Women take a stand in Netflix's Old West miniseries 'Godless'

Bill Keveney | USA TODAY

The Old West is no longer just a man's world in Godless.

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Netflix's seven-episode limited series (streaming Wednesday) is a gender makeover, as women take center stage in a genre usually focused almost entirely on men.

Godless is set in La Belle, N.M., a struggling 1880s community populated almost entirely by women after a mining accident claimed nearly all of the men. Their mettle is tested after widowed rancher Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery), who lives on the outskirts of town, takes in wounded outlaw Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell), who’s being pursued by Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels) and his marauding band of killers.

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“Like most of the women in Godless, Alice is like steel,” says Dockery (Downton Abbey, Good Behavior), whose character has been shunned by the town because she married a Native American. “Alice represents a lot of women who had experienced great loss and hard times. They’re incredibly tough because of what they’ve been through.”

“Women’s lives at that time often focused upon domestic life and childcare (and) their employment opportunities were limited by their gender," she says. “The women of La Belle are given the opportunity, albeit through tragedy, to shift roles and (they do it) very successfully. They are liberated in a way and become empowered by that.”

Creator Scott Frank says remote Western outposts, where laws and social customs were mere suggestions, have long been seen as a crucible for examining male character. But that same test also applies to women.

“Why not explore womanhood in the Old West?” he asks. “There’s this question of what it means to be a man (but) at the same time, women were held back by men, by religion and by the environment. To see those women, once trapped and now empowered, was an interesting place to start telling a story.”

Mary Agnes McNue (Merritt Wever), who lost her husband in the mine explosion, now wears his clothes, carries the biggest rifle in town and is in a relationship with a woman who once worked in the town’s now-defunct brothel.

“The strange thing about the accident, although it’s tragic and horrible, is that it opened up a space for her to live a little differently,” Wever says. “I can’t imagine in that kind of environment that it was so rare to come across across a woman like Mary Agnes.”

As for a feminist tone, Wever says: “I don’t think the moral of the story is that all these women are waiting to be saved or are looking for husbands (to) solve their problems.”

Frank says it’s an “interesting coincidence” that Godless, originally a 2002 feature-film script, looks at gender roles and women’s empowerment at a time when the subject is front and center in the national conversation.

But father figures also are explored in the broken relationship between Frank Griffin and Roy Goode, and in the way Alice’s son, Truckee, looks up to Roy. Godless looks at the meaning of bravery and cowardice in the character of Mary Agnes’s brother, Sheriff Bill McNue (Scoot McNairy).

Frank also visits Blackdom, a nearby town named after a real New Mexico community that was home to freed slaves and black former soldiers.

Jessica Sula, who plays Louise Hobbs, a young Blackdom woman, says her character stands up for herself in difficult circumstances.

“All the gals, we loved researching women of the West,” she says. “There are so many women who made that trek and that journey. It was a gift to start trying to educate ourselves on real people who lived this.”