Mahir’s gym on Tauentzien Street in West Berlin, at the southern end of the Charlottenberg district, catered to men and women. The pervading philosophy was that boxing training—whether for professionals, recreational boxers, men, or women—was all the same. Men and women contented themselves with the same difficult regimens, workouts, sparring schedules, and principles of asceticism. Something of a salon—where Mahir held court spouting his ideas about perfecting the body—the gym attracted a wide assortment of people from bankers to artists to boxers.
The idea of measuring strength and such things as stamina, the bulge of growing muscles, and the confidence that came from executing boxing’s myriad exercises, not to mention the intricacies of the sweet science itself in the ring, were a new means of expression for women taking their place in the post–World War I world. And whereas boxing prior to the war was still somewhat hidden inside salons, gyms, the closed doors of hosted boxing smokers, or on the vaudeville stage, the images of gloved women were increasingly slipping into the mainstream.
So too were images of women in “unclothed” states, as images of fighters like Texas Mamie—clad in full-length tights, a form-fitting shirt, and short skirt from the 1900s—gave way to even skimpier outfits, which revealed sleeveless low-cut tops, a scarf around the waist, and something akin to modern bicycle shorts.
Female boxing bouts unheard of prior to World War I also became popular in Germany—particularly in Berlin’s growing cabaret scene—beginning in the early 1920s. The bouts were said to be hard fought, as distinct from the women’s boxing “acts” prevalent on the American vaudeville stage. Jack Dempsey, visiting Berlin, witnessed one such evening of boxing and was impressed by the ferocity and great skills of the young fighters, but fearful of the potential dangers.
Under the sway of Weimar culture, however, boxing’s popularity extended far beyond male and female spectatorship and participation in the ring and the “salon” boxing gyms. As a recreational sport, it even extended to such places as German luxury cruise ships where lessons and sparring were offered to the men and women of the upper decks.
The popularity of fistic women in Germany, though unsanctioned, was indicative of yet another rise in the physical culture for women that had begun in the 1880s. More than ever, women in England, on the Continent, and in the United States were taking up sports ranging from tennis to swimming, golf to baseball, and swimming to boxing, as well as other martial sports including competitive wrestling, judo, and jiujitsu (the latter two having been introduced in the early 1900s by Japanese masters of the respective arts). In the meantime, the French boxing variant, savate, continued to enjoy a renaissance that included many female practitioners both in the gym and in bouts. Championships in the sport were also held, and by the early 1930s, several newsreels and short documentary films featured savate, including films that taught the basic rudiments of the game. Some of these films also featured women such as the highly recognized fighter referred to as La Belle France who appeared in newsreels distributed by British Pathé. In the brief film, she is shown demonstrating a number of savate techniques with a male savate practitioner. In another newsreel short, a group of about twenty young French women are shown performing a series of exercises.
In the United States boxing as self-actualization also continued to gain traction for recreational boxers who met to box regularly in classes and gyms. One such group, cited by writer Kate Sekules in her memoir The Boxer’s Heart: A Woman Fighting, was the Busters Club of Flint, Michigan, which she reports was started by a group of stenographers who took up the gloves. How many women were in the club and how they started is unknown—although according to Sekules, at some point they were banned from practicing at the local YMCA.
Women and the Work of boxing
The 1930s was a time of deep anxiety and fear in the United States. The Great Depression and its aftermath—racial strife, the rise of fascism, and the coming of World War II—put tremendous pressure on men and women as they negotiated the changing landscape of their world. Cheap entertainment in the form of movies, and boxing and wrestling shows, saw a rise in attendance and the emergence of women as a meaningful fan base, just as vaudeville started to die out. Radio also leaped to the fore for entertainment of another kind, entertaining Americans seated in living rooms across America.
In the work of the ring, women had been laboring in one capacity or another for decades as entertainers, fighters, managers, and even trainers. In the 1930s that labor extended to such things as licensed fight promotion and refereeing. Most notable among them was Belle Martell, who became the first licensed referee in the state of California on April 30, 1940, after more than nine years of involvement in the sport alongside her husband, Art. Prior to her career in boxing, Martell had been a dancer and contortionist in vaudeville. It is also where she met her husband, a former boxer in his native Australia.
With the rise of talkies, the landscape for vaudeville changed dramatically. Belle and Art left the business and after moving to Van Nuys, California, Art set up a boxing gym in his garage and began training amateur fighters. Belle figured she’d retire and be a housewife for a change. Fairly soon thereafter, however, Belle grew tired of sitting around doing nothing and took to the sport herself. Before long she was good enough to train the boys as they came into the gym—and also helped with the business side of things. Quickly garnering success with popular fight shows, Belle and Art also managed amateur fighters. Shortly thereafter they came to the attention of none other than the “Great White Hope” himself, Jim Jeffries, who in his retirement had set up a boxing gym in Burbank, converted from an old dairy barn on his property. They began managing fight nights for Jeffries, which proved all the rage, and brought them to the attention of the Hollywood set who worked in the studios nearby.
By the mid-1930s Belle and Art were fixtures in the Los Angeles amateur boxing scene. Leaving Jeffries’s big red barn, they managed amateur boxing nights at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. Commonly referred to as the “Olympic,” they attracted large crowds: young and old, men, women, and kids. They also charged nothing more than fifty cents or a dollar to be entertained by a great boxing card and the chance to hobnob with the likes of Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck, and other Hollywood stars—many of them women.
Aside from co-promoting the bouts alongside her husband, Belle also began doing the honors as the ring announcer and gained a license to appear in that capacity at boxing matches, along with a license to act as a timekeeper which she did on a regular basis. On nights when she acted as the ring impresario, she cut a striking figure dressed in a black velvet evening gown and used every decibel of her twenty-two years of stage training to garner the attention of the crowd.
Speaking to a reporter about it, she said, “I had a tough job convincing the fans that they wanted to listen to a woman announcer. It just took a lot of nerve and a gift of gab. They thought they’d scare me, but I tossed back remarks as fast as they were made.”[11]
As an experienced trainer, timekeeper, and ring figure—and by 1940, running a well-respected gym called the Los Angeles Athletic Club with her husband and partner—she had a fair amount of notoriety, and what she thought of as “clout in the business.”
Belle’s next move was to gain her referee’s license. Taking it very seriously, she enlisted former lightweight champion Willie Ritchie to help teach her the fine points of the referee’s ring duties and to help her prepare for the state licensing exam. Newspapers reporting on her at the time wrote that she aced the test with the score of 97½—the highest ever recorded, though she’d actually failed portions of it on her first written attempt. Undertaking an oral exam in front of the five-member panel of the California Athletic Commission the day after her written test, she passed with flying colors.[12]
Belle Martell’s triumph, however, was short-lived and controversial. While she had been cheered at ringside for her previous endeavors inside the velvet ropes, the response to her role as the
“third man” was another matter.
“First Woman Referee Puts Pulchritude in Pugilism,” read one headline emphasizing the story along the lines of “feminine” interests. The photo, showing her with two young fighters, took more notice of what she was wearing than of her refereeing duties: “What the well-dressed referee is wearing becomes a fashion note as Mrs. Belle Martell makes her bow in Southern California as the first woman fight referee.”[13]
Another reported she handled her work “as well as any man.”[14]
But others in the press in California were less kind, vilifying her ring appearances—not so much for her performance, but because of the belief that “women have no place in a prizefight ring.”
Even the state was unsure of its own decision to grant her a license and limited her first appearance as a ring official to one bout only. Of that one fight it was reported “the inspector’s report to the commission” was thought to be “favorable.”[15]
Nine days after her license was issued, Martell officiated on a busy fight card at the weekly amateur fight night in Pasadena. She is said to have officiated at eight fights that night and even counted out a young fighter named Jimmy Archuleta who’d been floored with a knockout punch.[16] One paper went so far as to praise her for her “workmanlike manner” in that fight.[17]
She managed to officiate a few more matches before the California Athletic Commission issued new rules barring women from acting as referees in amateur and professional boxing matches after May 24, 1940. It read in part, “No license will be granted to members of the female sex to referee, second or manage in the ring when other performers are of the opposite sex.”[18]
Reacting to the cancellation of her license, and referring to herself as the first licensed female referee in the country, Martell was furious.
“The Commission found no fault with my work,” declared Mrs. Martell, “but based its action solely on the fact that I am a woman.
“If it continues to discriminate against me by refusing me assignments, I may take the case to the courts. Several women’s organizations are rallying to my aid and plan a protest to Governor Olson.”
A few days later, Belle felt beaten down by all the controversy. She had dedicated the better part of ten years to running amateur boxing shows with an unmatched dedication to the fight game and to the youngsters she had taken under her wing. Disgusted and sickened by all that had transpired, one month and one day after being granted the referee’s license she had worked so hard to obtain, she announced she was “giving boxing back to the men.”
She’d decided to retire from day-to-day activities ringside at the end of June. Explaining her reasoning she said, “The stupid and ridiculous charges stirred up during the past month have brought about my decision to step out and give the men, who have been blasting so loudly, a chance to see what they can do for boxing.”[19]
Even with her pronouncement and the suspension of amateur fighting at the Olympic, she and her husband went on to found Martell’s Arena, known fondly as Belle’s Arena, and continued to promote amateur fighters. Belle approached her work there with the same determination and spirit she’d always had—minus the hope of ever being an official inside the squared circle.
Other women also took to the business side of the ring in this era. In the spring of 1934, the wife of boxing promoter Archie Leary took over his duties at the Leary Arena in Fairfield, Maine, and put on mixed boxing and wrestling programs to enthusiastic crowds. She even added in a musical component to entertain the crowds between bouts.
During the war years, Helen Zivic, the wife of ex-welterweight champion and future International Boxing Hall of Fame fighter Fritzie Zivic, became the first woman to become a licensed promoter in the state of Pennsylvania. With her husband, a corporal in the army, off in San Antonio, Texas, Zivic not only took over her husband’s promotional duties but ran a stable of five fighters. Her view, however, was that she was only taking it on temporarily until he came home.
Juanita Yeargain, known as the “First Lady of Boxing” in Topeka, Kansas, had been a girdle-fitter before taking over the role of promoter for the Topeka Auditorium’s boxing and wrestling shows in September 1943. Her husband, Max Yeargain, a former fighter turned matchmaker and fight promoter, had taken the call to join the navy. Similar to Helen Zivic’s story, Juanita took over the reins, but in her case she never looked back. She promoted highly successful weekly sold-out shows that were proving more popular than her husband’s. Her NWA national championship wrestling cards included some of the best in the business. Her boxing fighters were also well-respected—one of whom was Chilean heavyweight fighter Arturo Godoy who’d fought and been knocked out by champion Joe Louis in 1940.
Another woman of the ring was Dorothy Bodeen. Following in the footsteps of Belle Martell, she became an officially recognized boxing promoter in California in 1945. Based in Oxnard, California, she began promoting a series of amateur boxing nights at the El Rio Stadium with the blessing of the California Athletic Commission.
Most famous of all the female boxing promoters from that era, however, was Aileen “The Redhead” Eaton, who began her career in boxing as a troubleshooter for the owner of the Olympic when business profits started to go bad in 1942. Bringing in a boxing commission inspector, Cal Eaton, the two worked side by side overhauling the promotion at the theater. They married some six years later with Aileen eventually taking over the business entirely upon Eaton’s death in 1966. Aileen helped build a veritable empire of fighting that is legendary to this day, with her best work hitting its stride in the 1960s and 1970s.
Her involvement in the sport included a three-year stint as a commissioner with the California State Athletic Commission. She is also the only woman (as of this writing) to be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. She was inducted posthumously in 2002, following her death in 1987. She also promoted the first women’s bout at the Olympic Theater in May 1976—shortly after the state of California legally sanctioned women’s boxing.
During the war years, women continued to box. From fighting teams of coeds in California to female soldiers and sailors boxing in makeshift squared match sites on base or aboard ships, images of women in the ring also extended to photos of “lady” seconds at boxing matches. One such match was held by the Royal Australian Air Force, as shown in the January 30, 1943, edition of the Milwaukee Journal.[20] The women, attired in uniform shirts and shorts, appear to be soldiers themselves and, if not, women involved in some sort of women’s work corps.
Newspapers also continued to tout boxing as exercise for women to improve their health and their figures—especially their “busts” by developing the pectoral muscles.[21]
In popular culture, boxing-themed movies were hitting the theaters with regularity. The Betty Grable vehicle Footlight Serenade featured her in a boxing number, “I Heard the Birdies Sing.” Her signature number tells the story of how falling in love is like hearing the “birdies” from a knockout and includes an innovative sequence where she boxes her own shadow.
The area inside the velvet ropes where boxing took place remained a male domain when it came to fighting or even refereeing. While the new modern woman certainly boxed in many guises in the period from the end of World War I on through World War II, there was also an apparent overriding discomfort that denied women the opportunity to fight as professionals in any meaningful or sustained way despite their growing success in the wrestling ring. The house side of the fight game, however, was another matter as women did make important inroads as spectators, managers, and promoters in the sport in the years between the wars.
1. Djuna Barnes and Alyce Barry. “Jess Willard.”
2. Djuna Barnes and Alyce Barry. “My Sisters and I,” p. 169.
3. Ibid., p. 170.
4. Ibid., p. 173.
5. Edith E. Moriarity. “As a Woman Thinks.” Tulsa Daily World, July 31, 1920, p. 6. [Library of Congress]. The author further wrote that Dempsey believed women in the future wo
uld go to the gym a few times a week to work out. In the opinion of the author, while women might take up “golf, swimming, tennis, basketball, bowling or skating,” they would never “go in strong for boxing.”
6. Djuna Barnes and Alyce Barry. “Dempsey Welcomes.”
7. “Girl Athlete Says Boxing is Valuable for Protection.” Toronto World, February 18, 1918, p. 5. [Google News]
8. Margaret I. MacDonald. “The Womanly Art of Self-Defense.” Moving Picture World, December 22, 1917, p. 1773. [Learnaboutmovieposters.com]
9. Jack Dempsey. “The Life of a Champion.” Rochester Evening Journal and the Post Express, February 2, 1925, p. 2. [Google News]
10. Erik N. Jensen. Body by Weimar, pp. 83–84.
11. “Female Announcer Boosts Boxing Game for Women.” Reading Eagle, September 5, 1939, p. 30. [Google News]
12. Cecilia Rasmussen. “L.A. Then and Now: First Women Boxing Referee Rolled with Punches.” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2006, p. B2. [ProQuest]
13. “First Woman Referee Puts Pulchritude in Pugilism.” Utica Observer Dispatch, May 19, 1940, p. 2-D.I [Fultonhistory.com]
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