A History of Women's Boxing

by Malissa Smith

  The fight itself, though historic in the context of the 1970s, was less than stellar technically. Neither fighter had a plethora of boxing skills and, as reported by the Associated Press, they were subject to occasional boos from the crowd accompanied by disparaging remarks interspersed with cheers for the harder flurries. The AP article itself wasn’t particularly flattering either, noting that the first round “For the most part . . . was an alley fight complete with flailing arms and wild punches.” The reporter also noted, “When solid blows connected, their bodies did not absorb the force and both were knocked off balance.”[50]

  Lange’s prefight boast was telling, as the fight went four full rounds. Svendsen was given the decision—her first actual “official” fight—but she had to work hard for it. Lange was said to have given a stronger showing than her first time in the ring. She attributed it to “a lot more conditioning. I had one day in the gym for the [first fight], because I had been called in as a substitute. This time I trained every day, hoping I could get a rematch.” Svendsen, clearly tired at the end of the fight, was quoted as saying, “She just wouldn’t go down, no matter how hard I hit her.”[51]

  While Caroline Svendsen’s fight for the right to box legally in Nevada had been very public, with national press coverage throughout, the matter of women’s boxing in the state of Arizona took a different tack entirely. The Arizona Athletic Commission, by a 3-0 vote, agreed to legalize women’s boxing in the state in early October, and even held their first legally sanctioned women’s bout on October 10. It was held with barely any press coverage and only became a national story when the Associated Press put it on the wire in the middle of November.

  The change in the Arizona rules stipulated that women who applied “for the $5 license must be between 18 and 38 years old, physically fit and must have had ‘a little experience boxing other women.’” The rules also specified that women wear “steel-and-sponge protectors . . . for the breasts and a sponge protector for the pelvis.”

  The commission chairman, Nicholas Kondora, said, “I don’t like the idea of women boxing but we had to go along with [it]. They told us women are doing it all over the country.” Another of the commissioners, Mike Quilhuis, “an ex-boxer,” was “enthusiastic about admitting the female leather pushers.” Weight brackets would be the same for both men and women, though no mixed-gender fights would be allowed.[52]

  Arizona had already had its share of controversy when it came to women’s participation in the ring. Seven months before, in March of 1975, Marion Bermudez, a twenty-three-year-old nationally ranked karate champion—with a third-degree brown belt at the time—chose to enter the Phoenix Golden Gloves in the 125-lb. novice class. Originally from the Bronx and of mixed Puerto Rican and Trinidadian heritage, she had transferred to Arizona State University from a small college in Nebraska where she had been the recipient of an athletic scholarship.

  Bermudez had taken up karate—a highly popular form of self-defense for women at a time of rising crime rates when many felt unsafe walking alone on the streets—in 1972. For some it was also a gateway to competitive karate, one of the few contact sports where serious competition was open to them. In accordance with the rules of the many associations that were springing up, mixed-gender competition was also allowed in certain of the martial arts forms (including kickboxing).

  As the date for the Golden Gloves championship loomed, Bermudez and her karate coach, Fred Stille, thought about having her apply, mostly to provide her with cross training to enhance her competitive karate skills. Both felt this was a key way of learning the “inside” game, as opposed to karate, which was traditionally fought with considerable distance between the opponents.

  With just seven hours of boxing training in the ring over a period of a week, Bermudez showed up for the weigh-in held on March 7. Her presence caused something of a stir between the coaches, fighters, and tournament officials in attendance. Rather than tossing her out, the officials decided to let her fight despite their trepidation—although mainly because they did not want it to become a contentious issue. As Ben Hinds, a tournament official also acting as a referee, put it, “This is definitively not a woman’s sport, but if we try to stop her I think she could turn around and sue everyone for violating her civil rights.”

  The state tournament director, Harry Ginn, agreed: “I’ve been in boxing 30 years and I’ve never heard of anything like this before. I don’t think women should be boxing, but she stands a chance if she fights a turkey. Otherwise, she doesn’t have the experience to fight inside.” The sponsoring organization of the Golden Gloves, the AAU, took a dim view and warned that there might be consequences.

  Bermudez forged ahead. Upon winning her first bout by split decision, Hinds said, “The young lady surprised me. I didn’t think she’d have the power that she did.” She eventually lost her second fight. Hinds, acting at referee, stopped it in the first round after she’d taken two standing eight counts. As it happened, the fighter she had lost to ended up as the divisional champion. Bermudez was upset about the fight being stopped, saying that she wasn’t hurt and had been pulled from the fight too soon. Later even Hinds agreed, but in the moment he was more concerned about her getting hurt and the possible ramifications.[53]

  Win or lose, when Bermudez entered the ring, she had the crowd behind her. One woman, “the wife of a boxing coach [even yelled out], ‘We do it at home with rolling pins and frying pans; no reason we can’t do it in the ring with left hooks.’”[54]

  Unfortunately for the officials who had allowed Bermudez to fight, displeasure with the decision was the least of it from the perspective of the AAU. Believing that it was firmly against AAU policies to allow women to compete, both Al Fenn, president of the Arizona Golden Gloves Association, and Harry Ginn were indefinitely suspended for allowing Bermudez to compete.

  Asked by the press for her reaction, Bermudez said, “I don’t think the AAU was right . . . I feel really badly about it. They really stuck their necks out for me and I’d like to help them any way I could.” She did say that she intended to continue boxing as part of her training “as long as my coach feels it’s beneficial.”

  Summing up what the tournament had given her, Stille said, “Both matches were a good experience for her. The second one kept her from having a swelled head—intellectually speaking.” He added, “We only trained about a week before the Golden Gloves. If we had had three months, I and other boxing coaches who worked with her think she could have had a good chance of winning her division.”[55]

  Bermudez went on to compete in a karate championship in New York, defeating a male opponent—winning $500 and the moniker of a professional karate competitor. She also finished her bachelor’s degree in electrical technology at Arizona State University, the first woman to do so. Her life revolved around the study of martial arts, and as she contemplated the future she spoke of why she was embracing boxing in addition to karate.

  At first, when I was looking at boxing, it really didn’t look like anything too complicated. My eye was untrained. Talking to some of the good amateur boxers and some of the pro boxers, there’s really a lot more to it than meets the eye. . . . People that really get into boxing seem to get the same thing out of their art that people in karate get out of theirs. It’s a matter of getting to know yourself and self-confidence. It’s kind of like testing yourself.[56]

  By the time October rolled around, Bermudez was ready to take on yet more challenges. With women’s boxing now legal in Arizona, she signed up to compete in the state’s first legally sanctioned women’s bout, a three-rounder against another karate student named Karen Mast, at the Tucson Community Center Exhibition Hall. Bermudez was decidedly the more experienced of the two and, although a sanctioned boxing match, it was actually a kickboxing fight billed as a “karate-boxing” exhibition. Not surprisingly, Bermudez defeated Mast by TKO at the end of the second round in front of the crowd of fifteen hundred cheering fans.

  Mast, a green belt in karate, work
ing at a karate school as an instructor, had taken the fight with one day’s notice and was not too pleased with the outcome. She’d agreed to participate “willingly” but in truth hadn’t known what to expect. As she told a reporter a couple of months later, “I didn’t train as a boxer, and I don’t know much about it, but everyone said, ‘don’t worry about it.’ That’s the attitude they said I should have. It wasn’t a good attitude.”[57]

  A second female bout in Arizona—this time an actual boxing match or rematch of sorts—was set for December 10, 1975, between Jean Lange and Princess Tona Tomah at the Phoenix Civic Plaza, and perhaps a repeat of their previous outing. Not much is known about the fight, although Tomah’s son, Piper Carle, recalled that his mother had won the first official women’s boxing match in Phoenix. He claimed it was a six-rounder and that his mother defeated her opponent by unanimous decision. He also recalled that she “had boxed 13 men before she was allowed to box women legally.”[58] Tomah was an important figure in the wrestling and boxing scene in Phoenix, where she even eventually trained amateur boxers under the auspices of the AAU.

  The state of Indiana, once the home of an active women’s boxing scene in the 1950s, became embroiled in controversy in early November of 1975 when a women’s amateur boxing match was canceled. The bout was between Jo Crumes, a local boxer and member of the Anderson PAL, and Barb Napier, Ohio’s women’s bantamweight amateur champion. They were to be a feature of the second annual Veteran’s Day boxing card held to benefit the Anderson PAL. Napier had won her title at an amateur boxing show held at the Dayton Gym Club in Dayton, Ohio, six weeks before—with no hitches reported—and, in fact, was accompanied to the fight night by Ed Shock, chairman of the AAU in Dayton, Ohio.

  The hometown fighter, Jo Crumes, was a twenty-one-year-old nursing student at Ball State University who’d recently played for the league-winning Madison County Women’s softball team. She’d also played basketball and even football on a pick-up team. Crumes, in a talk with reporters, called herself “daddy’s little tomboy,” and told how she’d been “shadow boxing, jumping rope and working out on the bags,” in preparation for the fight. She’d also sparred with male fighters, including some “highly rated local boxers.”[59] Her father, Wendell Crumes, was the Anderson PAL club’s boxing coach and a former Golden Glove fighter who had been taking his daughter with him to the fights since she was a little girl. He’d also overseen her training—giving her the same regimen as his male fighters and proudly expressed confidence in her abilities.

  The fight itself had initially been brought to the attention of the two governing bodies—the State Athletic Commission and the Indiana AAU—four weeks before. At that time, both parties had said they’d look into it and after a while told the PAL officials there was “nothing wrong” with putting a women’s bout on the fight card. A few days before the fight, it was announced that the fight had been postponed, but by the afternoon of the day before the fight the “differences had been ironed out,” and as a result, it was back on. Ten minutes before the scheduled start time of the PAL fight card, however, the bout was summarily canceled, although the rest of the fight card was allowed to continue without a hitch. It was said that the crowd had swollen by an extra hundred people to around three hundred paying customers in anticipation of the Crumes-Napier fight.[60]

  At issue when the controversy erupted were such technicalities as what the women were required to wear in the ring. The rules stated, “A fighter must wear a protective cup,” as well as mandating that “a fighter must either be in the ring topless or wear a T-shirt with nothing under it.” AAU official George DeFadis along with State Athletic Commission official Kelse McClure were uncomfortable with the lack of clarity and told the PAL they’d pull out the rulebook if the fight went ahead. Speaking to the issue, PAL club president Sgt. Roy Springfield was frustrated and, noting the shirt rule, said “that rules out any protective clothing, even a bra”—something both women anticipated wearing.

  To punctuate the seriousness of the AAU and State Athletic Commission requests to pull the bout, Anderson police chief Paddy Jamerson had been contacted, requesting that he stop the fight in the event that two women were allowed to proceed. Springfield agreed to drop the fight from the evening’s bout sheet, telling a local reporter:

  I’ll say this, in Indiana we go by the book and that’s good. I understand there are rules being written for women’s boxing right now but it takes something like this to get people to act. It’s discouraging to have [to] call the fight off, but that doesn’t mean we won’t try again.[61]

  Equally frustrated with the proceedings was Ohio AAU chief Ed Shock who said he was considering a lawsuit on behalf of Barb Napier, although action was never taken.

  As originally planned, Crumes and Napier had been scheduled to fight two bouts: one in Indiana and one in Dayton, Ohio. With the first fight canceled, it was just a matter of getting the two women the hundred-plus miles from Anderson to Dayton where they were to be featured in an amateur show at the Dayton Club Gym, the same club where Napier had won her title.

  The bout, labeled in Ohio as “the fight that couldn’t be staged in Indiana,” was Crumes’s debut match—but the crowd wouldn’t have known it based on her performance. From the opening bell, Crumes proved herself to be a boxer’s boxer. She showed terrific focus and fortitude and was able to drop Napier to the deck with a “short left hand punch” at 1:15 of the first round, giving Crumes the KO win. Crumes’s triumphant performance wasn’t enough for her father, who said “He was tired of the controversy [and] would ask his daughter not to fight again.”[62]

  Napier went on to break ground again on December 9, 1975, when she fought Ann Roberts of Tyler, Texas, in a four-round bout at the Eagles Club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a fight said to be the first sanctioned women’s boxing bout in the state. In this case, promoter Harry Simos presented his fight card to Vern Woodward, the secretary of the Wisconsin State Athletic Examining Board.

  Noting that the decision would be put to a vote by the three-member board, Woodward said:

  There’s no rule against it, but there’s no rule at all. I don’t know whether we have the right to approve or disapprove the bout. I’m going to check with the Attorney General and then poll the members of the board. I know women have fought other places, but we’ve never had to deal with it.[63]

  While there had certainly been women’s wrestling matches in Wisconsin, it is hard to say if any of the barnstorming women’s boxing matches in the 1950s had actually been fought there—at least legally. Within a few days, though, the board agreed to allow the bout to go on as scheduled by a vote of 3-0.

  Simos generated a lot of publicity ahead of his fight, with one newspaper noting the Napier-Roberts fight was garnering more attention than the main event. The crowd on fight night reflected the excitement of seeing female boxing in action with a nearly record-breaking audience of 1,126 fans and total receipts of $3,726. The boxing prowess of the two fighters, however, did not live up to the expectations of the crowd—even though they only fought one-minute rounds.

  Both young women, as one reporter put it, “looking young with their hair in pigtails, did not fight with enough gusto to please the fans.” Audience members liberally booed the fighters for inactivity, only livening up in the third round during some good exchanges. Even then, the mood of the crowd was mean with lots of jeering and catcalls thrown at the two fighters. At the end of it, Roberts, who outweighed Napier by twenty pounds, won by split decision.[64]

  After the fight, Roberts said, she had been “nervous” and admitted she “just didn’t fight a good match, I don’t know what was wrong, I think the size of the crowd had something to do with the way we fought.” Napier had a cut below her right eye from the brief encounter and said she didn’t know what had happened, but despite that said she’d “whip her the next time.”

  While neither fighter had shown particular skills when they boxed, both women were game to be in the ring and proud to ha
ve won the right to pound on each other legally. They were also inspiring others—even with their less-than-perfect boxing prowess. Arlene Townsend, who’d come to see the bout with her boxer husband, said, “I would have like to see them fight longer. It was too short. In fact, I wouldn’t mind fighting myself. The idea of being injured doesn’t bother me in the least.”[65]

  Much as Jo Ann Hagen’s fight against Pat Emerick in Council Bluffs, Iowa, circa 1949 had caused a sensation among local women, who inundated the promoter with requests to learn to box, the publicity surrounding such fighters as Caroline Svendsen got out the word that women could make it into the ring. Some fights appearing on regular boxing cards were even televised, which further spurred women to consider taking up the gloves. The breaking down of long-held barriers to active participation in boxing, whether under the banner of “women’s lib” or not, produced an enormous change in the perception of what women could and could not achieve.

  And despite crowds that may have been less than enthusiastic, one-minute boxing rounds, and uncomfortable chest protectors, women embraced the idea of boxing as a well-won right, with every cut and bruise a badge of honor for those who crossed through the velvet ropes into the ring.

  1. “Teen-age Miss Set to Stage Florida Fights.” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1960, n.p. [Folder: Miscellaneous. Box 45, Series 13. Fistic Arcana. Hank Kaplan Archive, Brooklyn College Archives and Special Collections, Brooklyn College Library.]

  2. “Brunette Boosts Boxing.” St. Petersburg Times, December 31, 1959, p. 20. [Google News]

  3. Jack Cuddy. UPI. “Giant Gate Expect.” Pampa Daily News (Texas), September 4, 1958, p. 12. [Newspapers.com]

  4. Jack Hawn. “Aileen Eaton, Dynamic Boxing Promoter, Dies at 78 after Long Illness.” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1987, n.p. [LAtimes.com]