As the author of Woman the Hunter (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997/1998), the first cultural history of the relationship of women and hunting, Mary Zeiss Stange has gained international recognition as the primary scholar working on the subject today. She has been profiled in The Chronicle of Higher Education, USA Today, and in widely syndicated Associated Press stories; has been interviewed by The New York Times, Sierra Magazine, Outside Magazine, Montana Quarterly and the BBC; and has done numerous interviews on National Public Radio, including “Talk of the Nation” and “To the Best of Our Knowledge.” Stange and her work were the subject of “She Got Game,” a lengthy feature interview by Barbara Ehrenreich, in the June/July 1999 issue of Ms. Magazine.
Stange’s other books include Gun Women: Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America, co-authored with Carol K. Oyster (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Heart Shots: Women Write about Hunting, a critical anthology of historical and contemporary women’s outdoor writing, published in August 2003 by Stackpole Books; and Hard Grass: Life on the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch, whichtraces the changing realities of high plains ranch life in light of contemporary environmental theory (Albuquerque: University of new Mexico Press, 2010). She also was general editor of the “Sisters of the Hunt” reprint series of classic women’s writing about hunting, which Stackpole published from fall of 2003 through 2005. More recently she has been consulting, in the US and Europe, on the complex relationship between hunter/conservationism and “green” environmentalism, and was invited to be a featured speaker at the first-ever international conference on Women and Sustainable Hunting sponsored by the International Council for Game and Wildlife Conservation (CIC) in Bratislava, Slovak Republic, in November 2012. She is now an Expert Member of the US delegation to CIC, and a member of its Artemis Organizing Committee. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Orion: The Hunters Institute.
Stange leads something of a double life—college teaching in upstate New York, and ranching and hunting in Montana, where she and her husband Doug operate the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch. In her writing, too, she moves between, and is equally at home in, two distinct worlds, having produced numerous articles for both scholarly and commercial publications. She has written regularly for USA Today, as a member of its editorial Board of Contributors. She also writes about women and feminism, contemporary religion, environmentalism, and various other political and social issues for such national publications as Big Sky Journal, High Country News, Bugle, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Women’s Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Times. Her essay “Last Man Out of the Hunting Lodge, Please Turn Out the Lights” was in 1998 awarded the Izaak Walton League’s “Thinking Like a Mountain” prize for cutting-edge writing on environmental issues, and in spring 2006, she won first prize in Sierra Club’s “Why I Hunt” essay contest. Hard Grass: Life on the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch was a Gold Medal winner for Best Regional Non-Fiction from the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards.
She is Professor of Women’s Studies and Religion and Director of the Religion Program, and formerly Director of the Women’s Studies Program, at Skidmore College. Stange was the 2004-2005 Edwin R. Moseley Faculty Lecturer at Skidmore, an award which “acknowledges an exemplary level of scholarship and achievement that sets a standard for academic excellence at Skidmore. It is the highest honor that the Skidmore faculty can bestow on one of its own.”
Contributions to Humans & Nature:
- Hunting the Edges
A response to “Does hunting make us human?” - Hunting/Human/Nature
From Minding Nature’s September 2014, Volume 7, Number 3 issue.
Noteworthy Links:
- Woman the Hunter
Mary Zeiss Stange’s seminal book on the history of women and hunting.
