‘When Barbara strips off her petticoats and straps on her guns’ is the tag line from an advertisement for Barbara Stanwyck's film Cattle Queen of Montana (Allan Dwan, 1954), and it indicates one of the major shifts that took place in Stanwyck's career and image in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike many of the female stars of her generation, who were over forty by this time, Stanwyck ‘stripped off her petticoats’ and extended her film career by performing in numerous ‘B’ Westerns where strong, female roles were uncommon until the post-war era. It is for these Western roles that Stanwyck is mostly remembered today.

In the late 1940s, the Hollywood film industry faced a series of crises such as a dramatic fall in attendances, escalating costs of production, the Paramount decrees, the popularity of television, and the development of drive-ins. This marked the beginning of the end for the studio era, and of the power the major studios wielded during this period (Anderson 1994: 6). Film attendance not only decreased, but audience composition and taste changed as well. The film industry attempted to lure audiences back to the cinemas through intensively publicised films that relied on spectacle, for example through the use of widescreen or the production of large-scale epics or multi-star films (Belton 1990: 185). The industry's rapid decline led many studios to lay off staff, including stars, directors and writers, who were either forced into early retirement or freelancing. Many stars freelanced to have more creative and financial control over their images and films. Powerful talent agencies would offer package deals of stars, writers and directors to Hollywood producers. Because of these shifts in the Hollywood film industry, many mature female stars were forced to end their careers in the 1950s because there were insufficient parts for mature women. Film production changed and teenage audiences, especially, increased, so there was less demand for veteran female film stars. Stanwyck's maturity, emphasised by her rapidly greying hair, affected the roles she played but also turned her into a role model for mature women. In this chapter I examine the models of womanhood Stanwyck offered during this period.