A review by liralen
Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond by Halimah Marcus

3.0

Once a year for the last five years, I have taken this path, moved from this kind of day into this same muted space and then, the Coliseum. Each year I have ridden to win a World Championship in Junior Exhibitor Hunter Pleasure, a division made up of girls under eighteen years old, and their Morgan horses, all of us outfitted for a hunt we'll never ride. We ride, instead, in circles, performing the commands of a disembodied announcer: walk, please, ladies, come down to the walk, reverse directions at the trot, canter please, riders, canter please. The most beautiful pair to follow these commands without fault wins. (Allie Rowbottom, 180)

I was never a horse girl—enchanted by the idea of horses as a child, yes, but with the clear sense that riding lessons were something for girls of a different class, that they would never be for me. My father and siblings and I went on trail rides a few times, in places far, far away from cities, and that was good enough.

And yes, the sense I get here is that riding as a sport—as it is practiced today—is something that is largely about image and class. Custom-fit riding boots costing hundreds of dollars, and time and money applied to the care and keeping of big animals, and travelling for competitions with no practical purpose...most major sports have no practical background that I know of, but it feels particularly striking here, where some of the competitions (see above) mimic something with a real-life application but in a way that is entirely divested of that application.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book connect to race, and to who thinks about race:

One day, because I’d been following some accounts connected to prominent Black travelers, I stumbled across photos from Outdoor Afro, a group of Black outdoor enthusiasts that included horseback riders. Besides photographs of myself, I couldn’t remember seeing images of a Black person on a horse before. (Sarah Enelow-Snyder, 136)

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Our history classes also taught them [white classmates] that Natives were dangerous “savages” who were vanquished by our forefathers because they were intellectually inferior. We learned that the first “American Dream” was “Manifest Destiny,” the delusion, veiled as divine purpose, that Christian settlers were destined by God to expand across the New World. I’ve lost count of how many times children and adults alike have said, “I didn’t know you still existed” to my face. Off the Rez, I was either invisible or an uncivilized relic on horseback. (Braudie Blais-Billie, 173)

Not surprisingly, it's the non-white riders who have the clearest sense of just how much whiteness and privilege there is in this form of riding. Don't get me wrong—riding was clearly a financial sacrifice for many of the writers' families—but the level of awareness varies.

If I imagine riding horses now, it's a more practical version than this: Wyoming, or Montana, or Saskatchewan, somewhere that it has a practical purpose (and wide, wide-open skies) and doesn't culminate in competitions where your posture is judged. But then, I was never a horse girl.