feminine ones. To describe it in feminine terms belies the truth about life in America in its early days. Life was not soft and gentle and nourishing. It was rough, tough, punishing, and strenuous, not for the faint of heart. It needed an iron will, brute strength, and determination to survive - more masculine qualities than feminine ones. In any depiction in story or film of the American West, the women who survived are painted as rough and tough, and able to keep pace with the men, outride and outshoot them, and take on all the manly chores needed to run a ranch, or a saloon in the rough and tumble western life.
Any attempt to describe early American life in feminine terms is doomed to failure. The image simply does not fit. Women needed to be tough to survive. The ideas of gentility and softness just don't fit in with the realities of early American life. Pioneering women were strong and unfeminine to a great degree, otherwise they would never have survived the harsh realities of life in the American West. It was not a life for the timid and frail. They toughened up quickly or they died. To paint the past in any feminine terms in misleading and simply wrong.
It has always been the whim of man to paint women in such terms, even when they do not exist in reality. So it has been their whim to paint the land in those terms - as something they can dominate and control. This is not because of the attributes they see in the land, but because of their need for power, their need to control all they can see and lay their hands on, their need to subjugate and rule. How can they see the masculine side of the land if they need to show their power over it? They have to show it as feminine, which they equate as weak and submissive to justify their self-righteousness in conquering the land and taming it, bringing it under their control.
Men have always used feminine terms to describe something or someone they can domi...