She's a Knockout!
She's a Knockout!
A History of Women in Fighting Sports
L. A. Jennings
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
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Copyright © 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jennings, L. A.
She’s a knockout! : a history of women in fighting sports / L. A. Jennings.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-3643-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-3644-8 (ebook) 1. Sports for women—History. 2. Hand-to-hand fighting—History. 3. Women athletes. 4. Women wrestlers. 5. Women martial artists. 6. Women boxers. I. Title.
GV709.J45 2015
796.83—dc23
2014025171
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For Mike, who is always in my corner
Preface
The Origin Story
In 2006, I was training for my first fighting event, a submission grappling tournament, at the local mixed martial arts (MMA) gym in Tallahassee, Florida. The gym was a steamy and pungent warehouse with no air-conditioning or windows. Sweaty, shirtless men sparred, hit focus mitts, wrestled, lifted weights, and jumped rope to blaring radio rock, and stuck their heads under the water cooler when the heat threatened to overtake them. These men, my teammates, were professional and amateur MMA fighters, some of whom would go on to fight in the International Fight League and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). On a fall day, a young man who worked for the local university newspaper arrived at the gym to write a story about the fighters. Inevitably, he saw me, the only female, training with a coach and asked to speak to me as well. We talked briefly about why I trained, which was to compete in the next month’s North American Grappling Association tournament in Atlanta. I mentioned that my boyfriend, now my husband, Mike, was training for the same event. He then asked if I thought MMA was good for self-defense, to which I replied, not really, because it was a sport with rules. He said good-bye, and the following week, my teammates and I eagerly opened the newspaper to read the story about our gym.
In a paragraph near the end of the article, the reporter describes me as standing “barely over five feet tall,” which, at a firm five feet, four inches tall, seemed an insult to my stature. Then the article explains that I was training because my boyfriend was and mentions that he was training for a grappling tournament. No mention was made of my plans for competition. In fact, the author explains that this young woman, me, was training for self-defense purposes and that all women should train for self-defense. In the space of a paragraph, I was diminished. My fighting goals were replaced with the more acceptable, at least to this young man, pursuit of women’s self-defense. Moreover, my training suddenly became in support of my boyfriend, rather than myself. Journalistic integrity be damned.
During the time that this interview took place and the subsequent article was printed, I was also in my first year of a master’s program at Florida State University. My scholarly focus was on cultural studies and feminism, in particular. Frustrated and angered by the demeaning nature of the article, I began to research what feminists have written about fighting sports. To my surprise, the only texts I could find were about the feminism of self-defense. There was nothing about women fighters.
The women’s self-defense movement is concerned with protecting women’s bodies from physical harm and has become increasingly popular during the past thirty or so years. The connection between feminism and the self-defense movement stems from feminist goals of freedom for women from oppression and objectification of the body. In “The Fighting Spirit: Women’s Self-Defense Training and the Discourse of Sexed Embodiment,” feminist scholar Martha McCaughey states, “In feminist discourse, the body is often construed as the object of patriarchal violence (actual or symbolic), and violence has been construed variously as oppressive, diminishing, inappropriate, and masculinist.”[1] Many feminists find that self-defense is the physical practice of a philosophical and ethical prerogative to protect women from violence and harm. McCaughey states that self-defense is more than a “set of fighting tactics. Self-defense transforms what it means to have a female body.”[2] She defines the female body as one that is considered passive and therefore under attack by men who are gendered aggressive.
I find this definition problematic. If men are inherently violent, does that not make women inherently passive? And if so, what does that mean for me, a woman who delights in training to punch and choke my opponent? In addition, I wondered why it was more acceptable for me to train for self-defense than competition in a fighting sport. McCaughey claims that gendered perceptions of men as aggressive make it seem inevitable for men to be violent and that their sexual assault of women is a biological consequence of aggressiveness. She believes that self-defense is important because it alters the ways that women are seen as victims and makes them active in defending themselves. The language used by McCaughey and other self-defense advocates to discuss the training of women in self-defense classes is based on gender binaries. Women are gendered to be passive; self-defense courses train them to be aggressive. McCaughey claims, “When women train to fight back, they defy gender norms. It’s manly, but not womanly, to protect and fight.”[3] This assertion rests on the belief that women should train to fight back against male aggression, but it makes no concessions for the competitive fighter. I felt constricted, once again, by the assumption that fighting is always a male prerogative.
Since 2006, I have continued to train, fight, and learn. I have finished my doctoral degree and written feminist articles on female fighters. I have read articles from other fighting enthusiasts that celebrate the growing popularity and general acceptance of women’s fighting sports. In 2012, women’s boxing was included in the Olympics for the first time in recorded history. The UFC featured its first female bout between Ronda Rousey and Liz Carmouche to an astonishingly large pay-per-view audience in 2013. As a martial arts enthusiast, I was elated to see women’s fighting sports come out of the margins and into the limelight. Yet, I noticed that many of the corresponding articles and news reports are fixated on the idea that this was the first time in history that women were being taken seriously as fighters, and I knew that this was simply not the case. If fighting is as old as man, then it is as old as woman, too.
The purpose of this book is to illuminate the rich and storied history of women’s fighting sports. In the twenty-first century, it can feel as though the image of a woman in a boxing ring, in a MMA cage, or on the mat during a wrestling match is incredibly new and evolutionary, and it is exciting to see women moving to the forefront of fighting sports; however, the false narrative that women have never been taken seriously as fighters ignores the incredible women who fought bravely long before
the UFC, television, the automobile, and even the sewing machine.
Women’s Fighting History
There is, in fact, a legacy of women who participated in fighting sports prior to the twenty-first, and even the twentieth, century. Many of these women are not only unknown, they are discounted by boxing and wrestling historians. Women have undoubtedly competed in fighting sports at varying levels, from country fairs to elite events, for thousands of years. This book leaves conjecture and myth aside by focusing on the history of female fighters throughout the past three hundred years, or, since the concomitant growth of the news media in the eighteenth century. It can be argued that sports journalism began when printing capabilities made it possible for newspapers to print stories that did not revolve around the major cultural and political issues of the time. In the sixteenth century, printed materials were innovative and highly valuable, so newspapers and tracts centered on religion and politics. There would not have been space in these precious papers for stories about boxing or wrestling. Nonetheless, by the eighteenth century, the print media proliferated as the art of printing became more streamlined, and the reading population demanded entertainment, as well as news. Scholars have found records of boxing matches in newspapers beginning in the early eighteenth century in England. Of course, people throughout the world were competing in sports far earlier than this, but it was not until the eighteenth century that sporting news became part of the English publishing industry.
To be specific, historically accurate, and concise, this book traces the history of female fighters in Britain and the United States starting in the early eighteenth century. Although there are numerous women who may have learned to box or wrestle during the course of history, this text specifically examines female athletes, which creates a distinction between people who compete in fighting as a competition and those who train for or practice a sport. Certainly, women have struggled merely to train in a fighting art, and there exists a history of restricting women from even learning the art of boxing or wrestling. This book analyzes the history of female fighters within the structured confines of a clearly delineated sport; therefore, the history of female fighters, for the purpose of this volume, is limited to women who have competed in fighting sports at an amateur or professional level.
This particular history looks at fighting sports, not fighting in a military setting. There are numerous excellent scholarly and historical texts that research female warriors, from ancient Spartan fighters to female pilots in World War II, and they are a fascinating study of women in the military. Possibly the most interesting female army was the “Amazons” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dahomey, who comprised the elite force of the king’s guards and fought on the front lines of battle. The Amazons underwent grueling training that included wrestling matches, running, calisthenics, and a general hardening of the body beyond anything the male army had to endure. A song of the Dahomey female warriors, handed down through oral tradition, boasts,
We are men, not women
Whatever town we attack
We must conquer,
Or bury ourselves in its ruins.
The Dahomey warriors were deemed “Amazons” by the many European visitors who saw them in person. The women remained guardians of the king of Dahomey during his wars with France in the late nineteenth century. Although the French eventually defeated the Dahomey kingdom, early hostilities ended in heavy French losses at the hands of the Amazon warriors. The last remaining female Amazon died in 1970.[4] While the history of female warriors like the Dahomey Amazons is a rich facet of women’s history and scholarship, this book does not detail women in military combat or tribal warfare. Instead, it focuses solely on women who have competed in fighting sports, whether sanctioned or, as was often the case prior to the end of the twentieth century, unsanctioned.
Our cultural perceptions of the past often anachronistically cast women as perpetually subjugated and constrained figures, and while women were certainly marginalized for most of history, there were times, places, and situations where they participated in decidedly unfeminine behaviors. The women featured in this volume, from England’s “Championess” Elizabeth Stokes in the 1720s to America’s female wrestler Cora Livingstone in the 1930s and early women’s MMA great Debi Purcell in the early 2000s, tell a story of individuals seeking their place within the ring (or mat or cage). This book does not relate the narrative of large social movements, but rather the fight of individual women whose stories come together to substantiate the reality of female fighters in history.
The introduction to She’s a Knockout!, “Why We Fight,” explores the history of fighting within the context of sports and competition. This section defines the concept of sport and examines the history of the three largest subsets of fighting sports: striking, grappling, and mixed discipline fighting. It also analyzes the cultural position occupied by sports, specifically the way that male athletes dominate the sports media, while women are pushed to the periphery. Female athletes, whatever their sport, have experienced discrimination from many corners of society. Women have been restricted from playing sports based on inaccurate medical claims, including the fear that a woman’s uterus might fall out of her vagina if she runs, as well as social fears that women who move around more than necessary might become sexually aroused.[5] Women interested in boxing or wrestling were subjected to even more vitriolic discrimination because pugilism was a contentious subject in its own right. But despite the blatantly sexist critics of their participation, many female fighters persevered to compete in the sports they loved. Many historical texts discuss women who took part in combative training as a necessary precaution for times of war. In this volume, the female fighter is defined as a woman who participates in pugilistic competition as an athlete rather than a warrior.
The first chapter of She’s a Knockout! is an extensive history of women in fighting sports in Britain and the United States. Entitled “Fighting in the Georgian and Victorian Eras,” this chapter begins with the story of Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes, the prolific British boxer of the early eighteenth century. This section centers on British fighters spanning from Elizabeth’s victories in the 1720s to the female wrestlers of the late nineteenth century. Although fighting was not a respectable pursuit by any means, boxing and wrestling were both considered British pastimes, and some English were particularly delighted by their female fighters.
Americans also fought competitively, despite the social restrictions against prizefighting. Chapter 2, “American Women Join the Fight,” details how fighting women in the United States were treated with contempt not only because of their sex, but due to the social aversion to boxing in general; however, by the twentieth century, there was a tremendous growth in the popularity of fighting sports in the United States. Beginning with the evolution of the traveling circus and burlesque theaters, the third chapter, “Fighting as Spectacle,” reveals how fighting became a more mainstream entertainment in the United States in the early twentieth century. Female wrestlers and boxers performed alongside strongmen, bearded ladies, and Chinese acrobats at carnival events, and were celebrated by fans. Pinup-style photographs of female wrestlers were turned into trading cards, and a lady boxer was crowned beauty queen by her local police force. But by the middle of the century, sports of all kinds had come under the jurisdiction of such athletic institutions as the Boxing Commission, which routinely sought to exclude women from participating.
“The Fight to Fight,” the fourth chapter of this book, focuses on the latter half of the twentieth century and the numerous court cases and lawsuits that sought equality for women in the ring. This chapter also examines how Title IX, from 1972 through the 1990s, allowed women to legally enter the arena of combative sports and how that new participation was often criticized from multiple cultural ideologies. Although women were now allowed to compete in historically male sports, they were still considered trespassers and unwelcome by all into the world of combative sports.
Chapter 5, “
MMA Goes Mainstream,” investigates the new sport of mixed martial arts and the increasing population of women competing in amateur and professional fights. In the 2000s, several women were, at various times, named the “face” of women’s MMA. Sports media promoted the idea that one woman would, somehow, embody the sport in its entirety and thus bring women’s MMA (WMMA) into the mainstream. Ronda Rousey is, undoubtedly, the most famous fighter in WMMA history, but she was not the first woman considered to be the “face” of the sport. As a consequence, this idea has, at times, pushed other fighters into the background, with the media concentrating on one female fighter at a time. This chapter not only reveals the history of women’s involvement in the sport of MMA, it explores the way that fighters were praised or criticized based on the social construction of idealized femininity.
MMA may be the fastest-growing sport today—and possibly of all time. And while throughout the past decade it has been frustrating to locate women within the extreme machismo of the sport and its promoters, MMA has been a conduit of change for female fighters. This book reveals how women have not been excluded, but rather forgotten and ignored, by the annals of fighting sports history. It includes numerous women who fought both inside and outside the ring to participate in the sports they love. And while it was not possible to identify every female fighter in history due to time, space, and other logistical restrictions, I hope She’s a Knockout! sheds some light on the fantastic history of women in fighting sports. Keep your hands up and your chin down, because you are about to meet some ferocious and fearless women.
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