I Call Myself a Huntress
Artemis was a huntress.
I come from a family of bargain hunters, not deer hunters. I didn’t become a deer hunter until I turned 60. I’m a sustenance hunter, not a trophy hunter. I hunt deer so I can eat local, wild, organic meat.
In the process of learning to hunt, I learned about Artemis, a goddess who protects women, children, and wildlife. Her temple at Ephesus has been a place of pilgrimage and worship since the Bronze Age, and was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It is this female lineage that has informed my hunting and my memoir, Reviving Artemis: The Making of a Huntress.
In “Don’t Call Me Huntress,” Alice Jones Webb complains that “huntress” is a patronizing title—and for many good reasons. She writes, “Huntress feels all wrong . . . Like wearing high heels in the backcountry when what you need are boots with good tread.” Like Webb, I object to the promotion of pink for women who hunt. I don’t want pink camo. I want well-manufactured technical clothing that will fit my female body and keep me warm in the November woods. In the contexts that Webb cites—a man at a party, the influencer economy, and advertising that borders on pornography, the term is demeaning. As Webb points out, hunting is a strenuous activity where makeup, fragrance, and fashion have no place.
But the word “huntress” does.
I want readers to know that my book is about a female hunter before they even open it. “Huntress” says that. I want the title to reclaim the term going back millennia, and to correct the mistaken belief that in prehistoric civilizations only men hunted. Recently, when archeologists in Peru dug up a 9,000-year-old skeleton buried with a hunting toolkit of stone projectile points and animal-processing tools, they assumed they’d found the remains of a male hunting chief. But the bones and tooth enamel indicate that the skeleton found at the Wilamaya Patjxa site was a female between seventeen and nineteen years old.
The book’s cover art further amplifies the power of “huntress.” The woodcut of an older woman with antlers growing from her head illustrates the close connection between the huntress and her prey. For me, hunting is not about domination, but about the connection to life and death. I don’t take or post trophy photos. I say a blessing. The deer feeds me.
Currently, the overall population of hunters in the United States is declining, but the number of women who hunt is on the rise. I’m one of them.
I am a huntress.
Reviving Artemis: The Making of a Huntress, my memoir of learning to hunt when I turned sixty, will publish on November 4, 2025 and is available to preorder now.
