ABSTRACT
Gender as a category of analysis is vexing for many scholars, but perhaps especially for historians. Over the past twenty years, a number of pioneering studies about the history of men and masculinity have made it possible for historians to think specifically about the ways in which men's gender roles and competition among men have shaped the military history of early North America. There are also examples of warrior women among Euro-American women in colonial America, although their stories tend to share many of the generic conventions of European folk tales and the penny press of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dianne Dugaw's Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 offers some context for Anglo-American warrior women by noting the long English tradition of girls who transvested as men to go to war and then became folk heroes for their exploits.
