The popularity of the boxing portion of the show and the review noting that even women could watch had an impact on the future of this kind of entertainment. For one, it legitimized the presence of women in the theater while giving credence to the popularity that pugilism had obtained in mainstream culture. Secondly, it gave the D’Omers license to begin touting Mlle. D’Omer’s boxing prowess more openly as a marketable aspect of their show.
This is precisely what happened in early 1875 when the two booked in at Brooklyn’s Novelty Theater and for another week at the Park Theater. Mlle. D’Omer’s billings for the shows listed her as “The accomplished Athlete and Amazonian Scientist” and noted that the two would “appear in a pleasing Scientific Display of Valor!” in addition to their sword act—in other words they would box.[67]
The following November 1875 saw the two in a return engagement at the Park Theater. For that series of shows, Mlle. D’Omer openly touted her boxing abilities with an ad that billed her as “The Lady Athlete and Only Female Boxer in the World.”
Building on that success, the D’Omers played to packed houses in St. Louis in December 1875, while the duo of “Fayette Welch and Jennie Satterlee gave an excellent burlesque on the D’Omer [act] . . . at a rival establishment.”[68]
If one considers mimicry as the best form of flattery, the “burlesque” of the D’Omer show, and particularly of Mlle. D’Omer’s athletic prowess, likely meant that she had tapped into something that resonated with both the audiences and thereby the financial potential that other performers could capitalize upon. It is also telling that she had chosen to label herself a “female boxer” in her advertisements as she not only furthered the legitimation of boxing as a female performance art, but also provided a strong indication of the acceptance she was receiving for her display of boxing’s highest accolade: good science.
A review of their act the following February, in 1876, appearing on page one of the New York Sun, gives credence to that assessment and also shows that she had not only staying power on the stage but also a solidly positive appeal, even though she was performing male physical feats:
Her position in sparring is graceful, and every blow is given with judgment. When apparently exhausted, after a lively bout, she walks around her antagonist, and, watching a favorable opportunity, strikes out, always keeping her face well guarded. She is possessed with an excellent temper and laughs as heartily when worsted as when holding the vantage ground. In her contest . . . she pummeled the Monsieur so scientifically and effectually that he, panting for breath bowed to the audience saying: “That’s my first defeat in a long while!” Madame D’Omer went from the stage, her face crimson from the hard blows. The Madame has in her possession a costly silver belt, studded with precious stones, which was presented to her as the champion woman boxer in England. She has walked a mile inside of eight minutes.[69]
Given the success of her pugilism show on the so-called “legitimate” stage, it is clear why Harry Hill thought to bring female pugilism into his more decidedly “low brow” entertainments so closely following the review of the D’Omer show in the New York Sun. And while there is no definitive understanding on why he chose to add female boxing to the acts he already presented, he would certainly have been aware of the popularity of her show.
Over the next few years, several women successfully performed sparring and boxing acts in theaters across the country. Rose Harland of Harry Hill’s fame even found herself on the same bill as the D’Omers in 1878 at the Olympic Theater in New York. The New York Clipper often carried advertisements for female pugilists seeking opportunities for shows, such as Nettie Burt and Alice Livingston, who advertised themselves as “The Original Female Boxers, in their act The Art of Self-Defence.” Nettie in particular claimed that she had “held the Champion Medal for over a year” and was the “Champion Female Boxer of America”—offered as part of Harry Hill’s boxing shows at that time.[70]
Nettie had gotten her start boxing at Harry Hill’s in or around 1878 in a “set-to” with Carrie Wells. The New York Herald wrote:
For three rounds they showed considerable science, and though the claret was not drawn, still they managed to disarrange one another’s headgear and to deliver some very telling blows on each other’s frontispiece. Nettie Burt, who is the taller and also longer in reach, seemed to have slightly the best of it in the wind up, but the majority of the audience was enthusiastic over the smaller antagonist, Carrie Wells.[71]
Alice Jennings, another fighter out of Harry Hill’s, was deemed to “display” good “science” in a bout against Libby Kelly’s sparring partner, “Carrie Edwards,” in 1882, and though she lost the fight, she offered to meet any fighter for $500 and gold medal awards.[72] Professor John R. (Johnny) Clark, Hattie Stewart’s old boxing teacher, gave Jennings “a diamond ring” at a “benefit” held in her honor “in Philadelphia at the Olympic Garden” in 1883.[73] Jennings also published “a standing challenge to any female boxer in the world” for the extraordinary amount of “$2,500, at either 110 or 125 pounds.”[74] Whether she ever realized that sum is unknown, but the offering gives a sense of her popularity in the ring at that time.
Anne Lewis, known as the “Cleveland Wonder,” and who famously lost a bout to Hattie Stewart, was also a celebrated boxer. Lewis, who was born on October 29, 1856, in Chemung County, New York, eventually made her home in Cleveland, Ohio. An article, calling her an “amazon expert” boxer, in the Syracuse Daily Standard described her as follows:
She is a tall, stately woman of masculine bearing, and walks with a firm, decided step. Her form is as straight as an arrow. She has a pleasing face, her lips are thin and firm, and her eyes clear and piercing. Her hair is of a bright, auburn hue, and is worn banged. The muscles of her arms and chest are hard as iron. A wiry bundle of muscle, lying from the collar bone to the armpit stand out in great prominence. . . . She is . . . 5 feet 6 inches tall, and weighs 155 pounds.[75]
Lewis’s talents as a boxer included fights with men. In January of 1885 she was said to have fought “a six round soft glove contest [with] Queensbury rules [against] Frank Stark of Sioux City at the Theater Comique,”[76] in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She also was said to have participated in “collar and elbow wrestling” matches in addition to her boxing.
Fighter “Lizzie Somers, the 110-pound female pugilist,” was called out by the Troy, New York, fighter of some renown Nellie Malloy in an open challenge published in the Sun. In an article that ran a few days after the challenge, “Edwin Stevens, the plucky female featherweight trainer and backer, said that in case his protégé was matched he would begin her training by walking her from First Street to the Harlem bridge before breakfast.”
Born in Brooklyn and nearing her twentieth birthday, Somers was described as “a pretty young women [with] a trim figure,” with the writer adding that “any lady of her weight will have to ‘mind her eye’ in order to defeat her.”[77]
Other female pugilists from the period come down to us from the Police Gazette’s publication of a series of brief vignettes about the state of female boxing in February 1885, just prior to the Stewart-Lewis fight. In their opinion, Libby Kelly was “the most scientific of her day.”
Other boxers in the spotlight were “Carrie Livingston, Nettie Burk, Alice Livingston and Rose Marshall,” although in their opinion “Libby Kelly was more a match for any of them.”
The next grouping of women noted by the Police Gazette article included “Mabel Gray, Alice Jennings and Daisy Daley” along with “Hattie Stewart . . . Bertha McCoy . . . [and] Anne Lewis.” The piece also had nothing but praise for Mlle. D’Omer, whom it was said now resided in Rochester, New York.[78] Hattie Leslie, who famously fought Alice Leary, and Hattie Edwards were also important figures in female pugilism in the period beginning in the mid-1880s.
Alice Ross of Canada, fighting in the early 1880s, gained notoriety, and Marry McNamara and Julia Perry, who fought a tough battle in 1888 where “vicious blows were interchanged,
” leaving both fighters “badly disfigured,”[79] also came to some prominence.
Jennie (Eugenia) Meade, originally from Cincinnati and trained by John Rowan, along with Marcia Meade, from New York “trained under John Donovan,” fought a ten-round contest together at the “Olympic Theater, St. Paul, [Minnesota]” in March of 1887,[80] which gave them both notoriety in the sport.
Women’s boxing in this era was not just confined to the United States. Women were known to have boxed and wrestled in France throughout the 19th century “in circuses, in music-halls, and at Fairs.”[81] Female pugilists also began appearing on the British stage, and women were known to have displayed their science in Canada and Australia.
There were doubtless many other women who tried their hand at professional pugilism in this period. Some were dancers, gymnasts, singers, seriocomics, and other performers who found their way to boxing to expand their repertoire and marketability on the stage, while others, such as Hattie Stewart, just liked to fight. Whatever their reasons, they brought boxing to the fore and helped spur a movement for nonprofessional women to pick up the gloves if for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of the sport.[82]
Crossing the Divide: Sparring for the Ladies and Other Sports of the New Woman
Through the 1880s sports were beckoning women of all classes, as were the concepts of leisure and recreation. While some sports leant themselves more toward competition, such as pedestrianism, rowing, baseball, hockey, and bicycle racing, other sports were considered more leisurely and more in line with the feminine disposition. The latter included lawn tennis, croquet, dancing, gymnastic exercises (light), roller skating and ice skating, golf in the early 1890s, and with the development of the “safety bicycle,” which sported newly designed wheels of equal size, bicycle riding.
The embrace of sports by women was not without strong opposition. The classic Victorian female was meant to conserve all of her strength for the rigors of childbirth and motherhood. Female competitive sports in particular were discouraged in favor of “healthful” displays of exercise. The Victorian conservative moralist Miss T. R. Coombs was one such person who argued against the sport of competitive bicycling by asking:
Can we admire a girl, however beautiful she may be, whose face is as red as a lobster, and streaming with perspiration whose hair is hanging in a mop about her ears whose hairpins are strewn along the race-course, and whose general appearance is dusty, untidy and unwomanly?[83]
Boxing, while it remained on the periphery, at best, of acceptable sports for women, did begin to cut across class lines. Much as boxing and sparring had attracted “gentlemen” over the years, both in England and in the United States, the sport began to attract “ladies” as well. A case in point was the 1885 Sparring Club of Philadelphia’s festival of games, an event hosted annually, featuring gloved contests between club members where ladies were present.
Under the heading “Philadelphia’s Foibles. Young Ladies Studying the Noble Art of Self-Defence. Fair Hands in Boxing Gloves,” the New York Herald published a piece in January 1886 (and republished across the country) on the sparring craze among the privileged young women of that city since the festival. Couched in the idea that “The young ladies present ever in search of a new sensation, caught at the idea of learning to spar,” the article described the difficulties of training them, where the “young ladies [have a] feminine passion for ‘a strong guard’ and a prompt ‘cross-counter’” which the article’s writer assumes is “likely to grow.”
One boxing master is described as a “professional teacher of the heretofore exclusively ‘manly art’” who had “met the best men of his day in this country and England, though never for money or with bare knuckles.”
He had several students “but said, frankly, that he did not enjoy giving lessons, because he was in constant fear of accidently injuring his pupils.”
His main concern was in ensuring that the young women’s hands were properly gloved. To do so, he modified the design, adding “extra horse hair padding” as well as introducing an extra interior glove to help the women make a fist, while cutting of the top of the outer one. “Alteration [of] the gloves is rendered necessary,” he said, “by the universal inclination among the female sex to strike with the hand open.”
He continued and said, “It is the most difficult thing imaginable to teach a lady to close her fist. Even after you think she has been sufficiently warned of the danger she will impulsively lunge at you with her open hand—the fingers straight out and rigid.” No explanation was provided for this phenomenon other than that the inclination was to slap rather than punch.
Asked if he felt that the sport was “a proper one for young ladies?” he replied,
Why not? They are taught to swing clubs and dumb-bells at nearly every ladies’ seminary in the country. I regard sparring purely as a sport. . . . It inculcates a poise on the feet that never can be secured otherwise and it develops muscles of the shoulders and back as no other exercise yet discovered does.[84]
An article published in April of 1886 about a woman in West Philadelphia who also taught sparring provided a different perspective on her young charges. She had taken up the gloves very reluctantly due to “failing health” and “weak lungs” at the behest of a brother with similar problems who’d found his way back to robust health through boxing exercises. After learning to spar, “she found the tonic of judicious exercise far superior to any preparation of bitters she had taken before” and “began to eat more,” and “soon the roses of health drove the pallid hue of invalidism from her cheeks.”
Having been badgered by her friends about her return to health, she imparted her “secret” and began to train one of her closest confidants. In the interim she devised a modified corset to pad the body from blows, and having done so she began teaching other young women. Her main focus was not only health but also helping her students through the “awkward” experience of donning their “air-cushioned boxing gloves,” which ensured that the ladies would not be bruised. After some weeks, she was proud to say that they were able to spar four two-minute rounds, and as the author noted, she had become “a secret society female apostle of health.”[85]
While the Herald’s tone was dismissive and implied that the craze for sparring could easily be replaced by something more fashionable, the underlying notion that young women could and should participate in vigorous exercise was indicative of the new appreciation of health that was sweeping the country for middle-class men and women. This appreciation for the New Woman and her improved physical health was also an important message in the article about the “Lady” sparring teacher.
A third article, entitled “Boxing Ladies of Boston,” originally appeared in a Boston paper and was republished in England in 1887 with a lead that began, “It is not society girls only, but shop-girls, typewriters, and even mothers of families who take part in the exercise of boxing.”
The article continued that the boxing took place:
At a well-known dry goods palace . . . the room given up to its female employees for luncheon purposes transformed almost every day at the noon hour into a boxing school, where the girls meet in friendly contest. . . . A tightly-blown football, fastened pendant from a hook in the ceiling by a piece of rope is generally the object of attack, and around this the fair young girls dance like so many Comanche Indians, striking out first with the left, catching the leather sphere squarely in the centre, then on the recoil sending it spinning again with a clever upper-cut or cross-counter, each time ducking so as to avoid a blow in the face as it comes back to its original position . . . they experience considerable trouble in mastering some of the feints, guards and leads [but] . . . on the whole, they are enthusiastic and persevering, and quick to acquaint themselves with pugilistic points, and, best of all, are very slow to engage in public exhibitions. They take to the sport for the physical good it does them, and for the development of mind and muscle.[86]
An interesting facet of all three articl
es was the decoupling of boxing as a competitive sport from sparring and boxing exercise. In the pieces about the Philadelphia boxing students, the teachers put a lot of effort into ensuring that their pupils would not be bruised or injured in any way. The male teacher, in fact, was at pains to maintain the well-being of his students. He was also very careful to dissociate himself from professional boxing, establishing very clearly that he had never boxed for money and only sparred as a “manly” pursuit. The female teacher had developed special clothing for her pupils to wear to keep them safe from harm and had taken the further precaution of using gloves that would not leave marks.
The article about the women who boxed in Boston clearly framed the endeavor as an exercise—though in praising the women’s skills, the notion that they were “very slow to engage in public exhibitions” may well have been wishful thinking.
The boxing/sparring as exercise paradigm did, however, provide an outlet for vigorous physical activity which, though at the outer reaches of acceptable forms of sport, was nonetheless, a growing option for middle-class young ladies who were otherwise sheltered from pugilism’s more “ugly” side.
The idea of boxing as exercise for the New Woman was also spreading. By the following year, an article reprinted from the New York Mail and Express in the Semi-Weekly Interior Journal, of Stanford, Kentucky, was published under the heading “Sparring by Ladies”:
An opinion in support of the efficacy of the exercise comes from one of the leading actresses of the day, who thus speaks of sparring by ladies: “If a lady engaged in theatrical or operatic work could select but one of the many accomplishments to which we as a class are devoted, I should recommend sparring. The stately carriage, without which none of us can hope to succeed, is made the more easy by knowledge of the principles of boxing, and it comes too, without any seeming effort.[87]
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