Blog #4 - Rooster Cogburn/ High Noon/ Little Jo

High Noon (1952), Rooster Cogburn (1975), and The Ballad of Little Jo (1993) are films that represent the changing status of and attitudes towards women. The main female characters are different, but each are contrasted with their environment, representing how these women represent progress towards the modern day woman.
In High Noon, the main character, Will Kane marries a Quaker woman named Amy Fowler. Kane is the marshal of the town for one more day, and on this day, Frank Miller, a killer he put in jail years ago, has returned seeking revenge. As a powerful male figure, Kane accepts his duty to the people of Hadleyville to remain and face near certain death. Kane has no diplomatic intentions, and knows that the only way to settle the dispute is through the law of the gun. Amy, a pacifist by religion, has seen her father and brother die because of guns. Amy does not understand Kane's decision to stay and fight Miller and his sidekicks. She chooses to leave Kane behind and to take the twelve o'clock train out of Hadleyville, the same time Miller will be arriving. As Tompkins explains: "... a set of oppositions [are] fundamental to the way the Western thinks about the world. There are two choices: either you can remain in a world of illusions, by which is understood religion, culture, and class distinctions... or you can face life as it really is -- blood, death, a cold wind blowing, and a gun in the hand (48)." Amy's decision to protect Kane and join him in the gun fight symbolizes the beginning of the women's equality movement. By facing life as it really is, Amy establishes herself as a masculine woman,who Kane and the town of Hadleyville then see in a new light.
In Rooster Cogburn, John Wayne also plays a classic western sheriff, a man who shoots first and asks questions later. For this reason, the town judge removes his tin badge but gives Wayne's character Rooster Cogburn an ultimatum; if he chases down and brings the notorious criminal Breed to justice, his badge will be returned to him. During his pursuit of Breed, Cogburn arrives in Fort Ruby to find that Breed and his gang of criminals have already killed many members of the Indian residents. He finds a woman and an Indian boy and learns that the woman, Eula Goodnight, is the daughter of a reverend who was killed in the attack. After bringing Eula and the Indian boy, Wolf, to safety, Cogburn leaves to pursue Breed further. Eula and Wolf buy supplies and insist on joining Cogburn. For the rest of the film, the developing relationship between Cogburn and Goodnight is in the limelight. Goodnight uses language to break down Cogburn's stout introversion. Tompkins clarifies: "Drawing on Octavio Paz's definition of the macho as a 'hermetic being, closed up in himself' ("women are inferior beings because, in submitting, they open themselves up")". She continues, "Schwenger shows... ' it is by talking... that one opens up to another person and becomes vulnerable. It is by putting words to an emotion that it becomes feminized.'(56)" By engaging Cogburn in conversation throughout their journey, Goodnight breaks down Cogburn's defenses and begins to appreciate his masculinity and understand why he is the man he is. By 1975, when Rooster Cogburn was released, the second wave of the feminist movement was in full stride and while the second wave failed to establish that women had the same rights as men, it established that men needed to respect women as partners, not as a second sex. While Goodnight is still not quite equal to Cogburn by the end of the film, the two understand that there are gains to be had from having a mutual respect between them.
The Ballad of Little Jo tells the story of a woman choosing to pose as a man in order to escape both her past and the poor treatment women receive in the west during the 1880s. She creates a new life for herself in which the town respects her as a sheep herder. However, society only respects her because they believe she is a man; in scenes where Jo's true identity is found out, the male members of the scenes have a severely negative response and even express feelings of betrayal. When Jo is forced to fight against representatives from a cattle company who want to buy all the land in the area, it remains clear to the audience that she isn't as emotionally comfortable of killing others, even in the face of death. When she kills the two gun men, she struggles with the emotional consequences. Despite of this, she is established as the hero in the film and the citizens of Ruby City respect her as they would any man. In one of the last scenes, the citizens of Ruby City and Jo's friends discover that she was a woman after she dies. Her friends are angry and feel betrayed as if Jo played them. In the 1990's, despite women being established as equal to men, there still existed large amounts of prejudice in the workplace and in American society. The Ballad of Little Jo shows that women are just as capable of making a tough living as men, and that the reasons for prejudice against women lack depth and objectivity.