CHEYENNE — Notable female rodeo legends have paved the way for women’s participation in this male-dominated event, but not without some roadblocks along the way.
Cowgirls of the West Museum Director Pam Cooper said the participation of women in rodeo events greatly evolved over time. Before the 1930s, women competed in roughstock events, as well as steer roping and street wrestling — and they were good at it.
Roughstock events are where competitors ride a bucking horse or bull either bareback or in a saddle, according to the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA).
Cooper credited Eloise Fox Hastings, later famously known as just Fox Hastings, as being one of the first women to pave the way for female competition in rodeo sports. Hastings learned how to wrestle steers from her first husband and soon became the most popular female “bulldogger” of her time, in the 1920s.
“Fox kind of epitomizes a lot of the early-year cowgirls,” Cooper said.
Bulldogging, which is another term for steer wrestling, is an incredibly dangerous sport. It requires the person to race alongside the steer on horseback, leap off and wrestle the animal to the ground.
A steer typically weighs twice as much as a contestant, and by the time the two connect, they’re each traveling at 30 miles per hour, according to the PRCA. A 2020 analysis published in the National Institute of Health concluded that “steer wrestling has the greatest risk of injury for timed event athletes.”
But that didn’t stop Hastings.
At just 16 years old, she ran away from her home in Sacramento, California, and joined the Irwin Brothers Wild West Show in 1914, according to the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame.
She eventually met her first husband, Mike Hastings, who was “one of the great bulldoggers of early rodeo,” according to the National Rodeo Hall of Fame. Mike showed her how to steer wrestle, a sport only available to men at the time, Cooper said.
“Women never did that,” Cooper said. “They just figured women weren’t strong enough.”
Fox Hastings soon rose to international fame as a world phenomenon, being one of the first women to wrestle steer competitively.
“Every time the rodeo traveled to another town, all the attention was on Fox,” Cooper said.
Fox Hastings’ husband didn’t handle her sudden rise to fame very well, Cooper said, and the couple divorced. She married again around 1930 to champion bronc rider Charles Wilson — however, her story comes to a sad ending.
When Wilson died of a sudden heart attack in July 1948, Fox Hastings died a short time later, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a hotel room.
“She was very lonely,” Cooper said.
Women in rodeo faced a lot of challenges, both medically and from male competitors, Cooper said. Many of them did not have children, and Cooper speculated it was due to internal damage to their reproductive organs from the bronc and bull riding. She said many of these women found blood in their urine a few hours after a competition.
“It just wasn’t a pretty picture,” Cooper said.
‘When rodeo died for women’
In the early 1900s, major rodeo competitions, including the Pendleton Round-Up, Cheyenne Frontier Days and Calgary Stampede, featured female bronc and bull riders in their roughstock competitions, according to a Northern Light Media article . Women also famously competed in other male-dominated sports, including steer wrestling and roping.
At the turn of the century, Cooper said, women were riding and competing against men in the rodeo.
“But there came a time when the men realized they were getting good,” Cooper said. “The women were getting good.”
Mabel DeLong Strickland was awarded Cheyenne’s coveted McAlpin Trophy in 1922, making her the All-Around Champion Cowgirl. Strickland was a famous trick-rider in the early 1900s, known for her daring exhibitions, such as passing under the belly of a galloping horse or getting her mare to jump over automobiles, according to the National Rodeo Hall of Fame .
She also competed in steer wrestling and roping. In 1922, Strickland held a personal best time of roping a steer in 18 seconds flat at the Pendleton Round-Up, “almost beating the men’s world record,” according to the NRHF.
Cooper said other cowboy competitors would approach her husband and ask him to convince his wife to pull out, saying she “was too much competition.”
But probably the most significant change for women in rodeo history happened after a fatal bronc riding incident in 1929. Cooper said a lot of the stock contractors and rodeo promoters decided it would be safer for female bronc riders to tuck their feet into the cinch, a strap of the saddle that ran underneath the horse’s belly.
This technique was called hobbling, but the women weren’t used to being attached so tightly to the horse’s back.
“They were used to bouncing up and down on a bronc,” Cooper said. “That’s how their body muscles learned that.”
Bonnie McCarroll, another famous female bronc rider, was involved in a fatal accident, which many speculate ended female participation in roughstock events, according to Judy Crandall, author of “Cowgirls: Early Images and Collections.”
McCarroll was hobbled to her horse during a competition when the horse spooked and fell to the ground. The horse, lying on its side, was trying to get up, but McCarroll was tightly strapped to its back and couldn’t escape. Her head struck the ground repeatedly as the bronc tried to get up and fell to the ground. She died eight days later from her injuries.
“That’s when the promoters said women are not going to do this anymore,” Cooper said. “At that point, in 1929, women really were pulled away from the rodeo.”
Women still competed in barrel racing and trick riding, but roughstock ended for women after that point. There was a slight resurgence in the 1940s, when the Girls Rodeo Association, known today as the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association, was formed, “but that didn’t really pick up much either,” Cooper said.
“There were still trick riders, there were still some ropers,” she said. “But there was no roughstock. And that is kind of when rodeo died for women.”
Getting back in the saddle
Although very few women are seen in professional roughstock rodeo events, there is a growing emergence of cowgirls who are looking to get back in the saddle.
A petition created in 2015 asked the National High School Rodeo Association (NHSRA) to allow female high school students compete in bull riding. The petition garnered a total of 207 supporters, and a few female high school students commented on the petition, arguing women should be allowed to compete.
Kendall Oakley, who started the petition, said she’s a female bull rider who was “rudely” rejected by the NHSRA when she asked for acceptance into the competition.
“I understand that it is a dangerous sport, but it is 2015,” Oakley wrote. “The amount of females riding bulls is only growing, and I know tons of girls throughout the U.S., and even Australia, that are bull riders.”
The petition was shared on the Women’s Roughstock Foundation Facebook page, a small group of 51 members supporting female roughstock participation in national high school and college rodeo events. However, the NHSRA 2022-24 rulebook still bans female high school students from competing in bull riding.
“Unfortunately, women have encountered many obstacles while trying to pursue their dreams in the competitive events of bull and bronc riding,” the WRF says. “Since high school rodeo and college rodeo associations will not allow a woman to ride in a ‘men’s’ sport, most of us have had to make a jump from junior rodeo to professional rodeo competitions.”
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