Peg also relates several of her tactics, striking the left abdomen just above the stomach (presumably the liver) with the left hand to make the opponent “shoot his head forward instantly,” which sets him or her in perfect range for a “cout de grace” with the right hand. Yet, at the moment of victory, when the body of Hannah lay quivering at her feet, “one leg was drawn up over the other, her arms were flung across her face, her breasts were swollen monstrously,” Peg claims to feel like a monster herself:
I hate myself—I execrate the day that I was born. Why do I live that I am so vile? These horrid fits come upon me, and rob me of all reason. There is no good in any part of me. And see, in this hour of victory, what Fate hath in store. The mob’s applause? Bah! A purse of guineas, won by beating this poor woman that hath done me no great harm?[41]
Margaret’s journal is the narrative of a conflicted woman. She admits her delight in fighting while in the act, but when not in the ring, she feels demoralized and “unsexed.”[42]
Throughout Bruising Peg, Creswick depicts Peg as a member of a lower class, albeit one who was apparently adept at curtseying with the best of them. Peg’s casual attitude toward fighting nude reveals the less rigid social codes outside the aristocracy. Peg describes her large limbs, bleeding hands, and “horrid” face, but her real shame comes from the nature of her profession, which, although popular amongst the people, makes her feel unwomanly. When a younger sister, Anne, comes to visit Margaret, she notes that while she had been able to beat everyone in the neighborhood since she was fourteen and easily defeated Hannah and other fighters in the ring, she would be devastated if Anne found out about “Bruising Peg.” She is a heroine to the lower classes, but when she comes into a fortune and elevates herself into the burgeoning bourgeoisie, Peg becomes “Margaret” and attempts to leave behind the inner “beast” that urges her to fight.
The novel progresses in a slow and somewhat convoluted narrative regarding the romantic endeavors of Margaret and her younger sister Anne; however, the interesting moments come when Peg finds herself seething from within, wanting nothing more than to hit someone and release her hidden rage. She hates this desire to fight but delights in the sweet release of beating someone with her hands. The body and conclusion of the novel are, as previously mentioned, bizarrely constructed, but the depiction of Margaret/Peg as a conflicted woman resonates throughout Creswick’s novel. The novel, through the voice of Peg, suggests that women “afflicted” with bloodlust must be tormented and, as evidenced by the conclusion of her narrative, in need of a strong husband to restore her femininity. Creswick’s novel, while delightful to a modern historian of women’s fighting sports, did not garner much attention during the author’s lifetime. Whether readers were uninterested in the topic of a female fighter, turned off by the title, or, more likely, unimpressed by the author’s writing style, the book was largely ignored and remains out of print today.
The real “Bruising Peg” is remembered only in name from a brief line in Boulton’s historical survey of London entertainment, The Amusements of Old London. Boulton relates a battle between two women who “fought for a new shift valued at half a crown in the Spa Fields, New Islington,” according to a 1768 newspaper source. The winner was a “woman called Bruising Peg, who beat her antagonist in a terrible manner.”[43] The real “Bruising Peg” existed in the eighteenth century as a brutal fighter, but Creswick’s novel introduces her within the context of Victorian sensibilities. The novelization of her life and experience as a pugilist remains an example of the tendency to define female fighters as troubled yet easily fixed through marriage to an appropriately masculine husband.
A Feminine Trial of Skill
Street fights continued to be a method of settling disputes amongst the poorer classes of England. Upper classmen would risk their lives to fight duels with swords or pistols, but the men and women of the lower classes dueled with their fists, probably because their communities needed them to remain alive to help sustain their families. In its April 7, 1822, edition, Bell’s Life in London, and Sporting Chronicle carefully details the fight between two women of Kent Street.[44] Bell’s was a weekly publication that covered various types of sports, including boxing. The paper eventually became a staple in most Victorian men’s Sunday reading regimen. In this particular issue of Bell’s was the story of a fight between Sally and Nancy over a lover. The women wore “short jackets, secured at the waist by a handkerchief, their hair cropt expressly for the present purpose.” Unlike the disgust of the Times fifteen years earlier, this delightful article uses colorful language to expound on the fighting skills of the two women, claiming that the “Ladies, on coming up to the scratch, displayed fine science, but were cautious.” Round one went as follows:
Nan made play, but Sal was not to be had, and fought rather shy. Some maneuvering ensued, when Nan, made a feint, Sal Attempted to put in a left-handed hit, which was well stopped by the former, who placed a blow near the place where Sally took her snuff, and which made her ivories dance a reel in their box.[45]
While this fight may have originated from of an ordinary quarrel, it was organized like a legitimate bout, with each round ending with a score on either side. Round three began with the following snarky comment from Bell’s: “This was a good manly—we beg our Readers’ pardon, but we had really forgotten that we were speaking of the softer sex) a good womanly round.”[46] As the fight ensued, the women exchanged blows, with Nan landing a “heavy hit” that caused the “claret to flow prodigiously from [Sally’s] upper lip.” After Nancy later managed to throw Sally out of the ring and “spoiled the look of her adversaries mug,” the paper reports that the skill shown at the beginning of the fight began to decline in the later rounds: “These rounds were more like a pull-cap concern for a sweet-heart between two nursery-maids than an exhibit of science between Ladies possessing their abilities—but we must, in justice, acknowledge they were both already beaten.”[47]
In the thirteenth round, the women primarily clinched, undoubtedly from the same fatigue that affects boxers today, and the author suggests that if their hair had not been cropped short, they would have resorted to hair pulling. The seconds, deemed “Ladies in Waiting” by the paper, suggested that the fighters each drink a glass of “strip-me-naked,” which was apparently a euphemism for gin. After a twenty-minute break, the fight resumed, although Nancy quickly took Sally down with a “floorer,” which knocked the latter out for nearly three minutes. Although Sally attempted to come back with what the paper describes as “baby-play rounds” and declared that “she’d die afore she’d give in,” the fight was soon over, with Nancy declared the victor. The women were “apparently well pleased with themselves, and with each other,” so they removed to a nearby bar to “sign a treaty of peace” over drinks. The tone of this account is a far cry from the disgust expressed by the Times in 1807, yet the cheeky language pokes fun at the spectacle of Nancy and Sally’s fight.
The general attitude toward women fighting vacillated between antipathy and fascination during the Victorian era. For some men, watching two women wrestle or box was simultaneously humorous and erotic. For other men and women, the distasteful spectacle of female fighters was a source of revulsion. In 1888, there were reports of a woman dying in the ring after a battle of great “vigor and determination.”[48] The victor of the fight, Mrs. Christmas, was placed in jail after her adversary, Ellen Noonan, died from injuries received during the fight. And while Britons struggled to reconcile the reality of human life, the body, and sex with strictures of Victorian social codes, across the pond, nineteenth-century Americans were searching for identity in their new, but already troubled, country.
1. William Hickey, Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Alfred Spencer (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1913), 82.
2. Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, London in 1710, trans. W. H. Quarrell and Margaret Mare (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 90–91.
3. London Journal, 23 June 1722, 3.
4. London Jou
rnal, 23 June 1722, 3.
5. Arthur L. Hayward, Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who Have Been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining, or other Offenses (Project Gutenberg, 2004).
6. Pierce Egan, Boxiana, Vol. 1 (London: G. Smeeton, 1830), 300.
7. Christopher Thrasher, “Disappearance: How Shifting Gendered Boundaries Motivated the Removal of Eighteenth-Century Boxing Champion Elizabeth Wilkinson from Historical Memory,” Past Imperfect, 18 (2012), 53–75.
8. British Gazetteer, 1 October 1726.
9. British Gazetteer, 1 October 1726.
10. British Gazetteer, 1 July 1727.
11. British Gazetteer, 1 June 1728.
12. Daily Post, 12 November 1899, 27.
13. Daily Post, 16 June 1730.
14. British Gazetteer, 28 December 1728.
15. British Gazetteer, 24 May 1729.
16. British Gazetteer, 18 July 1730.
17. Tom Molyneux, Pancratia (London: W. Oxberry, 1812), 113.
18. Molyneux, Pancratia, 120.
19. Allen Guttmann, Women’s Sports: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
20. Guttmann, Women’s Sports, 72.
21. Observer, 14 July 1973, 3.
22. Guttmann, Women’s Sports.
23. William Hazlitt, “Of Great and Little Things,” in The Miscellaneous Works of William Hazlitt (New York: R. Worthington, 18–?), 236.
24. Tom Paulin, “Spirit of the Age,” Guardian, 4 April 2003. Available online at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/apr/05/society.history.
25. Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” xiv.
26. Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” xiv.
27. Essex Standard, and Colchester, Chelmsford, Maldon, Harwich, and General County Advertiser, 2 September 1836.
28. Times (London, England), 25 September 1805, 3.
29. Times, 25 September 1805, 3.
30. Times, 25 September 1805, 3.
31. Times (London, England), 24 March 1807, 3.
32. Quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Random House, 1978), 112.
33. Phyllis G. Tortora and Keith Eubank, Survey of Historical Costume, 4th ed. (New York: Fairchild, 2005), 281.
34. Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New York: Yale University Press, 2003), 51.
35. Quoted in Steele, The Corset, 51.
36. Quoted in Steele, The Corset, 57.
37. Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports (London: Routledge, 1994), 66.
38. Paul Creswick, Bruising Peg: Pages from the Journal of Margaret Molloy (London: Downey, 1898), 5.
39. William Biggs Boulton, The Amusements of Old London; being a survey of the sports and pastimes, tea gardens and parks, playhouses and other diversions of the people of London from the 17th to the beginning of the 19th century (London: B. Blom, 1969), 30.
40. Creswick, Bruising Peg, 18.
41. Creswick, Bruising Peg, 18.
42. Creswick, Bruising Peg, 23.
43. Boulton, The Amusements of Old London, 234–35.
44. Bell’s Life in London, and Sporting Chronicle, 7 April 1822, 48.
45. Bell’s Life in London, 7 April 1822, 48.
46. Bell’s Life in London, 7 April 1822, 48 .
47. Bell’s Life in London, 7 April 1822, 48.
48. Washington Post, 21 June 1887, 1.
Chapter 2
American Women Join the Fight
In 1856, the Detroit Daily Free Press reported about a “brutal prizefight between two women” in Gloucester, New Jersey. The women, who punished one another “to such an extent that they were covered with blood from head to foot,” were also punished by the law, as they and several onlookers were arrested and taken to Woodbury Jail.[1] Ten years later, in St. Louis, Missouri, Maggie Shoester and Annie Wood, employees of a beer saloon on Market Street, were “barbarously mutilated and disfigured with cuts and bruises and all sorts of fantastic bloodstains and blotches” after a fight.[2] There is no information on whether the women were punished for the bout, but perhaps their position as barmaids gave them some protection against the machinations of the police.
Women in the United States traveled a tougher route to the ring than their British sisters. In the late eighteenth century, the United States was a combination of puritanical ideology and the movement toward Enlightenment. American women were doubly restricted: The strict religious morality and the Enlightenment’s ideals of science and reason placed fighting outside the confines of acceptable behavior. Fighting sports were considered barbaric, disruptive, and indicative of a lower moral order. More importantly, most people believed that boxing and other forms of pugilism were vestiges of the old country, and many Americans wished to dissociate completely from British culture. Thomas Jefferson and other leaders of the new republic criticized boxing as violent and morally degrading.[3]
In 1835, New Jersey passed a law banning the “degrading practice of prizefighting,” which was quickly adopted by numerous other states in the Union.[4] Without the aristocracy to back them, like their British pugilistic brethren, fighters in the United States risked fines and jail time to practice the art of boxing. But even the law could not stop the world’s oldest sport, as boxing matches continued to transpire in back alleys and bars. There is little evidence of boxing matches with female fighters occurring in the United States prior to the mid-nineteenth century, although it is likely that these types of illicit bouts were held without detection by police and escaped media exposure.
While the majority of prizefighters were men, some women became involved in the highly illegal and despised sport. In 1866, a fight in South Brooklyn invited a critique of not only the lower classes, but the immigrant citizens who lived in that part of the city. The October 19, 1866, installment of the Daily Evening Bulletin reports that the women living in that part of Brooklyn
are, as everyone knows, composed of no gentle elements, and make up for the lack of the purring softness of dangerous female women of higher stations in life by the greater length of their nails, greater power of physical endurance, and a super abundance of pugnacity in general, which they are by no means delicate in bringing into requisition on every available occasion.[5]
The paper goes on to make snide remarks regarding the people in the community, even using the designation the “ladies (?)” for the women. According to the account, during an intermission before a prizefight, a Mr. Stackpole bet $50 that his wife Elizabeth, “could whip any woman in the crowd in a square stand-up fight.” A Catherine Meisser, with Mrs. Judy Hart acting as her second, engaged in a bloody battle with Mrs. Elizabeth Stackpole, who was seconded by her husband. After some rough and dirty fighting, the seconds became involved as well, and Mr. Stackpole apparently attacked Judy, the result of which was a “general attack of the crowd, armed with haysticks and stones, on Stackpole and his wife.” Nearly everyone involved was arrested and charged with felonious assault, although there appear to be no records regarding the aftermath of these cases. Regardless, the melee was attributed to the lower-class status of the individuals, the ferocity of the “ladies (?),” and the nature of prizefighting.
In 1869, Sarah “Sally” Chapman and Mary Ann “Molly” Jones, two women described by the Chicago Tribune as being “of questionable repute,” each bet $25 that they could best the other in what the Tribune dubs the “petticoat championship of America.”[6] Men of the roughest and lowest orders attended the fight, which was held at three o’clock in the morning a few miles outside of Boston. Per the Tribune, the women wore only a “pair of ordinary drawers, stockings, and women’s gaiters.” Thus, the women were evidently topless during the fight, in addition to being drunk. The Tribune declares that the “scene was one of excitement, as well as of disgust and pity.” Neither woman
showed signs of having trained in the “semidignified art of self-defense,” and at one point, Molly reportedly leapt over the tables that created the “ring” around the fighters after dodging one of Sally’s particularly heavy attempts.[7] But she overcame her fears and hopped back in the ring. After round eighteen, Molly’s friends tried to call off the fight because they were afraid the women would kill one another. Molly bravely entered the ring again, but she reportedly cried the entire time and begged for someone to take her away. The fight was called in favor of Sally, obviously, after the twenty-first round. The Tribune claims that the fight was “probably one of the most brutal and revolting of [affairs] that ever took place in the country.” The paper also denounces the city of Boston for allowing this type of event to take place, especially since Massachusetts was supposed to be “so famous for morals”; however, the women were the recipients of the most damage, having their faces “badly disfigured” and their reputations, especially Molly’s, forever cemented in the newspaper.[8]
She's a Knockout! Page 8
