SOURCE: Lenz, William E. “The Function of Women in Old Southwestern Humor: Re-reading Porter's Big Bear and Quarter Race Collections.” Mississippi Quarterly 46, no. 4 (fall 1993): 589-600.

In the following essay, Lenz investigates the role of women in Southwestern humor stories through a reading of William T. Porter's anthologies The Big Bear of Arkansas and A Quarter Race in Kentucky.

Old Southwestern Humor flourished from approximately 1830 to 1860 in local papers such as the La Fayette East Alabamian, in widely read regional publications such as the New Orleans Picayune, and in that national clearinghouse for frontier writers, the New York Spirit of the Times. The numerous sketches of backwoods life were primarily contributed by professional men who enjoyed adopting the title of “Correspondent” to record the manners, morals, and odd customs of the inhabitants of the Old Southwest—Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas. Lawyers...