In her interview with Dempsey, Barnes did not so much talk about women in the ring as hint at the fetishism of the male boxing body as a sexual object—a continuation on the trajectory that had begun with the gushing reviews of Gentleman Jim Corbett and his famous pompadour in the 1890s.
“Of course the women will all be on Georges Carpentier’s side,” said Jack Dempsey. The champion heavyweight paused as if to let that sink in, then continued: “It’s not longer enough to have speed and a good right arm to be the favorite. You have to be good-looking, too, now that ladies go to the fights. Well I am willing to do my bit.”[6]
This was a far cry from the novelty and outcry at the idea that “dainty” women would be subjected to the violence of the ring, which permeated the writings about female spectatorship not ten years before—although when it came to articles penned by women, Barnes’s writings seem more like a continuation on the trajectory that had begun with the Corbett interview, minus her admissions of “fandom.” What was clear from her work was the idea that women ogled male boxers as sexual objects—frankly and without concern.
Another author on the cusp of fame who wrote about women at the fights was Ernest Hemingway. In an article penned for the Toronto Star Weekly in May 1920, he observed that women, present for the first time at a boxing event in Toronto, were not only game to watch, but quickly garnered the intricacies of the sport and the ultimate boxing cachet: the knockout.
The fight had been marketed to women as a chance to see the French heavyweight boxing “idol” Georges Carpentier—the doyens of Toronto society among them. From Hemingway’s perspective, Carpentier’s good looks were not, however, the only draw. Hemingway strongly felt that the boxing itself, with all of the attendant blood and gore the fistic art could muster, was perhaps an even greater lure than the half-naked male boxing bodies in the ring. In Hemingway’s estimation, what he was witnessing was a redux of the Roman Forum, which he insisted had at one time or another seen a greater proportion of women in attendance.
Women’s Boxing: Self-Defense and Self-Improvement
At the time of World War I, women had been lacing up the gloves in the salons of the middle classes and the vaudeville stage regularly since the 1880s, yet women’s fighting was still taboo and difficult to come by. The self-reflexive strands of modernity had, however, begun to imbue women’s participation with a sense of themselves and their own possibilities—especially when equating boxing with self-defense.
Boxer Vera Roehm seemed to embody some of that spirit—having started in vaudeville, she graced the pages of the National Police Gazette in 1917, and used her position to promulgate boxing as an important tool in the arsenal for a woman’s ability to stand her ground. Billing herself as a “physical culture expert, boxer and all-around athlete,” Roehm firmly believed “women would do well to learn boxing. It would teach them to take care of themselves at all times,” and from her perspective would help “the vast majority” of women who “are helpless at present if insulted or attacked, as often happens.”[7]
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, of Austrian parentage, she claimed to have been trained as a nurse, though this is hard to substantiate given that she began appearing in the highly popular vaudeville act Will Roehm’s Athletic Girls as early as 1911. Will Roehm, likely her father, had earlier promoted Cora Livingstone as the champion lady wrestler of the world in 1908.
Vera Roehm, though a member of the Athletic Girls troop, began drawing notices of her own in such places as Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1914. There she gained notoriety as a physical culturist and all-around athlete in the five-woman show that consisted of boxing, wrestling, fencing, exercises, and bag-punching routines.
Her main claim to boxing lore, however, was her participation in what was likely the first female boxing film teaching self-defense. Distributed in 1917, by Paramount-Bray, the short, entitled The Womanly Art of Self-Defense, was marketed as an educational two-reeler. A review described “the usefulness to women of knowledge of boxing.” Vera Roehm was described as “one of our finest feminine exponents of boxing.” She was lauded for demonstrating a myriad of boxing techniques and for explaining boxing lexicon. “Here we learn what is meant by the kidney blow, the solar plexis [sic] blow, and various other important movements,” she was said to have described. The review also complimented her for the “forceful illustration” of how “a woman may maintain her right to sit on a park bench unmolested.”[8]
The year 1917 also saw Roehm syndicate a series of articles marketed as health tips. Her simple exhortations to women were on such subjects as gaining enjoyment from exercise, the importance of stretching, and how to get rid of a scrawny neck, all featuring her in posed photographs wearing a sleeveless form-fitted top and tights.
She was, however, an interesting contradiction—on the one hand, an advocate for women’s physical development in the boxing ring, on the wrestling mat, and even in her own home doing exercises; and on the other, as late as 1919, on record as claiming that women didn’t belong in the professional boxing ring. It was also reported that while she had watched sparring events between men, and even lightly sparred with male boxers on occasion, she had never actually been to the fights.
By 1922, Roehm was marketing herself as a physical culturist and stage beauty, promulgating the secrets of the stage to share her tips with women through her exercise regimen that took a mere ten to fifteen minutes a day. She also marketed body building and physical culture courses.
Another woman whose fame as a “champion” boxer coincided to some extent with Vera Roehm was “Countess” (as in a boxer’s ten count) Jeanne La Mar (alternatively, she was known as Jeanne Lamar and Jeanne La Marr). La Mar was purportedly born in France, though a 1930 census entry shows that she was actually born in New York of French parentage in 1900. Given that she had a son named Marcel who was born in 1912, her likely birth year was closer to 1890. La Mar was married to Paul Lamar until sometime before December 1927.
She seems to have begun appearing as a French boxing “champion” around 1921 when she bag punched to music at Stillman’s Gym in New York City. Known as a ballet dancer, she was remembered fondly by gym owner Lou Stillman decades later. Most accounts show her fully engaging in the New York boxing scene in the early 1920s, though how she learned the art before coming to Stillman’s is unknown. Aside from boxing, she also enjoyed some renown as a soprano on the vaudeville stage and appeared in occasional dramatic roles.
Claiming to be the French female boxing champion, the five-foot, two-inch boxing dynamo was skilled not only at the sweet science but also at effectively garnering publicity for herself. La Mar, in a bid for boxing notoriety outside of the realm of the vaudeville stage, took the tact of working with well-known boxing promoters. Her aim was to get a fight at the world-renowned Madison Square Garden. To do so she sought out no less a personage than Tex Rickard’s boxing organization at the Garden (Jack Dempsey’s promoter and an architect of bringing in female spectators to the prizefights—known as the “Jenny Wren” section) and his longtime matchmaker Leo P. Flynn (who went on to manage Dempsey).
After some negotiations, La Mar successfully signed with Flynn. With over sixty fighters in Flynn’s stable at the time, La Mar, as the first female boxer under contract, solidified her place of preeminence in the boxing world. Once under contract, she set to work attempting to get a match against Miss Mae Devereaux or alternatively an exhibition bout against a male boxer to be named. As for Devereaux, in the mid-1920s Dempsey, a strong proponent of women who boxed, was most impressed with the actress and dancer, whose real name was May O’Hara. Having been trained by her brother Eddie O’Hara—who also trained Dempsey—she had the skills of a true champion, skills Dempsey believed could knock out a lot of male bantamweights. Having taken up boxing for fitness, she also boxed to keep herself from the mashers walking along Broadway.[9]
La Mar’s real goal at this time, however, was to obtain a boxing license from the New York State Athletic Commission (boxi
ng had become legal again in the state in 1920). Her efforts to obtain a license proved unsuccessful, but La Mar remained undaunted.
She further legitimized her prominence by claiming to have sparred with such French male boxing champions as George Carpentier (who had just lost to Jack Dempsey) and Eugene Criqui. Given that she had visited France in 1919, where her husband had been a second lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Forces, it is possible that she had opportunities to show her prowess in the ring at that time. Regardless of whether she actually sparred in Paris, however, La Mar’s intention was to solidify her place as a trailblazer in the ranks of female professional fighters.
As it turned out, she was unsuccessful in her bid for a fight at the Garden, but she continued to garner press coverage for her feats in the ring, including sending the boxer Johnny Watson to the canvas in the third round of an exhibition bout in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1922. La Mar appeared on the stage presenting a series of boxing exhibitions, where she followed in the long tradition of female pugilists from the 1880s and challenged women in the audience to box with her.
Eager to maintain her insistence that she was an actual boxing professional versus a stage performer, she put in appearances at professional and amateur boxing shows wherever she could. These exhibitions included fights with other fistic women (on the vaudeville stage or in boxing venues) including bouts with Princess Henry, so named because she was married to pugilist Prince Henry.
Although it is unclear when she and Flynn parted ways, she eventually signed with boxing promoters Joe Woodman and George Lawrence in 1923, who helped La Mar perform in three-round exhibitions against the likes of the fighter Bugs Moran, the gangster. At around the time she signed with Woodman and Lawrence, it was reported that she secured a professional boxing license, the first ever issued to a woman in the state of New Jersey. Her aim was to fight a sanctioned bout against Kiddy McCue, a boxer out of St. Paul, Minnesota, or Princess Henry of Allentown, Pennsylvania, with whom she had already been performing in shows. It is unclear if any of these bouts actually occurred, as a press notice in September of that year stated that none of her challenges had been accepted. It has also been claimed she was granted a license to box in the state of Texas at some point—but it remains unsubstantiated.
By 1924 she was featured on WHN radio in New York, both singing in French and English (in her guise as a soprano) and giving talks on such topic as “Self-defense for Women.” Press accounts of her boxing, however, were starting to dry up, and as the decade wore on, her radio work seemed centered on her singing. Advertisements in Variety emphasized both her boxing and dramatic stage appearances. She also appealed to Actor’s Equity in this period to ensure that no other artists could use her stage name.
In late 1927 she moved to Los Angeles with her second husband, Thomas Failace (or Faye). The marriage came to an abrupt end a few weeks after their arrival when police were called to their Hollywood home, apparently responding to the culmination of weeks of brawling since their wedding in early December. There is no mention of what happened to her first husband, Paul Lamar. Some accounts note that he died—though the record is spotty—and one reporter researching her life claimed that at her husband Paul’s death she was the beneficiary of a large insurance claim, which she was said to have lived on as her main source of income through the mid-1930s. Added to the mystery, however, are census records that indicate Paul had remarried and remained quite “alive.”
At about this time, in 1931, La Mar was also flatly turned down in her bid to be granted a boxing license by the state of California. Her history in this period became somewhat murky as she struggled to maintain her place in the limelight. By the early 1930s she was pulling such stunts as calling out the famed Olympian Babe Didrikson to meet her in the ring. Shortly thereafter, in 1935, La Mar decamped from Los Angeles to live in her cabin on a piece of land above Big John Flats Mountain near Wrightwood, California, about an hour and a half northeast of the city. Once there she became embroiled in a mystery worthy of any 1930s Hollywood potboiler.
Still identified as the French female boxing champion, La Mar began to drink heavily, and as her cash flow apparently dried up she sought out pickup bouts in local venues. Though no longer married, she lived with a younger man identified later as Gustave M. Van Herran, known locally as Gus. La Mar claimed he was her nephew whom she raised since childhood. Undoubtedly this was the same “Marcel” identified as her son on her first husband Paul’s passport application from 1920. The best guess is she called Gus (Marcel) her “nephew” to maintain the fiction of her purported age which, as time went on, got younger and younger.
In 1937 or so Gus disappeared rather mysteriously only to have his skeletal remains discovered alongside a rusted-out hunting rifle. His remains were found on La Mar’s property about a year after his disappearance. An investigation at first concluded that Gus, who had been shot in the head, was murdered; however, the cause of his death was eventually changed to suicide. The Associated Press news report at the time, published in the New York Times, stated her nephew had been released from Stockton State Hospital where it was reported he had apparently threatened to commit suicide a month or so before his disappearance. La Mar disputed the findings, but nothing ever came of it. At about this time, she herself left the mountain for parts unknown and was said to have died in the early 1940s nearly destitute. A reporter looking into her story in the 2000s brought to life the claim that she had confessed to murdering Gus, though the actors in the sad tale were long since gone.
For all of the drama of her story, punctuated by many acts of self-promotion that kept her in the public eye for decades, La Mar, through her attempts at legitimizing her standing as a professional boxer—some successful, some not—remains an important figure in women’s boxing at a time of great transition.
As with Roehm, she sought to promulgate women’s boxing as a means to self-actualization. Through her talks on self-defense, although she differed from Roehm, who did not see a place for women in the professional side of boxing, La Mar very much supported women in the professional prize ring and sought prominence in the sport she came to love for herself wherever she could.
The struggle for acceptance of such figures as Roehm and La Mar bracketed the legitimization that women had successfully garnered for themselves at the ballot box. Other women in other sports also pushed for success. One figure, Ida Schnall, had come to prominence with her failed bid to become a member of the 1912 U.S. Olympic Team. A champion swimmer and diver, her efforts to compete in Sweden, where women’s swimming events were added to Games for the first time that year, were thwarted by the U.S. Olympic Committee secretary, James E. Sullivan. The following year, as captain of the New York Female Giants baseball team, Schnall was to write a letter to the editor of the New York Times complaining about the denial of women in such prestigious sporting outlets as the Olympics.
Despite her being denied a place in the Olympics, Schnall gained notoriety as a female sports figure and advocate for women’s physical cultural. Schnall’s life intersected La Mar’s in 1923 when La Mar accepted Schnall’s very public challenge to fight. Various news reports had them fighting for the featherweight, junior lightweight, or lightweight championship, and Schnall was photographed, with a baseball bat in hand, as she readied for the bout.
The match was set for May 12, and an application to the New York State Athletic Commission was lodged; however, a permit for the bout was not forthcoming—and the women, though determined to fight, were minus a venue. At the time, La Mar pointed out that nowhere in the rulings were women forbidden to fight, but regardless of her interpretation, their boxing bid was denied.
Other women who boxed with some notoriety in the era with an eye on women’s fitness and health included Americans Laura Bennett and Gertrude Allison, French boxer Mlle. Gonraud, and the English fighter Miss Annie Newton, who along with other members of the Women’s Boxing Club in London, founded by her father, Professor Andrew Newton, were said
to have been featured in a Gaumont newsreel piece in the 1920s.
In this same era, female boxing characters put in appearances in films—with the boxing as self-defense meme clearly embedded in the characterizations. Most famous of them in the United States was Clara Bow’s Rough House Rose, first shown in 1927. The film was produced by Adolph Zucker and Jessie L. Lasky, and directed by Frank R. Strayer for Paramount Pictures, and as noted in the trailer (the only surviving portion of the film), it is the story of a girl who “got her men treating ’em rough.” The images show her socking a boyfriend, cheering on another boxer boyfriend at ringside, and bits and pieces of a boxing dance number at the nightclub where she was a headliner.
The German film The Fighting Lady, also produced in 1927, incorporated the boxing-as-self-defense theme as an antidote to troubled political times and the physical threats that lurk in the dark. The heroine takes up boxing after being mugged in the park. Her newly found confidence and prowess, however, have a detrimental effect on her relationship with her fiancé, who feels threatened by her ability to take care of herself. Angered by his lack of understanding she storms out and, walking in the same park where she was mugged before, she fends off a would-be attacker with three swift shots that knock him down to the ground. Her fiancé comes upon her, having followed her for fear that she was cheating on him. Together they drag the would-be criminal to the police—followed by images of newspaper headlines lauding her for defending herself. The close of the film opines that by the year 2000 women will be the protectors over men.[10]
Other strands along the theme of self-improvement were articulated by such women as actress Vicki Baum who took up boxing in the early 1930s and viewed it as a means of measuring her own strength. Baum, joined by such luminaries as the iconic Marlene Dietrich and Germany’s elite boxing royalty including Max Schmeling, worked out at a boxing club opened by Sabri Mahir in Weimar-era Berlin. Said to have originally been a soccer player from Turkey who left at the time of the Second Balkan War, Mahir was also purported to be a German named Sally Mayer, originally from Cologne. Whether Mahir or Mayer, he took the name “Terrible Turk” and gained fame boxing four opponents at a time at Germany’s first boxing venue, the Circus Busch.
A History of Women's Boxing Page 14