Proceedings: Svinth 2003, GSJSA (2024)

Guelph School of Japanese Sword Arts, July, 2003

479 BCE: A Greek woman named Hydne becomes a Hellenic hero by helpingher father Skyllis pull up the anchors of some Iranian ships during a storm,thus causing the ships to founder and their crews to drown. While mostmodern authorities suggest that Hydne and her father were probably sponge-fishers,it is possible that they were upper-class athletes whose training for Dionysianswimming meets had been interrupted by war. Why? First, Hydne and Skyllis’subsequent fame (Greek sponge-fishers rarely became Athenian heroes), andsecond, the paucity of detail and mass of conjecture surrounding the originalsources.

About 460 BCE: The Greek historian Herodotus describes the practicesand culture of some female warriors he called the Amazons. Who the Amazonswere is not known, and in practice there were female warriors and priestessesthroughout the Mediterranean world. Also, stories about Amazon mastectomiesare likely owed to Hellenistic stage tradition rather than actual practice:Hellenistic actors traditionally bared their right breasts to show thatthey were playing unmarried females.

396 BCE: A Spartan princess named Kyniska becomes the first woman towin the chariot racing events at Olympia. While Plutarch wrote that Kyniskapersonally drove the winning chariot, most other ancient sources suggestthat she was the owner of those horses rather than their driver.

About 330 BCE: Etruscan bronze statuettes show men wrestling with women.While the men were naked, the women wore thigh-length pleated tunics. Accordingly,the art was probably allegorical rather than erotic.

About 322 BCE: Greek writers describe the female bodyguard of a NorthIndian prince named Chandragupta.

First century CE: A Chinese annalist named Zhao Yi writes about a womanwho was a great swordsman. She said the key to success was constant practicewithout the supervision of a master; after awhile, she said, she just understoodeverything there was to know. But as immediately after saying this sheaccepted the job as swordsmanship instructor for the Kingdom of Yueh, perhapsthis description is lacking some verisimilitude. After all, if one didnot need a teacher save one’s self to become a sword master, why wouldshe herself become one?

18-27: A peasant rebellion rocks Shandong Province and leads to thecollapse of the Xin Dynasty and the creation of the Later Han Dynasty.This unrest (called the Red Eyebrow Rebellion after its members’ practiceof painting their eyebrows blood red) was led by a woman who claimed tospeak with the voice of the local gods. Strictly speaking, this was a caseof spirit-possession rather than shamanism.

About 41: Later Han soldiers under the command of the Shensi aristocratMa Yuan kill a Vietnamese feudal lord living near Tonkin and publicly rapehis wife and sister-in-law. These rapes may have been official acts, as,from the Han perspective, they would have demonstrated the superiorityof Chinese patrilineage over Vietnamese matrilineage. On the other hand,they could have been individual acts, as the Chinese did not consider rapea public crime until 1983. Either way, the outrage causes the two women,named Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, to incite a Vietnamese rebellion. Thisrebellion in turn introduces the Chinese to the giant bronze drums thatthe Vietnamese mountaineers used to transmit military information and providesa favorite subject for Vietnamese stage and puppet plays.

About 55: The Roman Caesar Nero introduces his notorious Youth Games,which featured, to the disgust of the historian Tacitus, sword fights betweenwomen.

About 60: When a British queen named Boudicca refuses to pay taxes tothe Romans, a Roman official has the woman flogged and her daughters raped.The outraged Celts retaliate by killing tens of thousands of RomanizedBritons living in what is today Norfolk and Suffolk, and burning the Romancapitol at Londoninium. When this rebellion is rediscovered through translationin the sixteenth century, it causes Boadica’s chariot, as the translatorscalled it, to become an integral part of Elizabethan English nationalism.As for the unfortunate first century queen, she and her daughters committedsuicide near Epping Upland after the Romans slaughtered the British menin battle.

About 200: A Christian philosopher named Clement of Alexandria writesthat women should be athletes for God. That is, they should wrestle withthe Devil and devote themselves to celibacy instead of bowing meekly totheir destiny of mothers and wives. However, this was not a universallyheld view, and wealthy Roman men continued amusing themselves with gymnastic,gladiatorial, and swimming acts featuring scantily-clad female competitors.

271: A group of Gothic women captured while armed and dressed as menare paraded through Rome wearing signs that read “Amazons.”

About 535: Korean aristocrats replace female sword-dancers with malesword-dancers, apparently as a method of limiting the power of female shamans.

585: French churchmen debate whether women have souls. At least thatis the postmodern feminist view of the debate, which was actually aboutwhether the Old French word vir meant the same thing as the Vulgate Latinword hom*o. (The decision was that it did not.)

590: The Christian Synod of Druim Ceat orders British women to quitgoing into battle alongside their men. The ban must not have been especiallyeffective, since the daughter of Alfred the Great is remembered as theconqueror of Wales and the people who taught sword dancing to the Ulsterhero Cû Chulainn were female.

697: Roman Catholic priests prohibit Irish women and children from appearingon contested battlefields. This institutes a cultural change, for in pre-Christiantimes, Irish women and children had often accompanied Irish men into battle.

About 890: Beowulf is written. A villain of the piece is a homicidalcrone called Grendel’s Mother. Meanwhile, in “Judith,” a much shorter poemwritten about the same time as Beowulf, the poet praises a God-fearingwoman who gets a lustful feudal lord drunk then beheads him with his ownsword. While unusual (medieval heroines were usually martyrs rather thankillers), “Judith’s” author obviously knew something about beheadings,as Judith, a handsome Hebrew woman, required two mighty blows to severthe demonic lecher’s head from its neck-rings.

About 970: According to a twelfth century writer named Zhang Bangji,Chinese palace dancers began binding their feet to make themselves moresexually attractive to men. The crippling practice was widespread throughoutsouthern China by the fourteenth century, and throughout all of China bythe seventeenth, and is remarked because footbinding prevented well-bredHan females from effectively practicing boxing or swordsmanship until thetwentieth century. (Some were noted archers, though, generally with crossbows.)Still, into the 1360s, Hong Fu, Hong Xian, Thirteenth Sister, and otherChinese martial heroines (xia) were sometimes portrayed by women on Chinesestages, and there was a seventeenth-century reference to a fourteenth-centurywoman named Yang who was said to be peerless in the fighting art of “pear-blossomspear.” But in general this ended with the spread of footbinding, and fromthe fourteenth to twentieth centuries specially trained men played femaleroles in Chinese theatricals.

About 1020: The Iranian poet Firdawsi describes polo as a favorite sportof Turkish aristocrats. According to the thirteenth century poet Nizami,aristocratic Turkish women also played polo, which was the Central Asianequivalent of jousting.

1049-1052: A female general named Akkadevi becomes a heroine of west-centralIndian resistance to southern Indian aggression.

About 1106: Troubadours popularize pre-Christian legends about an Ulsterhero called Cû Chulainn who was so much man that by the age of seven,he already required the sight of naked women to distract him from wantonkilling. Further, as he got older, Cû Chulainn became notorious forconquering matristic societies by rape. Evidently Christian patrilinealismwas being imposed on Ireland, and the victors were describing how it wasbeing done, as in the earliest forms of the story, Cû Chulainn’smartial art instructors included a woman known as Scáthach, or “Shadowy.”

1146: Eleanor of Aquitaine, the self-willed 24-year old wife of LouisVII of France (and future wife of Henry II of England), joins the SecondCrusade dressed and riding astride like a man. While this was doubtlesschic (Eleanor never actually entered battle with the Muslims), her disregardfor propriety caused the Pope to forbid women from joining the Third Crusadeof 1189. Like most laws, the ban was widely ignored by the working classes.

1184: Minamoto soldiers kill a Taira general named Yoshinaka and hiswife. Subsequent Japanese accounts portray the woman, Tomoe Gozen, as amighty warrior.

Thirteenth century: Tahitian priests introduce the huna religion intoHawaii. The martial art associated with this religion was known as lua,a word meaning “to pit [in battle]” or “two” (e.g., duality; the idea wasto balance healing and hurting, good and evil.) The methods developed fromboth military hand-to-hand combat and the ritual killings that were partof the huna religion, and its practitioners were divided into those whoused their skills to heal and those who used their skills to harm. Skillin lua involved setting or dislocating bones at the joints, inflictingor stopping pain using finger strikes to nerve centers, and knowing howto use herbal medicines and sympathetic magic. Working-class Hawaiians,both men and women, also boxed and wrestled. There were no set rules inthese latter games, which were known collectively as mokomoko. Accordingly,players slapped palms upon agreeing to terms or to signify a draw.

1207: King Pedro II of Aragon sponsors the first European tournamentknown to have honored a woman. (His mistress, of course, as Iberian noblesmarried for land and children rather than love.) The construction of preparedstands soon followed, as the lady and her servants could not be expectedto stand in the mud like ordinary people.

1228: A woman challenges a man to a judicial duel at the lists in Bern,Switzerland, and wins. Such challenges were not uncommon in Germany andSwitzerland during the thirteenth century, particularly during rape cases.To even the odds, such judicial duels were arranged by placing the manin a pit dug as deep as his navel while allowing the woman free movementaround that pit. The usual weapons included leather belts, singlesticks,and fist-sized rocks wrapped in cloth. During these duels, if a participant’sweapon or hand touched the ground three times, he or she was declared defeated.Male losers were beheaded, while female losers lost their right hands.

1280: The Venetian merchant Marco Polo describes a Mongol princess namedAi-yaruk, or “Bright Moon,” who refused to get married until she met aman that could throw her. The story may be exaggerated, as it was not writtenuntil around 1295, and the writer, Rustichello of Pisa, was never one tolet facts stand in the way of a good story. Nevertheless, it is likelythat during his travels Polo really did see some Mongol women wrestling.

1292: Northern Italian towns start holding pugil-stick fights, bare-knuckleboxing matches, and cudgeling tournaments. Legend attributes the creationto the Sienese monk Saint Bernard, who taught that fists were better thanswords or sticks for deciding arguments, but illustrations show slappinggames in which players sat cross-legged on benches, and then took turnsslapping one another until somebody fell off the bench. Another game involvedslapping buttocks; this was often played between men and women. Mock equestrianbattles were also fought in which a girl sat on a boy’s shoulders, andthe pairs then undertook to knock over the other.

About 1300: A secretary to the Bishop of Wurzburg produces a manuscriptdepicting unarmored German fighters. Known today as Manuscript I.33 (pronouncedone, thirty-three), the text is in Latin while the technical terms arein German. Most of the work, however, involved a series of watercolor drawingsshowing students, monks, and even a woman training in a variety of sword-and-bucklertechniques.

1354: The Islamic traveler Ibn Battuta reports seeing female warriorsthroughout Southeast Asia. While many of these women were probably sword-dancers,others were royal bodyguards. (Southeast Asian princes often preferredfemale bodyguards to eunuchs.)

1364-1405: Tamerlane’s armies ravage Central and Southwest Asia. WhileTamerlane was a devout Muslim, and non-Muslims took the brunt of the Timurids’legendary cruelty, his use of female archers in defense of baggage trainsappalled orthodox Muslim opponents.

1389: Sixty aristocratic women lead 60 knights and 60 squires from theTower of London to the lists at Smithfield. The thought of females actuallyfighting during a tournament was, in the words of a near-contemporary Germanauthor, “as impossible as a king, prince, or knight plowing the groundor shoveling manure.” (Contemporary tales of female jousters appear mostoften in erotic fantasies and satires.) Women did sometimes compete inball games and foot races. Many wealthy women also enjoyed hunting withcrossbows and falcons.

1409: Christine de Pisan, the Italian-born daughter of a French courtastrologer, publishes a book called Livre des Faits d’Armes (“Stories ofFeats of Arms”). Hers was a vernacular study of military strategy and internationallaw. It included original work alongside translations of Vegetius and Frontinius.It is also a reminder that medieval females could be as knowledgeable aboutmilitary and political matters as was anyone else within their social oreconomic classes.

1431: The English burn a 19-year old Frenchwoman named Jeanne la Pucelleas a witch. Her actual crime was rallying peasants to the French flag.(She and some Scottish mercenaries had won some important battles, thusgiving the peasants hope.) Jeanne la Pucelle was renamed Jeanne d’Arc (Joanthe Archer) during the sixteenth century. The modern cult of Saint Joandates to the 1890s, when French politicians decided to use the woman’smartyrdom to create a unifying national holiday. (Bastille Day, which theCatholics viewed as godless, and the Royalists viewed as an insult, wastoo controversial for this purpose.)

1541: While going up a river in Brazil, the Dominican monk Gaspar deCarvajal reports being attacked by a band of armed females. The story causesthe river along which Carvajal was traveling to be called “the Amazon.”

1541: Pedro de Valdivia leads a military expedition whose members includedhis mistress, Inés Suárez, overland from Peru into CentralChile.

About 1545: Women begin playing female roles on the French stage. Thepractice spreads to Italy around 1608, and Britain around 1658. The reasonwas that dowryless females were willing to work for less money than themen and boys who had traditionally played female roles.

1561: Mochizuki Chiyome, the wife of the Japanese warlord MochizukeMoritoki, establishes a training school for female orphans and foundlings.The skills the girls learned included shrine attendant, geisha, and spy.While Mochizuke-trained geisha are sometimes claimed as the first femaleninja, it is more likely that the women were simply prostitutes trainedto remember and repeat whatever they heard from their carefully selectedpatrons.

About 1590: A chronicler named Abu Fazl describes the harem of the MughulEmperor Akbar as housing about 5,000 women. About 300 of these women werewives, the rest were servants and guards. The guards were mostly from Russiaand Ethiopia, and were little more than armed slaves. There were exceptions,of course, and one of Akbar’s chief rivals in the 1560s was a warrior-queennamed Rani Durgawati.

1601: A Javanese prince named Sutawijaya Sahidin Panatagam dies. Throughouthis life, the man’s courage and luck were legendary, and he reportedlyforgave would-be assassins by saying that daggers could not pierce theskin of a man who was protected by the gods. He took this belief seriously,too, as his concubines included an East Javanese woman who introduced herselfto him by attacking him with some pistols and butterfly knives.

1606: The Iberian navigator Quiros visits the Tuamotus Archipelago,and observes its Polynesian inhabitants wrestling. Both men and women wrestled,and there were sometimes mixed bouts. The audience defined the ring bystanding around the participants. The wrestling was freestyle, and hairpulling was allowed.

1611: The Mughul Emperor Jahangir falls in love with an Iranian widownamed Mehrunissa. The emperor’s fascination is not surprising, as Mehrunissawas a gifted poet, competent dress and carpet designer, and avid tigerhunter. (She hunted from atop a closed howdah, and once killed four tigerswith just six bullets.) Her niece was Asaf Khan’s daughter Arjumand Banu,the woman for whom the Taj Mahal was built.

1630-1680: Dueling provides a favorite theme for French playwrights.According to these writers, people (both men and women dueled in Frenchplays) dueled more often for love than honor, and noted that trickery broughtvictory more often than bravery.

About 1650: Doña Eustaquia de Sonza and Doña Ana Lezamade Urinza of Potosí, Alto Perú become the most famous femaleswashbucklers in Spanish America. At the time, Potosí, a silver-miningtown in the Bolivian Andes, had more inhabitants than London, and was probablythe richest city in the world.

1688: Following a coup in Siam, women drilled in the use of musketsreplace the 600 European mercenaries and Christian samurai who had servedthe previous government. The leader of these women was called Ma Ying Taphan,or the Great Mother of War. Burmese princes also used female bodyguardsinside their private apartments, and European, Japanese, or Pathan mercenarieswithout.

About 1690: Female wrestling acts become common in Japanese red-lightdistricts. Although Confucianist officials charged that such acts wereharmful to public morals, female wrestling remained popular in Tokyo untilthe 1890s and in remote areas such as southern Kyushu and the Ryukyus untilthe 1920s.

1697: A 40-year old Maine woman named Hannah Dustin escapes from anAbenaki Indian war party after hatcheting to death two Abenaki men, theirwives, and six of their seven children as they slept. (A third Abenakiwoman and a child escaped, although both appear to have been injured.)For this slaughter (which is almost unique in frontier annals), the Puritanminister Cotton Mather proclaimed Dustin “God’s instrument,” while theGeneral Assembly of Massachusetts awarded her a sizable scalp bounty.

1705: Because a Comanche raid covered hundreds of miles and lasted formonths, wives often accompanied war parties, where they served as snipers,cooks, and torturers. Unmarried Comanche women were also known to haveridden into combat, although this was considered somewhat scandalous..

1706: A trooper in Lord Hay’s Regiment of Dragoons is discovered tobe a woman. At the time, she had thirteen years service in various regimentsand campaigns. Subsequently known as Mother Ross, she had enlisted afterfirst giving her children to her mother and a nurse. She spent her militarycareer dressed in a uniform whose waistcoat was designed to compress anddisguise her breasts.

1707: The French opera star Julie La Maupin dies at the age of 37; in1834 novelist Théophile Gautier made her famous as Mademoisellede Maupin. In her time she was a noted fencer and cross-dresser; her fencingmasters included her father, Gaston d’Aubigny, and a lover, a man namedSérannes. Other redoubtable Frenchwomen of the day included Madamede la Pré-Abbé and Mademoiselle de la Motte, who in 1665fired pistols at one another from horseback from a range of about ten yards,and then, after missing twice, took to fighting with swords. And in 1868,two women named Marie P. and Aimée R. dueled over which would getto marry a young man from Bordeaux. Marie was hit in the thigh with thefirst shot, leaving Aimée free to marry the young man. (Or so saidthe popular press.)

1722: Elizabeth Wilkinson of Clerkenwell challenges Hannah Hyfield ofNewgate Market to meet her on stage, and box for a prize of three guineas.The rules of the engagement required each woman to strike each other inthe face while holding a half-crown coin in each fist, and the first todrop a coin would be the loser. These rules perhaps suggest how bare-knuckleboxing began, as James Figg was a chief promoter of women’s fighting. Forexample, in August 1725 Figg and a woman called Long Meg of Westminsterfought Ned Sutton and an unnamed woman; Figg and Meg took the prize of£40. Nevertheless, says historian Elliott Gorn, the sporadic appearanceof women at English prizefights only “underscored male domination of theculture of the ring.” (Gorn, 1986, fn. 69, 265)

1727: After his army takes heavy casualties during a slave raiding expeditionagainst Ouidah, King Agaja of Dahomey creates a female palace guard andarms it with Danish trade muskets. By the nineteenth century this femalebodyguard had 5,000 members. One thousand carried firearms. The rest servedas porters, drummers, and litter-bearers. These Dahomeyan women trainedfor war through vigorous dancing and elephant hunting. They were prohibitedfrom becoming pregnant on pain of death. They fought as well or betterthan male soldiers, and were said by Richard Burton to be better soldiersthan their incompetent male leadership deserved.

1759: Mary Lacy, a runaway serving girl who served twelve years in theRoyal Navy, gets in a fight aboard HMS Sandwich. “I went aft to the mainhatchway and pulled off my jacket,” wrote Lacy, “but they wanted me topull off my shirt, which I would not suffer for fear of it being discoveredthat I was a woman, and it was with much difficulty that I could keep iton.” The fight then developed into a wrestling match. “During the combat,”said Lacy, “he threw me such violent cross-buttocks ... [as] were almostenough to dash my brains out.” But by “a most lucky circ*mstance” she wonthe bout, and afterwards she “reigned master over all the rest” of theship’s boys. (Stark, 1996, 137)

1768: After disguising herself as a boy and shipping out with the Frenchnavigator Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Jeanne Baré becomes thefirst female to circumnavigate the world. Women also served in the BritishNavy. These women avoided discovery because European seamen seldom bathedand invariably slept in their clothes.

1768: In the Clerkenwell district of London (perhaps at the London Spa),two female prizefighters mill for a prize of a dress valued at half-a-crown,while another two women fight against two men for a prize of a guinea apiece.And at Wetherby’s on Little Russell Street, the 19-year old rake WilliamHickey saw “two she-devils... engaged in a scratching and boxing match,their faces entirely covered with blood, bosoms bare, and the clothes nearlytorn from them.” These “she-devils” were singers and prostitutes, and theirpre-fight preparation consisted mostly of drinking more gin than usual.Other rough venues included the Dog and Duck in St. George’s Fields, BagniggeWells on King’s Cross Road, and White Conduit House near Islington. (Quennell,1962, 63-66)

1774: During Wang Lun’s rebellion in Shandong Province, a tall, white-hairedfemale rebel is seen astride a horse, wielding one sword with ease andtwo with care. The woman, whose name is unknown, was a sorceress who claimedto be in touch with the White Lotus deity known as the Eternal Mother.An actress named Wu San Niang (“Third Daughter Wu”) was also involved inWang Lun’s rebellion. Described as a better boxer, tightrope walker, andacrobat than her late husband, Wu’s skill is remarked mainly because femaleboxers were unusual in a society whose standards of beauty required womento bind their feet.

1776: According to tradition, a Buddhist nun named Ng Mui creates asouthern Shaolin boxing style known as wing chun (“Beautiful Springtime”).The tradition has never been proven, and twentieth century stylistic leaderssuch as Yip Chun believe that a Cantonese actor named Ng Cheung createdthe style during the 1730s. If Yip is correct, then the female attributioncould mean that Ng Cheung specialized in playing female roles, or thatthe ultimate master is a loving old woman rather than some muscled Adonis.Still, it is possible that some southern Chinese women practiced boxingin a group setting. During the late eighteenth century, Cantonese merchantsbegan hiring Hakka women to work in their silkworm factories. (While ethnicallyChinese, the Hakka had separate dialect and customs. Unlike most Chinese,these customs did not include binding the feet of girls. Therefore theirwomen were physically capable of working outside the home.) To protectthemselves from kidnappers (marriage by rape remained a feature of Chineselife into the 1980s), these factory women gradually organized themselvesinto lay sisterhoods. So it seems likely that Ng Mui was simply a labororganizer or head of an orphanage whose name became associated with a boxingstyle.

1782: A 22-year old Massachusetts woman named Deborah Sampson cuts herhair and enlists in the Continental Army. She called herself Robert Shurtliff,and fought against the Tories and British in New York. She also wrote lettersfor illiterate soldiers and did her best to avoid rough soldiers’ gamessuch as wrestling. (The one time she did wrestle, she was flung to theground.) After the war, Sampson married, and in 1838 her husband becamethe first man to receive a pension from the United States government forhis wife’s military service. Sampson’s maritime equivalents during theRevolutionary War included Fanny Campbell and Mary Anne Talbot.

About 1794: A boxing match between two English women is described. “Greatintensity between them was maintained for about two hours, whereupon theelder fell into great difficulty through the closure of her left eye fromthe extent of swelling above and below it which rendered her blind… Theirbosoms were much enlarged but yet they each continued to rain blows uponthis most feeling of tissue without regard to the pitiful cries issuingforth at each success which was evidently to the delight of the spectators.”(Hargreaves, 1996, 125)

About 1805: British newspapers start reporting the faction fights thathad been occurring at Irish fairs and horse races since the 1730s. Irishmen fought using sticks and brick-sized stones while Irish women struckusing razors or stones sewn inside knitted socks. While it was acceptablefor a male faction fighter to use his stick to parry a blow from a woman,it was considered bad form for him to hit her with the stick. Fists andfeet were another matter -- 2.5% of deaths associated with the factionfights were the results of kicks administered once the other fellow wasdown, and 5% of deaths were due to infected bites.

1807: After learning that the Polish hussar Aleksandr Sokolov was actuallya Russian woman named Nadezha Durova, Tsar Alexander I awards Durova amedal for bravery and a commission as an officer in the Mariupol’ Hussars.Durova continued serving with the Russian Army throughout the NapoleonicWars, and retired as a captain in 1816.

1817: The British fencing master Henry Angelo describes a mulatto fencerknown as Chevalier de Sainte Georges as the finest fencer in the world.Other noted Afro-European fencers of the period included Soubise, who taughtaristocratic women (including the duch*ess of Queensberry) to fence at Angelo’sLondon salle.

About 1820: According to Richard Kim, the wife of the Okinawan karatemaster Matsumura Sokon becomes known as one of the finest karate practitionersin the Ryukyus. As Mrs. Matsumura could reportedly lift a 60-kilo bag ofrice with one hand, the reputation may have been deserved. On the otherhand, it could be modern myth. For one thing, Matsumura Sokon was bornin 1805. Since Asian men typically marry younger women, this means Mrs.Matsumura was likely no more than ten years old. For another, Okinawansusually associate female wrestling with prostitutes rather than the wivesand daughters of aristocrats. Furthermore, left to their own devices, mostOkinawan women take up dancing rather than karate or sumo. Finally, NagamineShoshin did not publish the stories upon which Kim based his accounts untilJune 1952, which was more than a half century after Matsumura’s death.So perhaps some exaggeration crept in over time.

1821-1829: With significant outside assistance, the Greeks free themselvesfrom Ottoman Turkish rule. A heroine of the war was a Spetsiot woman namedLascarina Bouboulina, who commanded ships in battle against the Turks andEgyptians, and took pride in taking and discarding lovers like a man.

1822: In London, Martha Flaherty fights Peg Carey for a prize of £18.The fight, which started at 5:30 a.m., was won by Flaherty, whose trainingincluded drinking most of a pint of gin before the match. Female prizefightingwas a function of the low prevailing wage rate for unskilled female labor.(Assuming she worked as a fur sewer or seamstress, Flaherty’s prize exceededa year’s wages.) Attire included tight-fitting jackets, short petticoats,and Holland drawers. Wrestling, kicking, punching, and kneeing were allowed.Women with greater economic freedom usually preferred playing gentler games.For instance, although Eton did not play Harrow in cricket until 1805 --Lord Byron was on the losing Harrovian side -- Miss S. Norcross of Surreybatted a century in 1788.

1829: The Swiss educator Phokian Clias publishes a popular physicaleducation textbook called Kalisthenie. (The title came from a Greek wordmeaning “beauty” and “strength.”) Clias favored light to moderate exercise,and rejected ball games for women because he thought they required toomuch use of the shoulder and pectoral muscles.

About 1830: An Italian woman named Rosa Baglioni is described as perhapsthe finest stage fencer in Germany.

1832: Warning that lack of exercise produced softness, debility, andunfitness, American educator Catherine Beecher publishes A Course of Calisthenicsfor Young Ladies. And what was the best exercise for a woman, accordingto Mrs. Beecher? Vigorous work with mop and wash tub. No liberation there.Then, in 1847, Lydia Mary Child, author of The Little Girl’s Own Book,became slightly more adventurous, saying that “skating, driving hoop, andother boyish sports may be practiced to great advantage by little girlsprovided they can be pursued within the enclosure of a garden or court;in the street, of course, they would be highly improper.” (Guttman, 1991,91)

1847: Queen Victoria decides that women who served aboard British warshipsduring the Napoleonic Wars would not receive the General Service Medal.At least three women applied, and many more were technically eligible.But they were all denied. Explained Admiral Thomas Byam Martin, “Therewere many women in the fleet equally useful, and [issuing awards to women]will leave the Army exposed to innumerable applications of the same nature.”(Stark, 1996, 80-81, fn. 66, 184)

About 1850: After catching her trying to steal their horses, FlatheadIndians club to death a Blackfoot war chief called Running Eagle. As Blackfootmen frequently rode naked into battle as a way of showing that they hadnothing to lose by fighting, it cannot be argued that Running Eagle masqueradedas a man. Instead, it seems to have been fairly common for childless Blackfootwomen to participate in horse-stealing expeditions. Cross-dressing men(berdache) also accompanied Plains Indian military expeditions. The cross-dressersprovided supernatural protection and the women did the cooking. The Indianswere never as sexually obsessed as the European Americans, and ethnographicevidence suggests that most rapes attributed to the Indians were actuallydone by European or African Americans. (While tales of female sexual bondageto the Indians have been a staple of English and American literature, theater,and movies for 300 years, most Indian cultures require warriors to go throughlengthy cleansing rituals before having sex with anyone, male or female.These rituals were taken seriously, too, as failure to accomplish themproperly could cause a man to lose his war magic.)

1850: Theater manager A.H. Purdy introduces the spectacle of Amazons,or uniformed women performing close order drill, to the New York stage.Female drill teams remained popular with North American audiences for thenext 150 years; just look at football half-time exercises. And even bymid-nineteenth century standards, most of these acts were tame entertainment.In 1852, for example, Hispanic women appeared on San Francisco stages wearingnothing but bolero jackets, garters, and slippers. In 1877, immigrant womendressed in spangled tights and swung on trapezes in Wyoming saloons. Andin 1881, “Turkish dancers” appeared on Arizona stages wearing nothing butopen vests and transparent pantaloons. Contemporary audiences even enjoyedtransvestite performances so long as the cross-dressers kept their place.(Their popularity is suggested by noting that the practice of describingtransvestite performers as dressing “in drag” dates to about 1870.) ExplainedTom Barrett, a hoofer for Haverley’s Augmented Mastodon Minstrels, “Everyshow had a quartet, and most every show had a female impersonator… [whoappeared during] the second part, what we usually called the big act. Thatwas where some of the boys would put on wench dresses and they would playsome fool sketch or travesty.” (Erdoes, 1985, 172) Of course, when thecross-dressers overstepped their limits (as did three male cancan dancersat the Bird Cage Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona, shortly before the Shoot-outat the OK Corral), then they might be dragged offstage and beaten.

1854: In New York City, an Englishman named Harry Hill opens a concertsaloon at 25 East Houston Street. Although prizefights were illegal inNew York, Harry Hill’s nightly shows included boxing and wrestling acts.Most pugilists were male -- both William Muldoon and John L. Sullivan startedat Harry Hill’s – but could be female. In 1876, for instance, Nell Saundersboxed (and beat) Rose Harland for the prize of a silver butter dish. Adrawing published in the National Police Gazette on November 22, 1879,shows Harry Hill’s female boxers wearing T-shirts, knickers, and buttonedshoes, and showing a scandalous amount of arm and thigh. Harry Hill’s hadtwo entrances. The main entrance was for men, who paid 25¢ admission.The side door was for women, who paid nothing. Hill’s drinks were over-pricedand the air was a cloud of tobacco smoke. Other than that, Hill ran a respectablehouse, and his boxers circulated among the crowd to keep it that way. Reformpoliticians finally caused Harry Hill’s to close in 1886.

1857-1858: Forty-seven battalions of Bengali infantry and several independentprincipalities rebel against Britain’s Honourable East India Company. Althoughmost rebels were men, the best-known rebel was a woman, the 25-year oldRani of Jhansi. She rode into battle armed and armored like a man, anddied of wounds received near Gwalior in June 1858. The Rani’s counterparton the British side, a woman whom the modern Indians revere much less,was an equally redoubtable Afghan widow from Bhopal named Sikander Begum.

1864: In volume I of a text called Principles of Biology, the Englishphilosopher Herbert Spencer coins the phrase “survival of the fittest.”Spencer saw nature as a state of pitiless warfare with the eliminationof the weak and unfit as its goal. People who did not read him closelysoon applied this theory to social dynamics, and called the result SocialDarwinism. Social Darwinism was a very popular theory among white-collarworkers whose masculinity (and jobs) were threatened by women and immigrants.

1865: General James Miranda Barry, the Inspector General of the BritishArmy Medical Department, dies in London, and is discovered after deathto have been female.

1870: In a world where clerks and secretaries were increasingly female,Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel Venus in Chains turns male clerks’ terrorof what Henry James called “damnable feminization” into a fantastic storyof fur-clad, whip-cracking women verbally and sexually abusing men. Besidescreating a stock figure for subsequent p*rnographic fiction, Masoch’s conclusionretains some validity: “Whoever allows himself to be whipped deserves tobe whipped.”

1875: Parisian street gangsters are reported shaving their heads anddressing in metal-studded leather jackets. The press responded by calledsuch people “apaches.” Originally, this name referred to a Belgian pepperboxrevolver that had a blade under its barrel and a knuckle-duster in itsbutt instead of the Athabascan people of the American Southwest, but afterthe Apache leader Geronimo became a household word the revolver was forgotten.Around 1890, the apache name also began to describe a sadomasoch*stic dancegenre in which tattooed, scarred women fought knife or saber duels whilestripped to their underclothes, or smiled while men slapped them around.

1878: J. R. Headington argues in the American Christian Review thatfemale athletics represented a nine-step path to ruin. For example, a croquetparty led to picnics, picnics led to dances, dances led to absence fromchurch, absence from church led to immoral conduct, immoral conduct ledto exclusion from church (no forgiveness here!), exclusion from churchled to running away, running away led to poverty and discontent, povertyand discontent led to shame and disgrace, and shame and disgrace led toruin. While many middle-class women heeded Headington’s advice, fewer upper-classwomen did, causing female athleticism, especially in golf, tennis, andcycling, to become increasingly common throughout the late nineteenth century.

1881: Charlotte Perkins Gilman of Providence, Rhode Island, becomesthe United States’ first known female body-builder. Besides lifting weights,Gilman ran a mile a day and boasted of her ability to “vault and jump,go up a knotted rope, walk on my hands under a ladder, kick as high asmy head, and revel in the flying rings.” By 1904, fencing was also popularwith Rhode Island society women; instructors included Eleanor Baldwin Casswhile students included Marion Fish and Natalie Wells.

1881: A Swedish woman named Martina Bergman-Osterberg becomes the Superintendentof Physical Education for London’s public schools. By 1886, she had trained1,300 English schoolteachers in the methods of Swedish gymnastics. “I tryto train my girls to help raise their own sex,” said Bergman-Osterberg,“and so accelerate the progress of the race.”

1884: The British scientist Sir Francis Galton tests 500 men and 270women to see how fast they could punch. He found that the men averaged18 feet per second, with a maximum speed of 29 feet per second, while thewomen averaged 13 feet per second, with a maximum speed of 20 feet persecond. In other words, while some women could hit harder than the averageman, most women could hit only 55% as hard.

1884: A 20-year old American woman named Etta Hattan adopts the stagename of Jaguarina, and bills herself as the “Ideal Amazon of the Age.”Whether Hattan was all of that is of course debatable, but she was certainlyAmazon enough to defeat many men at mounted broadsword fencing during her15-year professional career.

1887: Circus magnate P.T. Barnum hires wrestler Ed Decker, the LittleWonder from Vermont, as a sideshow attraction. Barnum offered to pay $100to anyone who could pin Decker, and $50 to anyone who could avoid beingpinned within three minutes. Despite weighing only 150 pounds and standingonly 5’6” tall, Decker reportedly never lost to a paying customer. Of course,some matches were harder than others, and as a British sideshow boxer tolda reporter year later, “I still pray, ‘Oh, Lord, let me win the easy way.’”Women also fought as booth boxers. According to Ron Taylor, a Welsh sideshowpromoter of the 1960s, “My grandmother used to challenge all comers. Shewore protectors on her chest, but she never needed them. Nobody she everwent up against could even come close to hitting her.” (Undated clippingsin Joseph Svinth collection.) The most famous of these British fairgroundpugilists was probably Barbara Buttrick, who was the women’s fly and bantamweightboxing champion from 1950-1960. This said, not all the female pugilistswere female. For instance, a carnival shill named Charles Edwards toldA. J. Liebling about a turn-of-the-century Texas circus that had a womanstand in front of the tent promising $50 to any man who could stay threerounds with her. Once inside the dimly lit tent, the mark then found himselfboxing a cross-dressing male look-alike.

1889: Female boxing becomes popular throughout the United States. Championsincluded Nellie Stewart of Norfolk, Virginia, Ann Lewis of Cleveland, Ohio,and Hattie Leslie of New York. The audiences were male, and the fighterssometimes stripped to their drawers like men. Savate fights in which kickingwas allowed were also popular. Girls as young as 12 years headed the bills.Cuts were stitched on the spot, and the women often fought with brokennoses, jaws, and teeth. There were occasionally matches between femaleboxers and female savate fighters. In 1902, for instance, a Mlle. Augagnierbeat Miss Pinkney of England during such a bout. Pinkney was ahead duringthe first ninety minutes, but then Augagnier managed to kick Pinkney hardin the face, an advantage that she immediately used to send a powerfulkick into Pinkney’s abdomen for the victory.

1889: Female wrestling becomes popular in France and England. MashaPoddubnaya, wife of Ivan Poddubny, claimed the women’s title. Said journalistMax Viterbo of a female wrestling match in the Rue Montmartre in 1903,“The stale smell of sweat and foul air assaulted your nostrils. In thisoverheated room the spectators were flushed. Smoke seized us by the throatand quarrels broke out.” As for the wrestlers, “They flung themselves ateach other like modern bacchantes -- hair flying, breasts bared, indecent,foaming at the mouth. Everyone screamed, applauded, stamped his feet.”(Guttman, 1991, 99-100)

1891: Richard Kyle Fox and the National Police Gazette sponsor a women’schampionship wrestling match in New York City. To prevent hair pulling,the women cut their hair short, and to keep everything “decent,” the womenwore tights. (Not all matches were so prim, and in 1932, Frederick VanWyck recollected some matches of his youth that were between “two ladies,with nothing but trunks on.”) (Gorn, 1986, 130) Fox’s wrestlers includedAlice Williams and Sadie Morgan. The venue was Owney Geoghegan’s Bastilleof the Bowery.

1895: Theodore Roosevelt hires the New York Police Department’s firstfemale employee. The reason was that Minnie Kelly did more work for lessmoney than did the two male secretaries she replaced. In 1896, CommissionerRoosevelt also gave uniforms and badges to the women who processed femaleprisoners at police stations. Excepting meter maids and secretaries, policedepartments used women mainly as matrons and vice detectives until 1968,when the Indianapolis police pioneered the use of female patrol officers.

1896: San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Pavilion becomes the first US boxingvenue known to have sold reserved seats to women. (The occasion was a titlebout between Bob Fitzsimmons and Jack Sharkey, and Fitzsimmon’s wife Rosewas notorious for sitting ringside and shouting advice to her husband.)

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