5. Cooky, Messner, and Hextrum, “Women Play Sport, but Not on TV,” 203–30.
6. Michael Kimmel, The Gendered Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7.
7. Elizabeth Angell, “Sex and Female Politicians,” Allure, 2010. Available online at http://www.allure.com/beauty-trends/blogs/daily-beauty-reporter/2010/09/sex-and-female-politicians-the-debate-rages.html (accessed 16 September 2010).
8. Lawrence Wenner, ed., MediaSport (New York: Routledge, 1998), 188.
9. Helene Elliot, “Marion Bartoli Overpowers Sabine Lisicki for 2013 Wimbledon Title,” Los Angeles Times, 2013. Available online at http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/06/sports/la-sp-elliott-wimbledon-women-20130707 (accessed 6 July 2013).
10. Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 7.
11. Homer, The Iliad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 211.
12. Homer, The Iliad, 211.
13. Homer, The Iliad, 211–12.
14. Boddy, Boxing, 10.
15. Suetonius, “Augustus,” in The Twelve Caesers, trans. Robert Graves (London: Penguin, 1962), 63.
16. Barratt O’Hara, From Figg to Johnson: A Complete History of the Heavyweight Championship (Charleston, S.C.: Nabu Press, 2013), 7.
17. William Hickey, Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Alfred Spencer (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1913), 82.
18. New York Post, 14 December 1826.
19. Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 75–76.
20. Homer, The Iliad, 212.
21. Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth, eds., Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History and Innovation, Vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 127.
22. Green and Svinth, Martial Arts of the World, 199.
23. Green and Svinth, Martial Arts of the World, 259–60.
24. Green and Svinth, Martial Arts of the World, 322.
25. Michael Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 54.
26. Douglas Booth and Holly Thorpe, eds., Berkshire Encyclopedia of Extreme Sports (Great Barrington, Mass.: Berkshire, 2007).
27. “‘Judo’ Gene LeBell vs. Boxer Milo Savage: America’s First MMA Fight,” Black Belt, 2011. Available online at http://www.blackbeltmag.com/daily/mixed-martial-arts-training/boxing/judo-gene-lebell-vs-boxer-milo-savage-americas-first-mma-fight/ (accessed 14 October 2011).
28. Phil Pepe, “The Fight Hurt Nobody Except Fans Who Paid,” Hartford Courant, 27 June 1976, 5C.
29. Pepe, “The Fight Hurt Nobody Except Fans Who Paid,” 5C.
Chapter 1
Fighting in the Georgian and Victorian Eras
In the mid-eighteenth century, Englishman William Hickey composed his collected memoirs, which include numerous descriptions of the tawdry British underbelly. Hickey had a proclivity toward seedy drinking establishments and seemed to delight in recounting the stories of his poor and lower-class countrymen and women. He recalled watching a barroom brawl between two women in particularly colorful language:
Two she-devils, for they scare, had a human appearance, were engaged in a scratching and boxing match, their faces entirely covered with blood, bosoms bare, and the clothes nearly torn from their bodies. For several minutes not a creature interfered between them, or seemed to care a straw what mischief they might do each other, and the contest went on with unabated fury.[1]
While fighting sports appear to have been carried out regularly enough that inhabitants of a particular town were not shocked by seeing two women in the ring, accounts of female pugilists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are rare.
Although it is difficult to know the extent to which women competed in boxing, wrestling, and other pugilistic arts, various sources indicate that women in the United States and Europe were indeed part of the spectacle of fighting. Prior to the seventeenth century, it appears that pugilism was practiced, but not necessarily as a competitive sport, perhaps due to the restrictions of the church; however, considering that bear-baiting and dog fighting operated alongside Shakespeare and Marlowe in the theater houses, the church must have turned a blind eye to a variety of entertainments.
The reality is that men, and possibly women, were performing some type of fighting as entertainment prior to the Georgian era, which extended from 1714 to the mid-1800s. The availability of print media proliferated in eighteenth-century England, and newspapers became the popular mode to supply news to the reading public. Most written evidence of fighting events is from the eighteenth century, when newspapers and bulletins became more abundant. It makes sense that during a time when printed media were new and most precious, sports news was not regularly published. Additional historical records may become available in the future detailing the history of fighting as a spectator sport prior to the seventeenth century in the North-Western Hemisphere, and when that occurs, it is likely that we will discover that women were part of the action.
Historical records currently provide scarce data with which to piece together the history of early modern female combatants. Many of the records from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rely on anecdotal evidence from travelers and historians relating the stories of brawls between women. Zacharias Conrad Uffenbach, a German citizen, published the narrative of his 1710 travels to London, where he took in a boxing match. He was informed by a female spectator that she “had fought another female in this place without stays and in nothing but a shift.” The woman claimed that “they had both fought stoutly and drawn blood,” and von Uffenbach notes with apparent distaste that this “was apparently no new sight in England.”[2] Interestingly, an English traveler around the same time period recalled watching two women fight topless in Paris. It seems that the spectacle of fighting, to these men of leisure, was more interesting abroad than in their own home countries.
Boxing and other fighting sports remained fringe activities for women in the United States and Europe throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Female fighters intermittently appeared in the media and then disappeared until another woman would arrive a few decades later. Although records in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print media are surprisingly abundant, there is no clear guide on which we can rely that includes all female boxing or wrestling contestants. It is the very nature of history that, unfortunately, excludes the commonplace and the everyday. Based on current documentation and resources, there are prominent examples of female fighters prior to the mid-twentieth century. Undoubtedly there were more women competing outside of the eye of the media, and hopefully more female fighters will be uncovered in the future. For now, however, we must focus on the more famous examples of female pugilists in the United States and Europe.
The nearly two hundred and fifty years between the days of the most famous female pugilist, Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes, and the signing of Title IX in the 1970s were a period of spotty yet vigorous matches between female fighters. Although it appears that the boxing world treated many of these women, including Stokes, as legitimate and skilled fighters, the new print media sensationalized these bouts. In several cases, we have only the names of the women, along with a note that reinforces the gender of the two fighters. And in numerous instances, books and articles reference a particular historic match but do not provide a citation of the original source material. For example, numerous authors relate the anecdote of an 1876 boxing match between Nell Saunders and Rose Harland at the Hills Theater in New York City. These books and articles reveal that the winner received a silver butter dish as her prize. This quaint, domestically oriented prize may seem sexist by today’s standards, but at the time, a silver butter dish would have been a highly desired and worthy object. Still, the butter dish was not the typical prize offered to male fighters at the time; male winners of boxing matches received money or, depending on the venue, free beer. The butter dish given to the winner of the Saunders–Harland fight m
ay have been a promotional tactic, but while little else is known of the bout, the feminine nature of the prize has remained a solid piece of pugilistic history in many historical accounts. While there is no original source material for the Saunders and Harland match, it most likely did occur. Sadly, the lack of original documentation makes the story, with its fascinating detail of the silver butter dish, seem unsubstantiated and perhaps only anecdotal.
Although the 1876 fight lacks original source material, there are records of multiple other early bouts between women. Female fighters were a source of entertainment and spectacle for early fighting fans and the print media, just like today. This chapter delves into the extensive period of pugilism in Britain from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, when women who fought in striking and grappling arts were a source of entertainment sensationalized by the new print media. Although enthusiasm for female pugilists waned in the Victorian era, as concerns regarding the female body and motherhood grew in the scientific community, there have always been females who defied social conventions to compete in these historically masculine sports. While these women may haven been treated with scorn by the majority of the population, some praised their tenacity and skill. And so this chapter begins with the story of Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes, the championess of boxing.
Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes:
The Championess of Europe
Fighters, by necessity, are champion self-aggrandizers. In the history of athletic trash talking, such boxers as Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson unabashedly asserted their own skill and prowess. Self-aggrandizement, in tandem with insulting ones opponent, is both a defensive and offensive strategy for fighters outside of the ring. A fighter can praise himself and assuage any fears of inadequacy, while simultaneously degrading his opponent. Ali and Tyson may epitomize the trash-talking boxer of the late-twentieth century, but both men would probably bow to the incredible discursive skills of Elizabeth Wilkinson, self-styled “Championess of America and of Europe” in the early eighteenth century.
Wilkinson fashioned herself the “European Championess” of boxing in the early eighteenth century, a title she undoubtedly earned. Her first bout, in 1722, was the result of a challenge to Hannah Hyfield, a woman Wilkinson would soundly beat after twenty-two minutes of solid fighting. The London Journal published Wilkinson’s original challenge, admitting that the paper did so because it was unfamiliar with female pugilists:
Boxing in publick at the Bear Garden is what has lately obtained very much amongst the Men, but till last Week we never heard of Women being engaged that Way, when two of the Feminine Gender appeared for the first Time on the Theatre of War at Hockley in the Hole, and maintained the Battle with great Valour for a long Time, to the no small Satisfaction of the spectators.[3]
The paper then produces the following textual exchange in which Wilkinson challenges Hyfield prior to the fight:
I, Elizabeth Wilkinson of Clerkenwell, having had some Words with Hannah Hyfield, and requiring Satisfaction, do invite her to meet me on the Stage, and Box me for Three Guineas, each Woman holding Half a Crown in each Hand, and the first Woman that drops her Money to lose the Battle.
Hyfield responded in kind, declaring, “I Hannah Hyfield of New Gate Market, hearing the Resoluteness of Elizabeth Wilkinson, will not fail, God-willing, to give her more Blows than Words, desiring home Blows, and from her no Favour.”[4]
Wilkinson reportedly beat Hyfield after twenty-two minutes and then went on to compete for the next six years, when her name disappears from the records. In fact, Wilkinson’s name has been the subject of much debate amongst historians because she is listed as both Elizabeth Stokes and Elizabeth Wilkinson. Some boxing historians tie her to the recently executed murderer Robert Wilkinson, who, in addition to being a killer, was apparently a prizefighter. In 1927, Arthur L. Hayward edited the lengthily named Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who Have Been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining, or other Offenses, an anthology of biographies of eighteenth-century British criminals from a 1735 collection of original papers that has since been released as an e-book by Project Gutenberg. This compilation includes the story of Robert Wilkinson, the infamous murderer and pugilist. Curiously, the piece ends with a reprint of the Wilkinson and Hyfield challenges. The author provides no further commentary but instead insinuates a connection between the murderer Robert Wilkinson and the pugilist Elizabeth Wilkinson.[5]
Boxing history enthusiasts have read into this connection extensively, making suppositions about whether Elizabeth and Robert were blood relations or husband and wife. Others questioned if Elizabeth’s adoption of the last name Wilkinson was a sort of bloody tribute to the former prizefighter cum murderer. The former theory is based on evidence that the names Elizabeth Wilkinson and Elizabeth Stokes do not appear in any records prior to her public challenge to Hannah Hyfield; thus, her absence from public record as Elizabeth Wilkinson must indicate that she changed her name. Nonetheless, it is not unlikely that a young woman in eighteenth-century Britain could have existed without her name appearing in written records. And even if her name did, for some reason, appear in print prior to the 1722 challenge, those documents may not have survived.
Following her victory over Hyfield, Wilkinson became a fixture in James Figg’s boxing venues, where she continued to dominate the ring. Although she certainly defied eighteenth-century gender roles through her pugilistic activities, Wilkinson was not condemned by English society. She was the heroine of the eccentric British Isles. Nineteenth-century English sports journalist Pierce Egan published a series of tomes on the boxing phenomenon in British culture. Egan ties the popularity of boxing to English nationalism, citing the relationship between the inherent “manliness” of boxing and the pugilistic prowess of men born on British soil, but he notes that national pride in boxing extended beyond male citizens. In a small section entitled “Female Pugilism,” Egan quotes an exchange between Wilkinson and Hyfield, exclaiming, “Even heroines panted for the honours of pugilistic glory!”[6] Egan does not complain about Wilkinson’s involvement in the sport but instead celebrates her pugilistic skill as evidence of the superior nature of British stock in the ring.
Sometime between 1722 and 1726, Elizabeth Wilkinson became known as Elizabeth Stokes, the wife of fellow pugilist James Stokes. Stokes was Elizabeth’s promoter and an associate (and later opponent) of legendary boxer James Figg. Figg was the most prominent promoter and male boxer of the early eighteenth century, but Elizabeth, at the time, was the more famous fighter. In his essay “Disappearance: How Shifting Gendered Boundaries Motivated the Removal of Eighteenth-Century Boxing Champion Elizabeth Wilkinson from Historical Memory,” Christopher Thrasher argues that “society” purposefully erased Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes from boxing history in favor of a male contemporary. Figg is currently cited as the “father of boxing” by the International Boxing Hall of Fame, but according to Thrasher, Stokes was the more popular of the two. Using a scan of the Google Books database from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, Thrasher reveals that while Stokes was more popular during the nineteenth century, Figg far surpassed her in the twentieth century, as Stokes fell into obscurity.[7] Perhaps the late Victorian era return to masculinity led historians to put Figg on a pedestal and Stokes in the corner.
The British Gazetteer announced on Saturday, October 1, 1726, the upcoming bout between the British Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes and the Irish Mary Welch. The bout was to take place at the Stokes amphitheater, which was owned by Elizabeth’s husband James. A note at the bottom of the advertisement explains, “They fight in cloth Jackets, short Petticoats, coming just below the Knee, Holland Drawers, white Stockings, and pumps.”[8] The paper also contains the following words from Welch:
I, Mary Welch, from the Kingdom of Ireland, being taught and knowing the Noble Science of Defence, and thought to be the only Female of this Kind in Europe, understanding here is one on this Kingdom, who h
as exercised on the publick Stage several Times, which is Mrs. Stokes, who is billed the famous Championess of England; I do hereby invite her to meet me, and exercise the awful Weapons practiced on the Stage, at her own Amplitheatre, doubting not, but to let her and the worthy Spectators fee, that my Judgment and Courage is beyond hers.
Stokes responded to Welch, claiming that she was undefeated in the boxing ring:
I, Elizabeth Stokes, of the famous City of London, being well known by the Name of the Invincible City Championess for my Abilities and Judgment in the above said science; having never engaged with any of my own Sex but I always came off with Victory and Applause, shall make no Apology for accepting the Challenge of this Irish Heroine, not doubting but to maintain the Reputation I have hitherto established, and (few) my Country, that the Contest of its Honour, is not ill entrusted in the present Battle with their Championess, Elizabeth Stokes.[9]
While advertisements for fights were printed and reprinted throughout Britain, there seems to be no official or unofficial document detailing the outcome of these bouts; however, it appears that Stokes remained undefeated in her pugilistic career.
She's a Knockout! Page 5
