Women Try Hand at Noodling, Find It More Than a Sport

First posted on 02-15-2010

Noodling is not for the fainthearted. Noodlers use their bare hands to catch large catfish.

It is mainly practiced by rural men in blue-collar jobs, but that doesn’t mean that some women don’t try their hand at it, said Mary Grigsby, University of Missouri rural sociologist.

Grigsby says that rural women use noodling not so much as a sport but as a way to show their commitment to the men in their lives and to demonstrate how noodling symbolizes a way of life in a tight-knit community.

“Noodlers use the sport to define what kind of people they are. Women actually construct a feminine identity as part of that noodling way of life,” she said.

Grigsby conducted in-depth interviews with Missouri women at their homes and at fish fries and observed them at the July 2007 Okie Noodling Tournament in Pauls Valley, Okla., where noodling is legal. It is not legal in Missouri.

The women all said that they were brought into noodling by a man. They describe their participation in noodling by describing their relationship to the man or men who brought them into the group. None reported noodling on their own or with other women only.

“Women get into the sport because they want to share this kind of community outing and support the rural way of life,” she said. “Among those rural people, being what some of the noodling women call a ‘girly girl’ is not valued. What is valued is being a feminine person who participates. They are not trying to compete with the men.”

The women participate because they identify with and connect their sense of self to the norms that the noodling culture represents, she said. They signal that they are insiders.

The women who participate in noodling also tend to like the outdoors, are close to their fathers and a number of them are also hunters, she said.

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