Two days later, the Enquirer reported that the match was, indeed, a go. The women, described as “mountains of flesh,” are both lauded in terms of their beauty, size, and athletic achievements. Writes the Enquirer, “The match, aside from the novelty of the participants being women, ought to be a good one from an artistic standpoint.”[55] Marks was a weight lifter but also skilled in numerous athletic endeavors. As the newspaper suggests, the bout promised to be entertaining.
However, on December 29, 1889, the Enquirer reported that the bout was rather embarrassing, with the two women “rolling about the canvas as graceful as baby elephants in the straw.”[56] The newspaper, often changing its opinion of Leslie from beautiful and skilled to fleshy and “elephantine,” declares that her fighting ability was “75 percent wildcat power.”[57] Despite the earlier agreement to arrive at the fight at less than 210 pounds, Marks checked in at a reported 225 pounds, while Leslie came in at 220 pounds. The weight advantage appeared to have worked in Marks’s favor, as several of Leslie’s attempts to take her down for a pin of sorts were thwarted.
Leslie, on the other hand, managed to get off several good throws, including one in which she picked up her opponent and tossed her onto the mat. Both women were apparently frustrated and angry at various times during the match, resorting to such illegal moves as striking and kicking, even though they were restricted from wrestling, the wager being whether Leslie could throw Marks to the mat four times in an hour. Despite her best efforts and the enthusiasm of the crowd, Leslie failed to meet her goals.
Only a few months later, the women planned to meet again for a wrestling match. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on January 5, 1890, that this second fight was a “female fake,” although the women did study with professional wrestlers in preparation for the event. Per the Cincinnati Enquirer, fans were dissatisfied with the bout, claiming it to be a “fake.”[58] The match reportedly looked as though it had been planned out in advance, with some viewers claiming that the ladies were whispering instructions to one another. The paper concludes that the women’s seconds were enraged after the bout and that a subsequent fight between the two men in a catch-as-catch-can style soon followed.[59] Whether the fight was a theatrical performance or arranged to drum up interest in forthcoming events, it remains a historic moment for female wrestling in the late nineteenth century.
On September 25, 1892, Hattie Leslie passed away at the young age of twenty-three from a battle with typhoid fever in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her husband, John Leslie, nursed her throughout her illness. Typhoid, an illness born of contaminated food and water, was a prevalent calamity of the nineteenth century; however, by the 1890s, it was largely on the decline compared to previous years.[60] At the time of her death, Hattie was engaged at the People’s Theater, where she gave “sparring exhibitions with a male opponent.”[61] Her passing was commemorated in the National Police Gazette with a full-page image, as well as the headline “Hattie Leslie’s Last Round” in Milwaukee’s Sunday Sentinel.
Leslie remains an enigma in women’s pugilistic history. Was she an actress or a fighter? Many of her bouts are labeled “performances,” and her career as an actress is often mentioned in articles and press releases. Yet, she undeniably competed in various fighting matches, including the famous bout with Alice Leary, in which both women emerged with bruised faces and bloody knuckles. Her somewhat seedy second wrestling match with Ethel Marks may have been arranged, but their first fight appears to have been genuine. Leslie fought hard to throw her larger opponent, and while she succeeded a few times, she was ultimately unable to achieve the promised four throws. Their second fight may have been fixed, or it may have simply been cleaner than the first because both women knew what to expect and received some training from professional Greco-Roman wrestlers. But if it was rigged, perhaps Leslie and Marks acquiesced to promote their male seconds. Regardless, Leslie died young and would have unquestionably continued her fighting career if not for the fatal disease that took her down.
Gussie Freeman: Slasher of the Ropewalks
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the American media became more accepting of female boxers, even in large metropolises. In 1891, Gussie Freeman entered the boxing community with a nonchalant attitude regarding gender and social norms that shocked and delighted newspaper outlets and fans alike. An article in the November 22, 1891, edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle names Freeman the “Slasher of the Ropewalks.” “Gus” is described as a “born fighter” who “never cared for the society of people of her own sex, except to meet them at a bout of fisticuffs and to glory in their inevitable discomfiture.”
Freeman’s prowess in the ring was recognized during her bout with Hattie Leslie, in which the two women apparently set to “bruising” one another in 1882. At the time of the bout, Freeman was twenty-five years old, weighed 175 pounds, and was reported to be “afraid of nothing that walks on the ground.”[62] According to the New Hampshire Sentinel, more than two thousand spectators, including women, packed into a tiny hall to watch the two women fight for a $25 purse. The winner of the fight was never determined, because the police interrupted the bout, although not until the ladies had “cut and battered” one another and been “covered with their own blood.”[63] The sixteen policemen required to separate the women were part of the audience and only jumped in, according to the account, after the crowd went into a frenzy while watching Leslie and Freeman’s bloody, yet skillful, brawl. While some people felt uneasy about such brutal contact between women, the media recognized that Freeman was a unique and fascinating woman, worthy of admiration, mixed with condescending pity and scorn.
Female boxers typically did not occupy the higher orders of the American social strata. Most of these women, and men as well, worked with their hands (literally), which set them apart from the middle and upper classes, which feared the elements of hard work. It was the prerogative of the growing American middle class to emulate aspects of the upper crust, while also forming habits and conventions that demonstrated the new respectability of the bourgeoisie, and the term respectability was of the utmost importance to middle-class Americans in the late nineteenth century. Men and women avoided any type of behavior linking them to the lower echelons of society. Female pugilists, of course, automatically revealed themselves to be outside the normative middle-class ideology via their participation in fighting; however, many of these women presented themselves as respectable, or at least a simulacrum of Victorian American propriety, outside the ring. Both Hattie Stewart and Hattie Leslie dressed in the appropriate middle-class female garb when not in the midst of fighting. One can imagine that barring any bruises or cuts from training, female fighters might have looked like any other middle-class lady on the streets.
Unlike Stewart and Leslie, who maintained some semblance of culturally normative femininity, Gussie Freeman was known for her masculine ways, as she swaggered amongst men, smoking a pipe, drinking whiskey, and swearing like a sailor. Despite her shockingly unfeminine practices, Freeman was not a low-born lady, but the product of a “Long Island family of excellent reputation.”[64] Like Babe Didrikson, the famous female golfer, she was an inveterate athlete, playing numerous sports and even besting professional baseball player Jack Cassidy by throwing farther than he did one day. Freeman’s mother was reportedly brokenhearted by this anomaly of a daughter, who defied her mother’s instruction and acted more like a boy than the lady-like child of a Long Island matron. Nonetheless, although Freeman was no elegant lady, she did nothing to blacken her name morally. She was “simply a tough girl,”[65] but not an amoral one (except for the swearing, I imagine).
Freeman’s boxing skills were praised by publications throughout the country.[66] Like many boxers of the period, she would appear at a venue for a specified number of days, taking on all challengers as an exhibition of her skill. She challenged Hattie Stewart to a bout in February 1893, for a purse worth at least $1,000. At the time of her challenge, Freeman weighed 220 pounds, but her manage
r asserted that she could cut to 180 for the fight and still be strong. She apparently had a financial backer who would provide a purse of any price as long as the women were able to fight uninterrupted by the police.
In 1893, boxing matches were allowed to continue as long as the contestants wore four-ounce gloves, the same size and weight as the glove used in modern MMA. Interestingly, Freeman’s manager was named John Leslie, the widower of boxing legend and recently deceased Hattie Leslie Hattie and Gussie purportedly met for a match at some point before the former’s death. In 1941, an editor for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalled Gussie “giving a good account of herself until her hair came down in her face and she lost temper. The crowd went wild with excitement, and I thought there would be a riot.” John Leslie coached Gussie in the aftermath of his wife’s death, perhaps feeling sympathy for the woman who lost to the undefeated championess. [67]
Freeman entered the world of business in her typical unladylike fashion by opening up a saloon in Brooklyn, but she continued to train and fight as well. In April 1894, she appeared at the Howard Athenaeum in Boston, Massachusetts, and fought alongside the delightfully named Fatty Langtry, a famous male boxer of the period.[68] Langtry and Freeman trained together in preparation for their matches, evidence that some male and female boxers worked as training partners during this time. Freeman used her sparring experience with Langtry in 1895, when she pummeled one George Schmitzer, an iceman who had insulted her and denied the supply of ice he typically provided for her saloon. At this point, her weight had crept up to a ponderous 250 pounds, and at nearly six feet tall, she was solidly built and technically sound as a pugilist. After confirming that Schmitzer, a diminutive man of only 120 pounds, did indeed slander her, Freeman demanded that he face her in the typical stance. She then roundly thrashed him, despite his efforts at a defense, and left him knocked out in front of a crowd of hundreds. Her legacy remains one of a joyfully unique woman who lived as she wished to live without adhering to the social standards of the day. And like all of the female pugilists explored in this chapter, she courageously delighted in her craft, despite criticism or social obligations to do otherwise.
Nineteenth-Century Fight Promotion
Historically, fights were organized by venue promoters, for example, the National Police Gazette’s Richard Fox, or via the press through a series of challenges. This aspect of fighting sports continues, of course, with Ronda Rousey famously calling out Miesha Tate in 2011 (see chapter 5). In the pre-Internet days, challenges were made through newspaper advertisements and interviews à la the British championess Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes. The language of these self-aggrandizing challenges has remained consistent throughout time: The fighter declares herself to be the best at her sport. Then the fighter puts forth her requirements, for instance, a weight limit, although she typically asserts to be willing to meet all comers. Finally, the challenge ends with a taunt, wherein the fighter declares that any person who meets her will only fall, because she is, in fact, the championess of the world.[69] Champion fighters might appear at a venue and wait for an opponent or two to appear. Cora Livingstone, an early twentieth-century wrestler (see chapter 3), fought whomever showed up to take her up on her challenge, which sometimes meant two or three bouts each night. But many fights were set up following a newspaper challenge through the venue hall or coach of the primary fighter.
Nevertheless, plenty of boxing matches still occurred, not just for sport, but to settle personal vendettas between fighters. In 1894, Elizabeth Jones and Florence Zip of Indiana battled over a lover, but the fight was surprisingly by the book.[70] The women agreed to the Queensbury rules and fought to the finish, which was a brutal one. Jones knocked Zip out in the first round, and the latter broke her arm during the fall.
Fighting sports continued to operate within the margins of society, outside of the normal practices of “real ladies” whose primary objective in life was to nab a husband, start a family, and maintain her home. Yet, as the last decade of the nineteenth century progressed, the desire for female fragility diminished, as doctors and social thinkers advocated for women’s health and well-being. One function of creating a new generation of healthy girls far removed from their pale and fragile mothers and grandmothers who sought to look anemic was an increase in promoting women’s sports.
Women in Sports
In the final few years of the century, women’s participation in sports grew and became more widely accepted in the United States. An 1893 article in the Atchison Daily Globe declares that women had attempted almost every type of popular sport and were much the better off for it: “During the past few years, woman has been doing well so many things that were considered exclusively within the province of man that the term weaker sex has been losing strength almost as rapidly as woman has been gaining it.”[71] The paper recognizes certain women who were unusually skilled, including female sharpshooters like Annie Oakley, female swimmers, billiards players, horseback riders, and weight lifters. As for female pugilists, it claims that except for a handful of skilled women, the “less said about [the rest of them] the better.” While the paper praises the efforts of women in other sporting practices, it denounces pugilistic efforts amongst women, stating, “The late Hattie Leslie was the best-known woman boxer, but happily her handful of successors have been so little encouraged that they are rarely heard of.” The article concludes by claiming that fighting women have no place in the United States, although saying that they “may be all right in Dahomey,” an African nation.[72] Thus, female fighters became associated with the Other, the savage, the exotic, the freak.
It is certainly this “otherness” that made female fighters a regular part of the sensational style of journalism found in the National Police Gazette. In 1892, the Police Gazette published a compendium on women in the prize ring, which, although entertaining, was not necessarily historically accurate. The paper praises a woman named Lib Kelly, a “tall, athletic-looking girl” who possessed a “long reach and understood how to hit, stop, and counter to perfection.”[73] Kelly fought in the late 1870s and was always victorious. She went on to inspire numerous female pugilists in the United States, including Hattie Stewart, who the paper describes as a “beautiful specimen of physical development,” and that when she was “stripped,” “she looked a perfect amazon.” Fellow champion Hattie Leslie is also deemed a “famous Amazon” and “powerful specimen of humanity.”[74] The Police Gazette treats all three women as legitimate athletes, even while they sensationalize their fights in other articles. But unlike many other newspapers that criticized and condemned female pugilists, the Police Gazette celebrated the women who entered the ring and made Richard Fox a great deal of money through tournaments sponsored by the newspaperman.
In November 1894, the Los Angeles Times reported rather acidly that “women [were] certainly driving men from many fields,” including the sport of wrestling.[75] A small town in Austria hosted a women-only wrestling tournament, during which six women competed in a wrestling match in front of four hundred lively spectators. The American newspaper declared it a “disgusting exhibition,” but the Austrian crowd was delighted. Even so, the women were not well-versed in the science of wrestling, and participants quickly resorted to hair pulling.[76] The spectacle obviously generated enough interest in Austria to create an international story. Several different newspapers covered this and other female wrestling events in the late nineteenth century.
Whether the women were praised for their skill or ridiculed for their lack thereof, newspapers treated female wrestling events as performances, rather than displays of sport. Female fighters became even more associated with the idea of spectacle when a Parisian music hall featured female wrestlers alongside typical venue performances.[77] The women were large and strong, but somewhat disconcertingly, were given typically feminine stage names, for example, Fleurette and Mimi. The bouts consisted of intense throws and slams, as well as pins. Parisian citizens appeared to have enjoyed the shows, but reports in
the United States, the land of the Puritans, deemed them unpleasant.[78]
Yet, in 1897, the Washington Post, a more imposing and critical publication than the Atchison Daily Globe, published an article praising the new female pugilist, at least to a certain extent. Even though women were already practicing boxing, the Post declares that while women had made strides in other sporting activities, the “boxing woman . . . so far outranks all of the others so that they should not be mentioned in the same breath.” Of course, the article explains that these women could not hurt themselves or anyone else because their gloves were so padded and their arms “not hard enough to land a blow sufficiently stiff” to cause injury. Furthermore, the purpose of the new gymnasiums designed to teach women the art of boxing focused on technique and exercise, not the art of fighting. Boxing was not only acceptable to the writers at the Post as a form of exercise; the fashionable society of New York flocked to the new, chic boxing gyms in droves.
The boxing master at the New York gym told plump upper-class matrons that boxing was the “speediest and most healthful method for the annihilation of superfluous flesh,”[79] but he was quick to explain to the Post that his students were not learning to box for self-defense, because he considered it highly unlikely that a woman would ever need to defend herself. Nor, he emphatically declared, did he think it reasonable for a woman to box competitively. He explained his position, commenting, “It is all nonsense about women boxing. A woman can’t box because, if you hit her in the chest or the wind, you not only knock the breath out of her body, but you run the risk of starting some awful disease like cancer or something of that sort.”[80]
It is unclear where the master got this idea of “starting cancer” via a blow to the chest, but it reinforces the concept that a woman’s health, while benefitting from light exercise, is a fragile thing. The women at this particular gym learned the rudimentary skills and science of boxing, which were performed more like a dance than a brawl. According to the boxing master, women were better at precision than their male counterparts. Yet, this instructor asserted that women were decidedly less aggressive than men and needed to be urged to punch and use their usual posture of defense.[81] Ultimately, the purpose of this facility was to get women in shape, as svelte, light figures were preferable, much like they are today; however, some of the young women who trained in these posh gymnasiums were able to take their skills to the streets when necessary. A group of young women from Vassar soundly flattened a tramp going through the pockets of their unguarded coats while they were bathing at a local beauty spot.[82]
She's a Knockout! Page 11
