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This is an excerpt from Saloons of the Old West (by Richard Erdoes, Knopf: New York, 1979).

Westerners divided women into two categories -- good ones and bad ones. For many years only the bad ones could be found in saloons. By the time the good ones were bending their elbows at the counter alongside men, most saloons had become just bars. It was not that "respectable" frontierswomen never had a hankering to see the inside of one of those dens of iniquity... Men did not want females in their drinking places to spoil their "ethereally masculine aura." The role of women in the West was unique. Men were attracted by women while shunning them. They, at the same time, put women on a pedestal and brutalized them. They worshiped and also looked down upon them. They dreamed of creatures in lace and silk when what they really wanted was a workhorse on two legs. They paid women an exaggerated respect, but slapped them around when that seemed to them the thing to do... The overwhelming fact that determined the role of women in the West, and their relationship to men, was their almost total absence during the early years.
    Whores, of course, were there almost from the beginning... Even the painted cats were treated with respect verging on reverence. A so-called respectable woman found herself surrounded by self-appointed guardians clearing the way for her, shielding her from the rowdier element, carrying her across the street so that she would not drown in mud.... In the beginning, women in the cow country were almost as scarce and consequently held in as much awe as in gold rush California. It was said that no other class of men behaved toward women with more reverence and chivalry, albeit a crude kind, than the western miner and cowhand. The prevailing legend, and it has prevailed for a hundred years, tries to convince us that a virtuous woman in a gold camp or among cowpunchers was as safe as in church... This is not altogether true. Wyatt Earp, made by eastern writers into the cow country's Sir Galahad, frequently slapped women around, and sometimes beat them savagely. "But these were only dance hall girls," as the Dodge City Times reported in 1877.
    There is a contradiction here, the contradiction between reverence and contempt for women, between protectiveness and brutality. Old-timers among cattlemen insist that respect for womanhood was the lodestone. Range etiquette, so they maintain, forbade a stranger to show interest in the woman of a household where he was a guest or merely had dropped in. The only permissible appreciation shown to the lady of the house was to eat heartily. But after the 1880s, the human skunk who propositioned a good woman was no longer strung up or horsewhipped he was merely ostracized and shunned by all "real men."
    The difference between "virtuous" and "nonvirtuous" women lingered for a long time. During the second half of the nineteenth century, hte only place a man met a woman-- a willing woman-- was the saloon. The "better element," meaning the respectable ladies and the men they had under their thumbs, tacitly supported the symbiosis between saloon, dance hall, and cathouse, as "protective institutions." In an essentially womanless environment the virile bachelor cowpuncher and prospector had no excuse to "bother" the "good" women. The "bad" ones were available in fair numbers. The presence of the "fancy" women shielded the married women and their daughters from unwanted attentions.... Early westerners had considerably cut down on their inhibitions while the threat of punishment was often weak and distant. The decent women therefore showed great tolerance, one might say gratitude, to their errant sisters who acted as safety valves, and cheerfully accepted the former prostitute into their ranks once she was married and exhibited her marigolds, quilts, and preserves at the county fair.
    Western women played a larger and more central role than their more sheltered eastern sisters. The frontierswoman could shoot straight if she had to, could ride a horse, drive an ox team, set a broken bone, make soap, grow her own food, make her children's clothing, slaughter a pig, and raise a family without many of the tools and gadgets normally used in a city household. The frontierswomen were therefore a lot more self-reliant, and consequently self-assertive, than women in the long-settled East, a lot more self-assertive than they ought to have been in the opinion of some. Women competed with men as bullwhackers, mail carriers, saloon and hotel keepers, bartenders, hunters, gamblers, prospectors, bandits, cattle rustlers, and owners of businesses.
    The cowpunchers and miners were not a little intimidated, maybe even afraid of the brawny and resourceful decent women who presumed to lay down the moral law. They were more at ease with the fancy women and hurdy-gurdy girls who made their living by playing up to their machismo.
    The cowboy was... averse to the approaches of marriage-minded maidens.... There was sure more riding of mares than of lassies, and his good old pony seemed more important to the cowhand-- in both fact and fiction-- than a pesky female. The westerner found the women he was most at ease with in the place he was most at ease in-- the saloon.
    The (dance hall girls) were mostly refugees from the mill or farm. Girls in the mills worked up to sixty hours a week for a dollar a day and contracted TB after a year.... (Working in dance halls) beat picking up buffalo chips by a mile. And so they came... Most were good girls, at least in the eyes of the average westerner. Such women were sentimental at heart, especially after hours when they could afford it. They didn't mind rough manners, but demanded a minimum of respect. One cowpuncher found a dance-hall girl he knew on a stairway, savagely beaten, the front of her dress covered in blood. She had repelled the advances of a drunken client. "I don't mind the black eye," she said, "but he called me a whore." Some of the girls had second thoughts about the easy life with the fun galore and good pay... This was also true of those who had become old and worn out. They, as well as the disillusioned prostitute, often turned to alcohol and narcotics. They dosed their drinks with laudanum or they smoked opium... and they sniffed cocaine. Suicides were frequent.... (But) a good part of the time there was a happy ending.
    Violent death was one of the (dance hall) girl's... professional hazards, and more than a hundred cases have been documented, but a lot more westerners died for the love of a woman. To fool with another fellow's woman, legal spouse or otherwise, was also unhealthy. The West knew no friendly discussion about a triangular situation, as was the insipid custom in the East. ...(though) Judge, lawyer, and jurors would have taken a dim view of a woman shooting her man who had gone to meet a sportin' gal in a saloon. That was no dastardly deed but a mere peccadillo which judge and juror themselves indulged in occasionally.
    Of course, not all the women in saloons were pretty waiter girls, hurdy-gurdies, or brides of the multitude, though fiction would have it so. Good mothers and on the whole faithful wives did frequent (saloons).

    -From the chapter "'Wimmin'"