GREENWALD, MAGGIE

(1955– )

Since the 1980s, Maggie Greenwald has worked behind the cameras in numerous roles. Her work is unapologetically feminist and her feminist Western, The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), sought to change the way Westerns portray women. The film examines the unspoken facts of life for women in the West. Awoman with a tarnished reputation had no chance for survival except as a prostitute. Jo Monaghan (Suzy Amis), banished by her family after being raped, becoming pregnant, and delivering an out-ofwedlock child, determines another route of survival: she cross-dresses and succeeds in passing as a man in a frontier community for many years. Greenwald, whose directing has been mainly for television, presents a domestic tale set in the West that has little of the grand panorama expected from a classic Western.

See also FRONTIER AS ESCAPE FROM THE CITY.