Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In 1991 Nancy Floyd bought her first handgun. Soon she was participating in Ladies Day at her local shooting range and reading
Women & Guns magazine. In 1993 she began interviewing and photographing women who were fellow gun owners. In 1997 she started researching "gun women" from the past to see how they were represented in the popular imagination. Now she has brought her work together in a riveting new book, filled with remarkable photographs and candid first-person stories, accompanied by an eye-opening illustrated history of female gun ownership in America.
Sympathetic but unsentimental, Floyd presents gun-toting women young and old, including an eleven-year-old girl competing in her first gun competition, a woman whose grandmother was killed by an intruder, and a war veteran who experienced firefights while stationed in Iraq. Whatever you might think about gun-toting women before you open this book, your preconceptions are sure to be shattered by the end.
Synopsis
Using historical and contemporary accounts and visuals of America's gun women-in fiction and entertainment, sports shooting, armed self-defense, and the professional fields (police and military)-this highly illustrated volume looks at how armed women have positioned themselves within or against the mainstream culture of their time, while also revealing how mainstream America's perception of gun women have changed over time.
About the Author
Nancy Floyd is Associate Professor of Photography, Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design, Georgia State University.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Guns 101
Pleasure: Sports Shooting, Entertainment, Fiction
2. Shooting Like a Woman
3. Shooting Stars: Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley
4. Look Out! She's Got a Gun!
Power: Self-Defense
5. All Things Being Equal
Professional: Police And Military
6. Direct Fire
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index