Gender Politics
In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War and the creation of a new country, the eighteenth century was a tumultuous and quickly changing time in American history. Perhaps due to the image of women as the daughters of Eve, they have typically been viewed as weak in morality and self-control. The racial diversity in the burgeoning American culture configured white women as innocent, pure, and prone to victimization at the hands of nonwhite men. Like their European sisters (and women worldwide, it would seem), American women existed under laws and social codes that limited their actions based on their gender.
Education in the British colonies (prior to the revolution) was, as expected, spotty and infrequent. A nascent government fighting for independence had more important things than education to funnel time and resources into. During the seventeenth century, most children in wealthy households were taught by private tutors, although girls typically only learned to read, while boys studied reading, writing, mathematics, and the sciences. By the eighteenth century, more organized schools had been established and teachers, both male and female, hired to instruct young American minds. The puritanical-turned-Victorian middle class in the United States, empowered by their positions as shop owners and traders, pushed a strict moral ideology in politics and social customs. Late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie Americans vilified prizefighting, along with alcohol, obscene language, prostitution, abortion, showy dress, and excessive body ornamentation (for example, cap ribbons). But late nineteenth-century American culture also grew striated, as the excessive politeness of the Victorian age clashed with the growing “cult of manliness.”
A Culture of Weakness
The fashion of nineteenth-century American women, like their British counterparts, also included restrictive clothing and such unhealthy dressing practices as wearing corsets and carrying heavy hoop skirts on their hips. Women were undoubtedly exhausted from the restricted lung capacity forced by wearing tight corsets and the weight of carrying dozens of pounds of fabric. In addition to their heavy dresses and fripperies, they wore extensive undergarments, for instance, chemises, drawers, and “safety belts,” which functioned as a sort of prototypical adult diaper for menstrual cycles.[9] Crinoline or steel-hoop skirts and corsets helped women manipulate their bodies into the desired form, and underwaists protected expensive and dear fabrics from bodily oils. It was common for women to carry in excess of thirty pounds, although weight estimations vary from source to source. Regardless of the exact number, both the weight and restricting nature of Victorian-era clothing must have made getting and staying dressed an exhausting practice.
Mid-nineteenth century Americans also followed British trends by making a virtue of fragility and weakness. Wan-faced women on fainting couches perceived the almost tubercular state of appearance as a sign of beauty and class. While this pale look may have been popular in the fashionable sets and middle-class households that sought to emulate them, many people regarded this exaggerated ill health as ludicrous. Critics condemned women who put on an air of illness as products of romantic novels that featured feeble heroines. Indubitably, male authors were to blame for promoting illness as beauty, but the young women who followed the trend, especially healthy ladies who contrived to be sick, made themselves useless.
The author of the 1870 Bazar Book of Decorum decries contrived illness and states harshly, “We doubt whether any woman who cultivates sickness and weakness has a sound idea of the value of good looks.”[10] This type of affected illness was typically only prevalent in the upper and middle classes; people who were poor or lived in rural environments had no time to feign sickness when there were mouths to feed and work to be done. Women in the country were often described as ruddy, buxom, and strong, necessary characteristics for the type of woman living on a farm or in some other rural setting. In the cities, lower-class women also had to be robust and indelicate to survive the rigors of urban life, and it was typically this class of women, the girls who were raised to be strong, that produced the nineteenth-century female fighter.
Wrestling and the Advent of
Catch-as-Catch-Can
Wrestling, even more so than the sport of boxing, has a history as spectacle. Even today, wrestling is often first associated with the staged “professional” wrestling seen on television, in which highly charismatic men and women leap off the ropes and smash one another with chairs, all the while creating a bewildering and mystifying narrative that easily rivals a dimestore detective novel. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrestlers often made up part of the cast of performers in traveling circuses and fairs. Catch-as-catch-can wrestling famously originated in the circus scene as a series of brutal and sneaky techniques meant to ensure victory for the wrestlers, who declared they could take all comers.
Women also performed athletic feats as members of traveling circuses, from acrobats and contortionists to strongwoman performances, as well as boxing, fencing, and wrestling. Jackley’s Circus, a popular venue featuring performers from Europe, toured the United States in the mid-1870s and included female wrestlers as part of the entertainment. Large crowds would gather to watch the highly publicized all-female wrestling competition, the prize of which was jewelry, presented in front of the crowd on a pillow. The wrestling competitors, all of whom hailed from Vienna and were “imported . . . at enormous expense,” wore white shirts, red trousers, white stockings, and black shoes.[11] The women reportedly wrestled in the catch-as-catch-can style, although it appears from the description of the bouts that it was more of an “anything-goes” style of fighting. These particular women were unschooled in the art of wrestling and, of course, designed to titillate and amuse the men in attendance, which they dutifully did. The final two contestants were described as “stout as stumps and quick as flashes on their legs.” The two girls struggled for the advantage, and one of them ripped a large piece of the other girl’s skirt off, revealing what the Cincinnati Enquirer, that oft-declamatory publication, describes as a “patch of walnut buff as big as a sombrero to the eyes of the gods.” As familiar as we may be in the twenty-first century with euphemistic language and double entendres, one can hazard at least one guess as to what the paper was referring. The bout continued despite the destruction to the contestant’s habiliment, and when the fight was over from a legitimate throw, the women exited the stage. The paper claims that these particular girls were praised because their fight, unlike the previous soft-core tussles between the beautiful young women, was a genuine display of effort and skill.[12]
In 1880, three hundred people watched a wrestling match between Miss Ida Alb and Professor Charles A. Standbrook at the Theater Comique in St. Louis, Missouri. The event was indeed a spectacle, with prefight entertainment consisting of a contortionist, a professional eater, and a master prestidigitator. Alb was apparently a veteran of wrestling matches at the Comique, although the Enquirer notes that her opponent was typically her sister. This was the first time that she would compete against a man. The match consisted of numerous throws back and forth between the contestants, but none were deemed legal in the Greco-Roman style until Standbrook threw Alb over his head and flat onto the mat. That ended the first round, and the two took a break. In the second round, Alb returned the favor, although her opponent was able to keep his shoulders off the floor, preventing a full throw. She was not satisfied with his defense, so she wrestled with him on the floor, trying to get a pin. Although she was unsuccessful in this attempt, she managed to get a full throw, and thus ended the second round. She threw him again in the third round and won the match.
There is again a question of legitimacy in this fight. The paper describes Standbrook as not a large man, but standing nearly a head taller than Alb. In addition, Alb’s finishing move was not a hip throw, but the rather astounding feat of tossing Standbrook over her head. The Enquirer does not speculate on the performative aspect of the bout, except to say that people booed at the beginning when the two circled one another carefully, and othe
rs thought Standbrook was not trying; however, as the bout began in earnest, the crowd seemed to cheer and, perhaps, suspend their disbelief. Because bouts were fought in performance halls, whether wrestling or boxing, they were sometimes choreographed. Venues were not required to disclose whether the fight was theatrical or a true test of skill, so audiences had to use their own judgment. Regardless of the validity of the fight, it made headlines because of the pairing of a man and a woman.[13]
After this bout, there seem to have been no publicized wrestling matches featuring female combatants in the United States, or at least there are no surviving records of any such events for the next decade. There is, however, a dearth of firsthand sources that relate stories of women wrestling in the nineteenth century. Numerous secondary sources might reference a particular article or event, but when hunted down through academic databases and resources, many of these articles do not seem to exist. In many instances, Internet authors will perpetuate the myth of a particular boxing or wrestling match without an attempt to discover the original source material. Consequently, there are several “famous” boxing matches retold by many different authors that do not appear to exist or no longer exist in their original format. For example, numerous writers recount the story of a women-only wrestling tournament held by National Police Gazette owner Richard Kyle Fox in 1891. Several secondary and tertiary sources claim that there was an advertisement for this event, in which the combatants, Alice Williams and Sadie Morgan, were required to cut their hair short.[14] It is a fantastic story, and one that Internet authors, in particular, put forth without any careful citation. Yet, the National Police Gazette archives have no record of such an event, although their head archivist agrees that it sounds like the type of affair that Fox would have loved to promote. After a great deal of careful research, it appears that most of these Internet sources use incorrect information for source material. It was not Fox who put on the wrestling match, it was Billy Lester of “Billy Lester’s Big Show” fame.
In late April 1891, Lester presented “Billy Lester’s Big Show” at the Kernan Theater in Maryland. The Washington Post wrote that Lester’s show contained a number of well-known, talented performers. Alice Williams and Mary Morgan, not the aforementioned Sadie, were predicted to demonstrate excellent skill and strength in their wrestling match, and that prediction was certainly accurate.[15] Two days later, the Post reported that during their bout, which was the “most exciting thus far,” Williams came off the victor, with three throws to Morgan’s one.[16] This event is an important part of the history of female wrestlers, but the fight between Alice Williams and Mary Morgan has been misremembered in many Internet sources. The detail of the women cutting their hair short is not substantiated by the original and correct source material, and the name of the second fighter, Mary Morgan, often referred to as Sadie in other sources, is also incorrect. But the notion that Fox and his National Police Gazette would have been fervent supporters of female fighters is, indeed, correct.
The Rise of America’s Golden Era of Boxing
In the United States, prizefighting was a popular form of entertainment, but the pugilists themselves remained thoroughly ensconced in the lower classes. Prizefighting was illegal in the nineteenth century in the United States, decried by politicians and religious officials as barbaric. Furthermore, prizefighting correlated directly with gambling, a sin to most religious people. Unlike the boxers in Europe, who were often backed by aristocratic men, just as Shakespeare and other playwrights were once supported by royalty, the fighters in the United States had no upper-class individuals to overrule the prudish morality of the middle-class American “Victorians.”[17] Hence, prizefighting was a crime, albeit a rarely indicted one.
The National Police Gazette
Fights between women in the United States remained intermittent and ridiculed, just as prizefighting continued to be outlawed in nearly every state in the Union. In the mid-1880s, a group of women arrived on the boxing scene, helped, in part, through the promotion of the American tabloid the National Police Gazette. The National Police Gazette was founded in 1845, but it would not become the popular purveyor of spicy gossip and grisly gore until Richard Kyle Fox took over the publication in 1877. In the late nineteenth century, the sport of boxing was largely illegal in the United States, and promoters, fighters, and spectators could be arrested for attending illegal fights. Of course, this did not stop boxing matches altogether, it merely created an environment where the lower classes were at risk of arrest, while the upper-class men who enjoyed boxing could attend these illicit events with impunity.[18] Fox felt that prizefighting should be legalized in the United States, and he sought to legitimize the illegal sport by creating fighting events sponsored by the paper and providing coverage of the fight in a somewhat fair, unbiased voice. Of course, Fox’s efforts to legalize and legitimize prizefighting were not entirely altruistic. The Police Gazette exuded sensationalism on every page, but that is exactly what made it a popular read for Americans. Fox promoted fighters from a variety of backgrounds, from the famous John L. Sullivan, to such female fighters as Hattie Leslie and Gussie Freeman, to African American fighters, but his objective was always to write content that presented sensationalized news to America’s reading public, who hungrily devoured the blood, grit, sex, and violence provided by Richard Fox and his Police Gazette.
In 1884, the Police Gazette published an article on John L. Sullivan and the popularity of pugilism in the United States. The piece glorifies the muscular male physique, embodied, of course, by the highly successful Sullivan. The paper credits Sullivan with the growing popularity of boxing, which was seemingly unknown in the United States until he made headlines, aided, undoubtedly, by the efforts of the National Police Gazette. The article claims that because of Sullivan, fights were increasing between various types of pugilists, from heavyweights and lightweights, to child boxers and “women boxers of every degree of size, weight, and color.”[19] Two months later, the Police Gazette published a photo of Hattie Stewart, presumably the first highly publicized female boxer in America. The paper declares Hattie Stewart a champion, claiming that she was “eager to box any of the many female champions of America,” which suggests that other women competed and named themselves champion in 1884, and ostensibly prior to that date.[20] Even if there were female champions prior to Stewart, spectators were still titillated by the presence of women in boxing.
In fact, two years earlier, in 1882, the Georgia Weekly Telegraph reported a boxing match between Miss Natelle Lester and Miss Alice Jennings. According to the paper, the assembled fans did not know that the women would participate in the event. Thus, “there was a general craning of necks by the audience.”[21] At stake was a silver cup, which “would be presented to the lady who gave her opponent the greatest number of straight hits.”[22] The paper declares that female boxers were an “anomaly”; however, it also admits that Lester had “long been the holder of the champion badge for female pugilists.” So although the women may be anomalous, they are also part of a growing tradition of female boxers.
Like nearly every other report of female pugilists, the paper details the women’s attire and claims in a derogatory tone that “both ladies were arrayed in garments which afforded the audience an opportunity to indulge in a study of the anatomy of the human form.”[23] The fight was careful and scientific, with both women landing accurate blows, although it apparently devolved into a “clawing match” by the end. Still, it seems likely that the paper would categorize the tired scuffles typical of any boxing match through feminizing terms like clawing, while describing men in a similar situation as merely brawling. Jennings was declared the winner, having landed twenty-one punches, while her opponent, the presumed former champion, landed fifteen.[24] The fight between Jennings and Lester reveals that women were indeed part of the boxing world in the 1880s, even prior to the Police Gazette’s public display of women’s boxing.
The Art of Self-Defense
The 1880s saw an in
crease in pugilistic schools throughout the country. Boxing schools popped up in the United States in the early nineteenth century, often under the guise of fencing academies. Unlike prizefighting, which was seen as a debased and lowly form of entertainment, sparring offered gentlemen an opportunity to practice the manly art of boxing without tarnishing their reputations. Sparring while wearing leather boxing gloves provided practitioners with exercise and skill, while simultaneously reinforcing the masculine ideal of boxing. During the Victorian era, a time of prudishness heretofore unseen in Britain and America, men sought to reestablish their masculinity outside the world of dandyism and romantic poetry, but to say that boxing schools gained popularity only for men to reassert their masculinity would be false. Women also began training in the science of pugilism, and not because they wanted to increase their femininity or masculinity. In fact, most girls and young women who trained in “self-defense” in the 1880s did so simply because it was fun.
In 1886, several papers published the story of a boxing school where teenage girls learned to box in the Queensbury style. The teacher, an elegant and well-spoken older woman, remarked to the reporter that her charges were sparring for exercise, and not, she emphatically stated, for any type of exhibition or prizefight. This school taught boxing as an art, and the pupils loved it with a fervor that shocked the reporter. Inside the gym, the girls used an early form of a speed bag, made with a football tied to a rope, to train prior to their sparring match. The article describes a sparring match between two girls, who moved with the grace of dancers and the precision of experienced prizefighters. There was no winner, and after the bout, the girls discussed their tactics and mistakes like two military officials.
She's a Knockout! Page 9
