A ladies sparring club in Kentucky may have seemed far-fetched, but Hattie Stewart’s experience of teaching women to box in Norfolk, Virginia, in the early part of the decade certainly gave a sense of its popularity. Stewart herself had been taught the sport in the late 1870s, and while her learning experiences occurred in her German-American ethnic enclave in Philadelphia, whether women were working class or members of the upper classes, the sport was spreading across the country.
The Gilded Age: Female Spectatorship at the Fights
Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, was the most famous female reporter of her era beginning in the late 1880s. She made her reputation in 1887 when she “feigned insanity so successfully as to get herself committed to the lunatic asylum [in New York] for the purpose of writing a full and true account of the treatment of the inmates.”[88] The success of the series of articles, published in the New York World, led to the publication of a book entitled Ten Days in a Mad House and solidified her stature as legendary journalist.
Two years later, in a first for newspapers, Nellie Bly traveled up to Belfast, New York, where the boxer John L. Sullivan was said to be training for his bout against his boxing nemesis Jake Kilrain. It is unclear if Bly had ever witnessed a prizefight (likely not, given that she was only twenty-three at the time) but her manner was engaging and her first-person account was filled with the boxers’ interactions.
“Mr. Sullivan, I would like to shake hands with you,” I said, and he took my hand with a firm hearty grasp and with a hand that felt small and soft. Mr. Muldoon [his trainer] excused himself, and I was left to interview the Great John L.
“I came here to learn all about you, Mr. Sullivan, so will you please begin by telling me at what time you get up in the morning,” I said.
“Well, I get up about 6 o’clock and get rubbed down,” he began in a matter-of-fact way. “Then Muldoon and I walk and run a mile or a mile and a half away and then back. Just as soon as we get in I am given a showerbath and after being thoroughly rubbed down again, I put on an entire fresh outfit.”
Her questions, less about the boxing world and more about Sullivan himself, put him at ease. In a later exchange she wrote:
“Your hands look very soft and small for a fighter.”
“Do they?” and he held one out to me for inspection. “My friends tell me they look like hams,” and he laughed. “I wear number nine gloves.”
“By the time I am ready to fight, there won’t be any fat on my hands or face. They will be as hard as a bone. Do I harden them? Certainly. If I didn’t I would have pieces knocked off of me. I have a mixture of rock salt and white wine and vinegar and several other ingredients which I wash my hands and face with.”
Toward the end of their interview Sullivan said, “You are the first woman who ever interviewed me. . . . And I have given you more than I ever gave any reporter in my life. They generally manufacture things and credit them to me, although some are mighty good fellows.”[89]
The article, published in the Sunday World edition on July 28, 1889, was not so much a sensation as another milestone in the complex relationship between women and pugilism. Bly’s perspective was also interesting. Focusing on his physicality, his regimen, and ultimately, when it came to her focus on his hands, how they were not so different from her own.
The barrier having been broken, famed sportswriter Winifred Black, writing under the pseudonym Annie Laurie for the San Francisco Examiner, interviewed the likes of boxers Peter Jackson and James Corbett prior to their 1891 heavyweight bout. Her next exploit was to penetrate the work of boxing when she “infiltrated an all-male club in [June] 1892 to become the first woman to cover a prize fight for an American newspaper.” [90]
The fight was a forty-one-round bare-knuckle rout that left the fighters “disfigured and swollen, their legs unsteady.” The crowd, clearly out for more blood, was angry when the fight was called, but from where she sat, “Hidden in a perch overlooking the arena . . . it was a revelation.”[91]
“I have seen men,” she wrote, “not as women see them, but as men see them. . . . Men have a world into which women cannot enter. They have a being that women cannot understand. I learned all this at the prize-fight.”[92]
The female spectatorship at the heyday of British boxing with its sparring venues for women was a thing of the past in 1890s America. The variety theater version of sparring, however, was as popular as ever with venerable stars such as Hattie Stewart filling theaters with their acts along with new stars and boxers such as John L. Sullivan who supplemented their boxing earnings by taking to the stage.
While women were performing pugilism in the prize ring, on stage, and even as a form of exercise with limited acceptance, women as spectators were still a taboo prospect in the 1880s and early 1890s. Yet, something had pushed Winifred Black to want to see a prizefight. The boxing scholar Kasia Boddy, through her extensive research, has shown how boxing became a topic of exploration in literary efforts in the period. Following up on the thought, she raised the idea that under “the influence of Darwinism . . . men (and later women) . . . became interested in boxing as a subject matter within which to explore the mechanisms of sexual selection.”[93]
She went on to note, “The female assessment of a potential mate was central to many of Jack London’s fight scenes, and more often than not his emphasis is on male excitement in realizing that this is the case.”[94]
As early as 1891 the press began publishing reports of women in attendance at the fights. A brief notice in the St. Paul Daily Globe was particularly pointed in its condemnation:
It is reported that quite a number of women attended the [Jack] Dempsey-[Robert] Fitzsimmons mill at New Orleans. What with women fighting prize fights in a twenty-four-foot ring, surrounded by a lot of drunken pugs, and other women attending mills between masculines in disguise, our boasted modern civilization appears to have been side tracked.[95]
While the emphasis on the breakdown in normative gender roles was discussed as indicative of a decline in civilized decorum, through the 1890s, women’s spectatorship began to take on the sexualized connotations argued by Boddy. With the advent of cinema in this decade, the boxing film became an important mainstay of these early efforts, enticing audiences, including women, to become enamored with the images of half-naked men in the boxing ring.
These films began as short movies showing individual rounds of important boxing matches, with the fighters appearing shirtless and wearing short trunks or knee-length tights. Films of prizefights were also staged for the camera on specially created sets rather than in a live venue. Both types proved enticing and while boxing was still illegal in many states and locales, the popularity of these films further legitimized the sport while widening the audience even further to groups who might otherwise never have attended a match at a live venue.
The question of women’s spectatorship at the fights was also seemingly resolved once and for all with the inclusion of female audience members at the much-anticipated Gentlemen Jim Corbett versus Robert Fitzsimmons prizefight in Carson City, Nevada, held on March 17, 1897. As has been established, women were in attendance at Fitzsimmons’s 1891 bout, and Fitzsimmons’s wife became a ringside fixture at other matches of his. The Corbett-Fitzsimmons prizefight, however, was a definitive landmark for female spectatorship for two reasons: It was marketed directly to women in an effort to push boxing toward a more mainstream form of entertainment and the fight was filmed in its entirely and later shown across the country as the first full-length feature film ever produced.
In the run-up to the long-anticipated match against Fitzsimmons, the coverage of the bout became frenzied with teams of reporters following both fighters and filled with evocative descriptions such as the “beautiful black eye” sported by one of Fitzsimmons’s sparring partners. The coverage also featured writings by a female reporter. A first-person interview of Corbett entitled “Mr. Corbett Through A Woman’s Eyes,” published by William Randolph Hearst’s San F
rancisco Call and written by Edna Edwina Edith Edgerton, was filled with romanticized images.
Stating her feelings about seeing Corbett for the first time, Edgerton wrote:
Can I describe my emotions! Can I put in cold and chilling words the rapture with which I gazed on that form! Never! Ah me! Never! He has the head of a Greek god. His neck rises above his shoulders like a tower of ivory. He has the torso of Hercules, the arms and thighs of an Apollo Belvedere.
Edgerton, overwhelmed by the thought of “worshipping at the feet of Corbett,” reported that she fainted, adding, “When I came to my senses again the great champion was bending over me.” And having lifted her up and helping her to a “rude couch,” he agreed to be interviewed, rattling off his itinerary for the day including that he’d eaten “ham and eggs for breakfast,” and “play[ed] ball and skipped the rope for three hours.”
At the close he told her she should “write me up every day until the fight comes off,” with the closing note that this was said with “a roguish twinkle in the great athlete’s eyes.” And that while she would “interview Fitzsimmons to-morrow . . . tonight I dream of Corbett.”[96]
As distinct from Nellie Bly’s interview of Sullivan a decade before, the abjectly sexualized perspective promulgated by Edgerton presented her “women’s eye view of Corbett,” as a coquettish flirtation in which she relished the “eye candy” in front of her. Was it any wonder that women came to the fight and to the open practice sparring sessions at the arena in Carson City held a few days before the big event? The officials at Corbett’s quarters “had their hands full in keeping the crowd which two-thirds were women, from encroaching too much on the space.”[97]
Dozens of women were among the four thousand in attendance as Fitzsimmons and Corbett battled through thirteen hard-fought rounds. The fourteenth round, however, was the final reckoning for Corbett. According to one reporter, “The finish comes like a thunderbolt,” when “Fitzsimmons springs forward with a great right-hand smash over Corbett’s heart,” to be followed by a “ripping left, flush in the pit of . . . [Corbett’s] stomach.”
Fitzsimmons’s “amazon wife,” who sat directly behind his corner during the bout, was described as having “sprung up to the top of her chair. Her cheeks . . . flushed and her eyes . . . blazing . . . [upon seeing] her reward for her Spartan attitude.” She is further described as showing “not a tremor in her voice as she shrieks encouragement to the bloody man with the stilt-like legs standing over his fallen foe. It is the scream of a triumphant mother eagle, the paean of a Cleopatra for her victorious Antony.”[98]
The theme of romantic aggrandizement promulgated in Edgerton’s piece about Corbett was clearly carried through in the description of Fitzgerald’s wife as “Cleopatra” to his “Antony.” The sexuality of both the fighter and spectator are left in no doubt where male fighters stand in for hypermasculine images of maleness itself, and female spectators fulfill the role of sexualized and idealized feminine partners.
Interestingly, while Edgerton had swooned over Corbett, a tidbit published in the Sacramento Daily Record reporting the results of a poll seeking the female reaction to the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight alluded to the real-world issues women faced.
Salinas Index: Nine-tenths of the women are glad that Fitzsimmons whipped Corbett. They say that he wasn’t true to his first wife, and that he abuses his second wife. Mrs. Corbett number one was a Santa Cruz girl, known as Ollie Lake before she married “Pompadour Jim.”[99]
Two months after the fight, on May 22, 1897, the full-length feature film of the event debuted at New York City’s Academy of Music on East Fourteenth Street near Union Square. The success of the film, the first to be distributed as a single cinematic event across the United States, played to packed houses in quality theaters and opera houses from New York to California. It was also said that women accounted for a significant number of tickets sold at showings in the United States. As noted by the St. Paul Daily Globe, during the film’s run at the Metropolitan Theater in St. Paul, “The ladies too were out in force and appear to be making the most of this, their only opportunity to see just what a prize contest is like.”[100]
The Evening Times also offered commentary when the film began its run at Washington, D.C.’s, New National Theater in September 1897:
One of the remarkable features . . . is the great interest taken in the exhibitions by women. The reason is undoubtedly because the Veriscope allows them the opportunity of witnessing a clean scientific contest between two foremost boxers of the world, without being subjected to the necessity of seeing the men actually suffer from the effects of the blows, or having to undergo any of the little inconveniences encountered at an actual contest.[101]
Stuart’s strategy to book the initial runs of the film in quality venues also furthered the opportunity to entice female audience members who otherwise only frequented the theaters for other entertainments. Special ladies’ matinees were featured at some venues to spur attendance. The presentations in the first-run houses also included the presence of a master of ceremonies who delivered commentary during the showing—a not-unknown practice for traveling lectures that incorporated film—which may have further legitimized the showing as high-brow theater, certainly a first for prizefighting.
Scholars researching spectatorship of the film have noted that female attendance may have been somewhat overblown in some locales. Dan Stuart’s promotion machine (and their practice of issuing press releases ahead of bookings) was said to have touted women theatergoers. Still, women did indeed view the film in large enough numbers to be significant, not only establishing a place for women at the fights, but also in no small way helping to usher in a greater legitimation for prizefighting.
As the boxing film became an important mainstay of theatrical showings of motion pictures, other films such as the Edison Company’s 1901 short of the Gordon Sisters vaudeville sparring act also hit the cinema screen. The catalog noted it as follows:
Champion lady boxers of the world. Here we depict two female pugilists that are really clever. They are engaged in a hot and heavy one-round sparring exhibition. . . . The exhibition is very lively from start to finish; the blows fall thick and fast, and some very clever pugilistic generalship is exhibited.[102]
The preponderance of the boxing films and the opportunities available to women to view such films—and even marvel at themselves—helped to set the stage for the legalization of professional prizefighting in many locales as the 1900s loomed.
This new paradigm, however, did not cross over into the realm of female professional boxing, which remained at best a sideshow performance on a variety theater stage.
1. Jack London. A Daughter of the Snows. Quoted in Kasia Boddy. Boxing, p. 165.
2. Sporting Magazine, vol. 39., no. 231. December 1811, p. 139. [Google Books]
3. “Female Pugilism.” Stamford Mercury, October 15, 1824. [British Library Board]
4. Chester Chronicle, June 18, 1819 [British Library Board]
5. “Female Pugilism.” Stamford Mercury, October 15, 1824. [British Library Board]
6. “Female Pugilism.” Westmorland Gazette, October 16, 1824. [British Library Board]
7. “Female Pugilists.” Hampshire Chronicle and Courier, October 27, 1817. [British Library Board]
8. London Times, March 24, 1807. Quoted in Allen Guttmann. Women’s Sports, p. 76. Guttmann’s work is a definitive resource for historical accounts of women’s participation in sports.
9. “Pugilism: White-Head Bob (Baldwin), and O’Neal.” Westmorland Gazette, October 30, 1824, p. 2. [ British Library Board]
10. Frederick Douglass. Narrative of Life, p. 63.
11. The American Fistiana. New York: H. Johnson, 1849, p. 29. [Google Books]
12. New York Daily Tribune, March 25, 1843, p. 2. [Library of Congress]
13. Brooklyn Eagle, September 24, 1852, p. 2. [Brooklyn Public Library]
14. Brooklyn Eagle, March 26, 1847, p. 2. [Brooklyn Public Library]
15. Fayetteville Observer, October 16, 1856, p. 1. [Library of Congress]
16. Holmes County Farmer, May 31, 1860, p. 1. [Library of Congress]
17. “A Female Boxing Match. A Novel and Nonsensical Exhibition at Harry Hill’s.” New York Times, March 17, 1876.
18. New York Herald, June 8, 1876, p. 3. [Fultonhistory.com]
19. New York Herald, March 14, 1876, p. 6. [Fultonhistory.com]
20. New York Herald, June 8, 1876, p. 8. [Fultonhistory.com]
21. “A Female Prize Fight.” Hudson Evening Register, March 14, 1872, p. 2. [Fultonhistory.com]
22. Staunton Spectator, October 21, 1877, p. 3. [Library of Congress]
23. Hattie Stewart. Boxrec Encyclopedia. [Boxrec.com]
24. National Police Gazette, May 17, 1884. [Fultonhistory.com]
25. “Loves to Fight.” Buffalo Express, December 22, 1887, p. 8. [Fultonhistory.com]
26. New York Herald, April 4, 1884, p. 8. [Fultonhistory.com]
27. National Police Gazette, January 24, 1885, p. 10. [Fultonhistory.com]
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