rangerette

maryw commented on the word rangerette

Sexist term for a park ranger (or forest ranger) who is a woman.

I walk over to a park rangerette in a Smokey Bear uniform and ask about the sub. She tells a story about the struggle for the inner power of Crater Lake, a fight over geothermal vents.

Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, p. 157 (orig. pub. 1990)

Officially listed as semi-active, it is staffed only when blazes threaten the property of American taxpayers. Forest Service lore holds Abbey himself responsible for the cutback: ". . . fire bursts came and went with hardly a word from the North Rim tower," firefighter Stephen Pyne recalls in his memoir. Wayward as ever Abbey went AWOL from his coop—napping or writing in the tarpaper shack at the foot of the tower, entertaining visitors, or romancing "rangerettes"—proving the North Rim fire lookout to be expendable.

Michael Engelhard, Where the Rain Children Sleep: A Sacred Geography of the Colorado Plateau (2010), p. 219

See also Kilgore College Rangerettes, Wikipedia (college drill team, said to be the first precision dance team int he world).

And:

And here’s Shirley Temple — who might have been the most famous star in Hollywood at the time — dressed in a snazzy cowboy outfit and an eye-catching pair of boots. She had been appointed honorary Chief of the Texas Centennial Exposition Rangerettes (a bevy of attractive Texas women who acted as goodwill ambassadors and made personal appearances all over the country promoting the Dallas exposition).

Paulla Bosse, A Texas Centennial Scrapbook—1936, Flashback: Dallas (April 14, 2019)

July 17, 2020