Both women were also given their gloves. As described by the New York Herald, they were “driving kids, lined with a thin flannel [with] the ends of the fingers and thumbs . . . clipped off and the cording taken out of the backs to avoid cutting the pretty faces of the fighters.”[47] While not a bare-knuckle fight, the use of the gloves added protection for the boxers’ hands, but otherwise did little to protect the fighters, and if anything the use of such gloves was thought to have the potential to cause more damage as the fighters would feel more license to hit the bones of the face.
All in readiness, the two women entered the barn to the excited hoots and howls of the crowd before making their way to their respective corners and their seats on inverted peach baskets. Within minutes, both fighters were stripped down and, after shaking hands in the center of the “ring,” commenced their battle at 8:14 in the morning.
The fight itself lasted seven rounds. It was agreed upon by everyone in attendance that Leary had drawn first blood in the fourth round and drew blood again in the fifth round. Leslie, though, was the harder puncher and the better fighter with the fifth round proving to be a tough slog for both fighters. In the sixth round, in the opinion of the New York Herald reporter, “Leary’s heart was broken,” though Leslie did not take advantage of that and rather than aim for the knockout she continued to spar with Leary. By the seventh round, with Leary clearly wilting to the consternation of the crowd, Leslie’s second, George LeBlanche “warned her if she didn’t knock Leary out to the best of her ability he would quit.” This got Leslie to attack with renewed vigor as she let loose a barrage of “vicious pegs at pretty nearly every part of her opponent’s anatomy,” to the continued shouts of LeBlanche. With time called, Leary, “held out her hands for the gloves to be pulled off,” and Leslie was declared the winner with the time at 8:38 a.m.
Both fighters were clearly spent at the end. According to the New York Herald, Leslie sported “two black eyes” and Leary “one,” with both their “faces and hands . . . badly swollen.” One paper also reported: “The sum of money the winner is to receive is rather speculative, but the loser had a $10 purse made up among the spectators after the close of the fight.”[48]
By 12:30 that afternoon, they had all arrived back in Buffalo.[49] The aftermath of the fight, however, had barely begun.
Perhaps because the fighters were women who were both evidently so beaten, or perhaps because as the New York Herald noted it occurred “in the presence of fifty as tough, bad men as divine Providence ever allowed to congregate on a Sabbath morning,” the fight was immediately condemned by the press and by the authorities in Buffalo and the surrounding Erie County.
While the coverage by the Sun newspaper was neutral, the story in the New York Herald, which was picked up and carried across the country, was decidedly aghast. In hyperbolic prose, including the remark that the bout was “one of the most remarkable exhibitions ever presented in a civilized country,” it clearly sensationalized what it called the “fistic encounter” that would have been “a rather common place affair,” but for the fact that the “fight was between two women.”
The sub-headlines also cast a negative light. The round-by-round descriptions were sub-headlined “The Disgraceful Exhibition” followed by “Blood and Staggering Blows” for the third and fourth rounds, and just a one-word heading—“Brutal!”—for the fifth, sixth, and seventh, all of which further sensationalized the encounter.
The contrast to the Sun’s descriptions, which were matter of fact and devoid of any particular editorial content to guide the readers’ interpretation of the fight, was also interesting, especially since both papers routinely reported on female pugilism in New York, and the New York Herald, in particular, had a history of publishing positive stories about Harry Hill’s women’s boxing entertainments.
Other newspapers both local and regional also published stories about the fight. New York City’s New York World had sub-headlines that read: “A Disgraceful Match Between Amazons Near Buffalo. Alice Leary and Hattie Leslie Pound Each Other Like Real Pugilists—An Exciting Affair in Which Blood Was Drawn—Alice’s Second Threw up the Sponge for Her After the Seventh Round.”[50]
The Troy Daily Times wrote:
One gets a square look of barbarism in the face when he reads how Mrs. Hattie Leslie and Miss Alice Leary . . . fought for $500 and the female championship of the world. . . . The principals pounded each other for seven rounds, the reported incidents having all the savagery and loathsomeness of a regular mill between brutes of the other sex. Civilization has a great deal of work to do yet.[51]
The Washington Evening Star published edited portions of the New York Herald story with a sub-headline that read: “A Brutal and Disgusting Encounter on an Island in Niagara River.”[52]
By the following day, the New York Herald published a piece under the heading “Divine Woman!” that began: “Women’s rights, indeed! Why, if things go on in this way much longer, the men of the community will have to organize for mutual protection.” The piece continued:
When ladies take to prize fighting our home life has touched its zenith of glory and refinement. There is no sight under heaven so inspiring, so ennobling, so soul entrancing, so full of all that goes to make poor human nature angelic and god-like, as that of two women in a country barn, with fifty roughs and toughs for spectators, stripping themselves to their tights and preceding to maul, smash, mash, gash, knock each other’s teeth out and pound each other’s faces until they are black and blue.”[53]
Within two days, on September 20, Hattie Leslie and her husband, John (Spond) Leslie (she was also known as Mrs. Lizzie Spond), were arrested at their home in Buffalo, New York. At police headquarters they “were examined by Police Superintendent Morin,” before Hattie was brought “before the grand jury” for more questioning. Also arrested for “aiding and abetting a prize fight” was Bill Baker, Alice Leary’s second. Alice herself was not indicted at that time, but had otherwise disappeared, some said across the border to Canada. According to the newspaper account in the Daily Leader, the police were willing to go so far as to haul in every “spectator, including the newspaper men,” if necessary.[54]
The next arrest came on September 24. George “The Marine” LeBlanche, who had been indicted by the Erie County Grand Jury on the same charges of aiding and abetting a prizefight, was taken into custody in New York City at the behest of the Buffalo police superintendent. The first assistant district attorney in Erie County, William D. Mossey, had issued the bench warrant and LeBlanche was to be brought to Buffalo for trial. John Floss, who had helped promote the bout, was also arrested along with a man name Curley Hughes who was described as “a dead game” (a colloquial expression for what we would call a “straight shooter.”)
The case was brought to trial two weeks later, on October 4. Hattie Leslie provided testimony for the prosecution, stating that she had been approached by Billy Baker and had agreed to a prizefight for money. She also testified that she’d been taken to Navy Island by boat to fight, and that John Floss had only given her $15 for her part rather than the $250 she had been promised.
The defense took the position that it was not a real prizefight, but a publicity stunt for Hattie Leslie’s growing career as a club swinger and boxer. They further contended that signing the article of agreement was a way of making the fight seem legitimate and of enticing the newspapers to cover it.
The district attorney, however, clearly laid out the plot as one of malfeasance at best and saved his strongest condemnation for his closing argument:
The women . . . were to share the proceeds of this most brutal, most outrageous affair. The price was $6 to be entertained on the Sabbath by women fighting. If this is not disgusting, I have nothing to say. I don’t blame the women so much, though they are indicted. It is these men, these creatures, who are at fault. It is a disgrace to you and a disgrace to me—a shame to a city known for its law-abiding character, to think that men so brutal, so lost to every inst
inct in manhood should engage in such an enterprise.[55]
At eight o’clock that evening, after the jury had deliberated for two hours, the verdict came back with convictions for four of the five male defendants in the case. George LeBlanche and John Floss were each eventually sentenced to three months, while Billy Baker and John Spann [Leslie] were both sentenced to six months in the penitentiary. Hattie Leslie, who was to have been tried separately, was discharged and all pending charges were dropped against Alice Leary. John Floss also had his conviction overturned on appeal November 19, 1889.
The uproar about the fight, however, didn’t stop with newspaper accounts or even in the courts of Erie County, New York. No less a personage than Dr. Thomas De Will Talmage, the pastor of the famed Brooklyn Tabernacle Church, took up the matter of the fight from the pulpit, having received a letter of complaint because an article about the bout was carried in a newspaper on the same page as one of his sermons. In addressing the issue, Dr. Talmage said in part:
My reply is, that a newspaper which professes to be a picture of everyday life must give all of it. . . . Beside that, in an age when pugilism is so popular . . . and we are daily informed . . . of the different stage of illness in the case of [John L.] Sullivan, the celebrated bruiser, it is no wonder that women aspire to the honors being won by our sex. I do not know why women may not as well fight as men. Will you not deny them all privileges? You will not let them vote, and you will not let them preach, and now you would put limitation on the swing of their fists. . . . But, to take a more sedate tone, there may come some good from that encounter at Buffalo. It demonstrates to men as hardly anything else could what a mean, absurd, brutal, loathsome and disgusting thing is pugilism and that there may be a recoil most healthful and fighting matches [will end] . . . which have been the disgrace of our cities . . . on the same level with dog fights in which a Sullivan bloodhound or a Kilrain Newfoundland leave each other mauled and bleeding in the sawdust of the pit.[56]
As in England before, the issue of the brutality of the ring was a vexing one that was only exacerbated by the presence of women. Boxing remained illegal in most locales across the country, and while the vehemence with which the prosecutors in Erie County pursued the promoters in the Leslie-Leary fight was based on the contest having been between two women, it was by no means the first or the last of such prosecutions for prizefighting.
Reports of brutal prizefights were also not limited to women in the ring. Within days of the verdict, a “Brutal Prize-Ring Fight” made page one headlines in the New York World. The fight held in Canarsie, Brooklyn, was between “Johnnie Maher, of Fort Hamilton” and “Eddie Hart, of Flushing” and was noted as “eleven rounds, in which Hart was terribly punished” and “frightfully battered.”[57]
The Police Gazette, which had championed women’s boxing since its early associations with Harry Hill in the 1870s, also seemed to put a tentative foot toward questioning women’s participation in the sport when it published a series of quotes from London’s Lancet that also spoke to this issue in October 1890:
We noticed with some degree of alarm in the columns of a contemporary recently that “another step is to be noted in the progress of women. Henceforth the noble art of self-defence is to be included in the list of her many accomplishments.” It is satisfactory to find that this statement is merely alleged in regard to our fair American cousins.
In the same edition, a piece about the proposed fight between Hattie Stewart and Hattie Leslie, obviously penned by the paper’s owner, Richard K. Fox, was published. He offered that while “both champions . . . are clever with the mufflers . . . it is a game that they should allow the men to figure in.” Continuing, Fox wrote, “Boxing between females is a very dangerous sport, and those who have followed it have never created a sensation, neither will they.”
Had the tide turned? Was the outrage against boxing due in some small measure to the popularity of the gloved sport among women? Other articles in the Police Gazette about female pugilists tended toward short-paragraph pieces of boxing news relating information on upcoming bouts or the results of completed ones. Why, at that time, Richard Fox should have voiced disapproval for women’s participation is an unknown, as other pieces after the 1890 article did not follow suit. The Police Gazette’s reportage of the Leslie-Leary fight and the subsequent court case two years earlier were also absent of any editorial commentary. It is possible that something more personal regarding Stewart and Leslie was at work, or perhaps Fox was voicing the frustration of the diminishing financial returns on female bouts. As it is, without further clarity, the reasons for Fox’s change of heart remain an unknown.
All of the complexities of the fight game were certainly at play in the Leslie-Leary fight, magnified by the gender of the two contestants. The court case and associated press, however, did not stop women’s participation in the sport, and Leslie was to enjoy much greater success and recognition for her skills after the fight. Neither did it resolve the place of women in the frame of boxing’s masculine domain. If anything, the question became even more complex, as the evident skill of Leslie as a boxer contradicted the prevailing view of women as incapable of such athletic feats. That she had to be “egged” on for the kill by her second, gave credence to the prevailing view that women were ill-suited by temperament for a blood sport. The fact remains, however, that Leslie executed the commands and finished her job in the ring in the tradition of the game, much as the men, routinely pushed by their corners, gave their all to the sport in the same situation.
Other Boxing Women 1870s–1892
Until the past two decades athletic sport in all its branches was confined to the male division of the human race. But during the past twenty years many females have tried to emulate and follow in the path of the various athletic champions by attempting to become proficient with the oar, the boxing glove, as well as shoot, run, wrestle and walk.
—National Police Gazette[58]
In 1892 the Police Gazette, having overcome its briefly stated reticence about female boxers from two years before, published an article entitled “Women in the Prize Ring.” The write-up made reference to the women who “decades ago in England” had boxed and “posed as clever exponents of the art of self defence,” before touting what it saw as the true pioneers of American female pugilism.
One such person was Libby Kelly (Ross). Born in Jacksonville, Florida, Kelly “was a tall, athletic looking girl, possessed a long reach, understood how to hit, stop and counter to perfection,” and beginning in 1878 “appeared at Harry Hill’s . . . [making] her name famous by the science she displayed.”[59] Kelly was trained by the Harry Hill denizen Jimmy Kelly, and in the opinion of the Police Gazette “was at the time she made her debut the most scientific of her day.”[60]
Libby and Carry (Carrie) Edwards, another one of the original group of female pugilists who started boxing in the late 1870s, often performed together in a boxing act around the country, billing themselves as the “Original Champion Female Sparrers.”[61] One such appearance in November 1880 at Thompson’s Theater in Dallas, Texas, listed them as “rare attractions” of “renowned athletes who, in their role, have no superiors.”[62]
The Police Gazette also ran an item on the pair noting “the champion female boxers of New York have created quite a sensation at St. Antonio, Texas.[63]
Libby Kelly, considered by the Police Gazette to be “the first female champion boxer” of the United States, continued to box until 1882, when on “a boxing tour . . . [in] Pensacola . . . she knocked against an admirer with such force that he fell in love with her, and a wedding was the result.” The story continued, noting that “poverty finally came in at the door and love flew out the window, which accounts for the female champion’s return to [New York].”[64] Boxing under her married name, Libby Ross, she put in appearances at Harry Hill’s and resumed touring with her sparring partner, Carry Edwards.
The honors for the original and foremost female pugilist on the stage, howe
ver, belonged to Mlle. (or Madame) D’Omer. Said to have come to the United States from France with her husband, Mons. D’Omer (who was very likely Irish or English), and performing for the first time in New York in October 1874, the two put on a death-defying sword act to enthusiastic crowds, followed by other athletic exhibitions and a boxing finale that included a boxing match between them. For the show at New York’s Theatre Comique, Mlle. D’Omer was listed as “the champion female athlete.”[65]
In describing their act, the New York Clipper noted that “Mons. D’Omer, aided by Mlle. D’Omer, performed a number of feats, evincing his skill and dexterity with the sword,” including cutting a lemon in half that rested on the nape of Mlle. D’Omer’s neck “without leaving a mark upon the lady’s neck.”
His next feat was to shoot “an arrow through an apple placed upon Mlle. D’Omer’s head” with a blowgun, after which:
Their performance concluded with an exhibition of the manly art of self-defence, boxing-gloves being need[ed]. Mlle. D’Omer proved to be a skillful boxer, and got in some very telling blows upon the head and face of her opponent, while she parried with grace and agility those aimed at herself. Both were loudly applauded during their various rounds, and recalled at the close of their feats. This portion of their entertainment has no objectionable features, and enables ladies to gain an insight into the manner in which professional “mills” are conducted, without having their sensibilities shocked.[66]
A History of Women's Boxing Page 7