

Heart Shots

Heart Shots (Stackpole Classics)

Gun Women: Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America (Fast Track Books)

Hard Grass: Life on the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch