Sisterhood of the Squared Circle: The History and Rise of Women's Wrestling
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Sisterhood of the Squared Circle: The History and Rise of Women's Wrestling
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Overview
A behind-the-scenes look at over a century of female wrestling, with profiles and photos, documenting the rise of women’s wrestling from sideshow to WWE main event
“Sisterhood of the Squared Circle is absolutely a must read for most fans . . .” Wrestle Book Review
From the carnival circuit of the late 1800s to today’s main events, this book offers a look at the business of women’s wrestling with its backstage politics, real-life grudges, and incredible personalities. With more than one hundred profiles, you’ll learn about the careers of many well-known trailblazers and stars of today, including Mildred Burke, the Fabulous Moolah, Mae Young, Penny Banner, Wendi Richter, Trish Stratus, Chyna, Lita, Charlotte, Sasha Banks, and Bayley.
With rare photographs and an exploration of women’s wrestling worldwide — including chapters on Japan, Mexico, England, and Australia — Sisterhood of the Squared Circle is a priceless contribution to the history of professional wrestling.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781773050140 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 04/11/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 57 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sisterhood of the Squared Circle
The History and Rise of Women's Wrestling
By Pat Laprade, Dan Murphy
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Pat Laprade and Dan MurphyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-307-8
CHAPTER 1
The ORIGINS
From Amazons to Wrestlers
Although wrestling was commonly practiced by men, the male sex didn't have a monopoly on grappling. According to folklore, the Mongol princess Khutulun was a respected warrior and wrestler. She would consent to marry only a man who could defeat her in a wrestling match. Many tried; no one succeeded.
The most famous of the fighting women of antiquity were the Amazons, the mythical warrior women who maintained a matriarchal society and were regarded as some of the finest warriors of the era. There is little physical proof that the Amazons ever existed, but they became the stuff of legend among the Greeks, who depicted them in sculptures, pottery, friezes, jewelry, and poetry.
Interestingly, some etymologists have examined the term Amazons and theorized that it originated from the combination of a (meaning "without") and mazos (meaning "breasts"). This interpretation led to the theory that Amazonian warrior women either cut or cauterized their breasts in order to maintain better control of the bow, the Amazons' weapon of choice. Yet, Greek art of the era strove to represent impossible physical perfection, and the supposedly breastless or small-breasted Amazonian women were depicted as busty and beautiful female forms. It represents a paradox that still survives today; even female warriors were held to idealized and often unobtainable standards of physical beauty.
In any case, women learning the art of wrestling as a form of hand-to-hand combat and self-defense was more commonplace than it might seem. Reports of women's fighting as an entertainment spectacle can be found as far back as the 1700s, when historian William Hickey wrote that he had witnessed a battle between two "she-devils ... engaged in scratching and boxing" in London. In the 1720s, boxer Elizabeth Wilkinson was billing herself as "the Championess of America and Europe" for women's fighting, similar to what Hickey observed. The prize awarded to the winner of an 1876 boxing match between two women in New York City was a silver butter dish, a prize both valuable and practical for the fashionable dinner party hostess. Male fighters were awarded cash or free beer.
In the American Midwest, wrestling became a staple of traveling circuses and carnivals, which also featured a variety of sideshows, attractions, and games of skill and chance. Fairgoers were encouraged to challenge the carnival's star wrestler. Anyone who could beat the champ — or last a set amount of time without submitting or being pinned — would receive a prize.
Like many of the attractions on the carnival midway, these contests weren't necessarily on the up and up. Sometimes the plucky carnival-goer who accepted the challenge was in on the act and just trying to drum up business and encourage others to try their hand. It was wrestling with a dose of showmanship. It was an attraction designed to sell tickets and manipulate audiences ... and it wasn't exactly what it seemed to be on the surface.
The modern "sports entertainment" spectacle known as professional wrestling grew out of those carnival sideshows, where gullible "marks" were fleeced of their money, and turning a profit at the gate was more important than winning or losing on the mat. By the latter half of the 1800s, professional wrestling was one of the most popular attractions in Europe and North America, although its legitimacy was frequently called into question by critics and sportswriters, even in the infancy of the sport. And women were getting into the game.
In American saloons and carnivals, these fighting women usually wore black tights and flashy, form-fitting leotards. A large part of the appeal of women's wrestling was the implicit sexuality inherent in the bout. This was an era in which modesty ruled the day; Victorian-era swimsuits were knee-length affairs worn over bloomers, complete with stockings and ornate caps. In carnival and circus attractions, the audience was invited to gawk as two women in provocative outfits maneuvered into some rather suggestive positions, either with the intent to outwrestle an opponent or with the intent to titillate the paying customers. It was part athletic competition, part carny swindle, and part sexual fetish, and spectators were lining up to pay good money to watch it unfold.
In 1875, Jackley's Circus, a traveling circus featuring performers from Europe, toured the United States and included female wrestlers from Vienna as part of the act. "Large crowds would gather to watch the highly publicized all-female wrestling competition, the prize of which was jewelry, presented in front of the crowd on a pillow," wrote L.A. Jennings in her book She's a Knockout!: A History of Women in Fighting Sports.
Women's wrestling even became popular in France, where exhibitions were held in fashionable Parisian nightclubs and featured in the famous Folies Bergère in 1889 and 1890. Similar exhibitions were later held at burlesque halls in the United States.
One of the first female American wrestlers to gain notoriety was Grace Hemindinger, who stood six feet tall and weighed in at 275 pounds. A mountain of a woman, she wrestled primarily against male challengers from 1875 to 1878, when she gave up wrestling and focused on performing feats of strength on the circus circuit.
Wrestling women were defying societal norms and changing notions of femininity. Strong women with powerful and defined muscles were becoming sex symbols. As suffragettes pushed for voting rights in the United States, a small group of women were showing that "the fairer sex" could compete athletically against men and were challenging established gender roles.
Women's wrestling received national attention in the National Police Gazette, a tabloid newspaper that specialized in true crime stories that more conservative newspapers avoided. By the late 1880s, the Gazette was known for its lurid engravings, drawings, and photographs, often depicting burlesque performers, dancers, and prostitutes, skirting the ever-so-fine line between news and smut. The spectacle of women's wrestling was a natural subject for the Gazette to cover, and it became a popular topic among readers.
In 1891, under publisher Richard K. Fox, the Gazette sponsored the first recognized women's wrestling championship, which would be awarded to the top wrestler in the game. The championship marked a recognition of the growing appeal of women's wrestling and a first step toward legitimizing it taking it from a sideshow attraction to a sporting event that could be presented side by side with male wrestlers.
CHAPTER 2The PIONEERS
The National Police Gazette crowned its first women's wrestling champion at the Bastille of the Bowery, a sporting house owned by Owney Geoghegan, a former bare-knuckle boxer in his native Ireland. The hall was located in a rough-and-tumble section on the south side of Manhattan known for its numerous gay and lesbian bars. Josie Wahlford was the Gazette's first champion.
A native of Elizabeth, New Jersey, Wahlford (née Josephine Wohlford) had come up through the carnival circuit. By the age of 24, she was touring vaudeville stages, performing a strongwoman routine. Billed as Minerva (after the Roman goddess of wisdom), Wahlford was allegedly able to deadlift 700 pounds, which, if true, would still hold up as a world record today. She stood 5'8" and tipped the scales at 165 pounds, although she weighed much more than that as her career really took off.
Wahlford was the real deal — a capable wrestler with remarkable power and balance. She was trained by her husband, "The Professor" Charley Blatt, a powerlifter and wrestler from Hoboken, New Jersey, who took Wahlford under his wing.
"The Professor taught Josie all the tricks and she became invincible," wrote wrestling historian Nat Fleischer in a 1966 article in Ring magazine. "I would say that Josie Wahlford was the first generally accepted champion among the fair wrestlers of the USA."
Wahlford may be generally accepted as the first women's champion, but she wasn't the undisputed champion. Alice Williams also staked a claim to being the champion, by virtue of her win over Sadie Morgan at the Bastille of the Bowery that same year. However, Wahlford continued to defend her championship and had a lengthier career, pushing Williams's claims into the murky shadows of history.
Wahlford defended her championship in the back rooms of taverns in clandestine bouts that were not regulated by any governing body or commission. She defended the title against both men and women, but male challengers were limited to amateurs who could not outweigh Wahlford by more than 20 pounds, maintaining a common stipulation that was used during the open challenges from the carnival circuit.
Although reliable records of the era are hard to come by, it seems that Wahlford relinquished the title to Alice Williams, who subsequently lost the title to Laura Bennett in 1901. Bennett had made her name as one of the Bennett sisters, a group of touring siblings who put on boxing exhibitions. Bennett successfully defended the title against former champion Wahlford on multiple occasions. Those were the last matches that Wahlford had in her attempt to return to wrestling. After a worldwide career, Wahlford retired from the feats of strength competition in 1910. She died on September 1, 1923.
But the Gazette's championship was just a small step toward legitimizing women's wrestling, which continued to thrive on the carnival and burlesque circuits, but was still outlawed by some state athletic commissions and kept wholly separate from men's wrestling events, which were presented as legitimate athletic contests in arenas, gyms, and boxing halls.
Another American woman to make a name for herself on the carnival circuit was Marie Ford. Born in New York in 1900, Ford took up marathon running, acrobatics, boxing, and wrestling. As an adult, she stood 5'6" and weighed 132 pounds — certainly not the stereotypical Amazon. Ford was a legitimate athlete, and she toured North America issuing open challenges for wrestling or boxing. Challengers could be women or men (provided the men were not professional fighters and did not outweigh her). If challengers were slow to come forward, she would insult the audience, challenging their masculinity and goading them out of hiding, demonstrating a key component of modern professional wrestling: the art of cutting a promo.
A quick-pin specialist, Ford wore down opponents with body blows (in bouts where combined wrestling and boxing rules were in effect) or simply threw them to the ground and into an immediate pinning combination. She was a pioneer of what would later be known as mixed martial arts, combining the striking punches of boxing with submission grappling. Many opponents were so surprised they had been taken down that they simply could not recover their sense in time to avoid a speedy pin. Although she was never recognized as champion, Ford built a reputation as a carnival attraction.
Caricatures and paintings of women wrestlers of this time often depicted them as obese "housewives from hell," looking to smother hapless men, or pulchritudinous giants in battle. Female wrestlers were portrayed as sideshow freaks, analogous to the bearded ladies, geeks, and assorted other oddities occupying the midway. But as photography grew in popularity and cameras became more widely available, these caricatures were replaced by promotional photographs showing physically fit and attractive specimens. In Europe, especially in Russian circuses, many women were both wrestling and performing feats of strength, such as Marina Lurs (billed as the strongest woman in the Russian empire), who began wrestling in 1907; "The Ukrainian Hercules" Agafia Zavidnaya, who was billed as "the most dangerous woman in the world who is able to topple any man"; Masha Poddubnaya, who was proclaimed the "lady world wrestling champion" six times between 1889 and 1910; Anette Busch, who also did some sumo wrestling later in life; and the Irish-born "Miss Vulcana" Kate Roberts, who evoked a combination of strength and physical beauty a century before Beth Phoenix would embrace both of those same qualities and dub herself the Glamazon.
CORA LIVINGSTON
Back in the United States, Laura Bennett would end up dominating female wrestling for the first decade of the century, only to be surpassed by Cora Livingston. Many of the details of Livingston's early life have been lost to the mists of time — and generous amounts of promotional hyperbole — but one unassailable fact rings true: Livingston (whose name was also spelled as Livingstone in some reports) was the premier female grappler of the first two decades of the 20th century.
According to L.A. Jennings in her book She's a Knockout!, "at the time that Livingstone earned the right to declare herself the female champion wrestler of the world, the American press was displeased with female wrestlers because, up until the early 1900s, there had never been a particularly skilled one. This was perhaps because most of the women billed as wrestlers were either actresses pretending to be competent fighters or untrained women looking to fill a particular niche." Ironically, in the 1920 U.S. Census, Livingston would declare herself an actress, although by that time she had been a wrestler for more than a decade.
Livingston is believed to have been born in Buffalo, New York, anywhere between 1886 and 1893, although it has also been reported that she was born somewhere in Canada. According to the 1920 and 1940 U.S. censuses, she was respectively 32 and 52, and born in the state of New York, meaning she would have been born in either 1887 or 1888. According to most sources, both her parents died when she was young and she was placed in a convent school where she was raised by the nuns.
The nuns weren't likely to have approved of Cora's eventual vocation, but as a professional wrestler, the orphan from Western New York went on to tour the country and earn national acclaim as an athlete and attraction.
With her hair cut in a short and fashionable bob, Livingston somewhat resembled Hollywood's original It Girl, Clara Bow, but whereas Bow evoked girlish femininity, Livingston had the strong, sturdy build of a woman accustomed to a life of manual labor.
Livingston stood a reported 5'5" tall and weighed in at a stocky 138 pounds in her prime. As a girl, she reportedly excelled in track and field before turning her attention to wrestling. According to some sources, she was trained early on by two former American heavyweight champions, the late greats Dan McLeod and Dr. Benjamin Roller.
Livingston's first documented wrestling match took place on March 19, 1906, at the Lafayette Theater in Buffalo. A March 18 preview article in the Buffalo Evening Times stated that "Miss Cora Livingstone, 110 pounds, champion featherweight of Buffalo, and Mrs. Hazel Parker, 110 pounds, champion featherweight of the United States, will meet all comers in their class and offer $25 to any lady either fails to throw in 15 minutes. During the week Miss Livingstone and Mrs. Parker will contest for the featherweight championship of America, best two falls out of three, one bout a night to a finish. Both women are clever wrestlers and hold records."
Parker won the first contest on March 19. Livingston evened the score with a pinfall win on March 20. On March 23, Livingston won the third and deciding bout. From that point forward, Livingston was billed as a world champion, a title she defended throughout the East Coast and the Midwest.
She eventually caught the eye of Paul Bowser, a talented middleweight wrestler from Western Pennsylvania. The two met in 1910 and were married in 1913, Livingston legally using the name Cora B. Bowser from that point on. Bowser also helped train Livingston, further adding to her reputation as the most well-rounded technical female wrestler of the era.
Livingston toured throughout the United States and Canada, facing opponents like Canadian champion Celia Pontos and British champion Bessie Farrar, giving her further credibility as a world champion. Bowser would go on to become a wrestling promoter and would stake his claim to the Boston territory, which Livingston would call home.
Livingston suffered her first loss in suitably controversial fashion. On September 7, 1910, the champ faced local challenger May Nelson in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the Academy of Music before a reported crowd of 2,000 spectators. Livingston took the early advantage, and the crowd quickly turned nasty. The match was stopped by the police at the 13-minute mark when ringside fans attempted to storm the ring because of Livingston's rough treatment of the challenger. The match was postponed, and when it resumed two days later, Nelson pinned Livingston. Livingston's championship was not at stake. The riot was averted and the fans went home happy. Nelson reportedly received a purse of $100 for her win.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sisterhood of the Squared Circle by Pat Laprade, Dan Murphy. Copyright © 2017 Pat Laprade and Dan Murphy. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by WWE Superstar Natalya
Introduction
Chapter 1 — The Origins: From Amazons to Wrestlers
Chapter 2 — The Pioneers
Cora Livingston
Clara Mortensen
Chapter 3 — When Millie Met Billy: The Billy Wolfe Era
Mildred Burke: The Queen of the Ring
June Byers, G. Bill, and the Split between Wolfe and Burke
Nell Stewart
Cora Combs
Mae Weston
The African-Americans
Babs Wingo
Ethel Johnson
Marva Scott
Louise Greene
Kathleen Wimbley
Ramona Isbell
Ida Mae Martinez
Gladys Gillem
Penny Banner
Johnnie Mae Young
Chapter 4 — From Slave Girl to Women’s Champion: The Rise of Lillian Ellison
The Complicated Legacy of the Fabulous Moolah
The Moolah Girls
Rita Cortez
Ella Waldek and the Story of Billy Wolfe’s Ward
Ann Casey
Betty Jo Hawkins
Judy Grable
Princess Little Cloud
Beverly Shade
Susan Starr
Vivian Vachon
Donna Christantello
Joyce Grable
Bette Boucher
Susan “Tex” Green
The Independent Women
Evelyn Stevens
Kay Noble
Betty Nicoli
Donna Lemke
Chapter 5 — The Rock ’n’ Wrestling Connection and the 1980s: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Wendi Richter
The Original WWF Screwjob
Leilani Kai
Judy Martin
Velvet McIntyre
Sherri Martel
Rockin’ Robin
Debbie Combs
Misty Blue Simmes
Candi Devine
Madusa/Alundra Blayze
WCW: “Where the big girls play”
GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling
Chapter 6 — The Attitude Era: The Revival of WWF’s Women’s Division
Sable
Chyna
Trish Stratus
Lita
Ivory
Jacqueline
Jazz
Molly Holly
Luna Vachon
Torrie Wilson
Stacy Keibler
Victoria
Chapter 7 — Total Nonstop Action: A New Frontier
Gail Kim
Awesome Kong
The Beautiful People: Angelina Love and Velvet Sky
ODB
Daffney
Mickie James
Jade
Chapter 8 — The Rise of the Divas
The Bella Twins: Nikki and Brie
Michelle McCool
Melina
Beth Phoenix
Naomi
A.J. Lee
Natalya
Chapter 9 — International Report
Mildred Burke and the Introduction of Women’s Wrestling to Japan
The Beauty Pair: Jackie Sato and Maki Ueda
The Crush Gals: Chigusa Nagayo and Lioness Asuka
Jaguar Yokota
Devil Masami
Dump Matsumoto
The Jumping Bomb Angels: Noriyo Tateno and Itsuki Yamazaki
Bull Nakano
Akira Hokuto
Manami Toyota
Aja Kong
Megumi Kudo
Monster Ripper
Reggie Bennett
Ayako Hamada
Mexico
Irma Gonzalez
Lola Gonzalez
Lady Apache
La Diabolica
Sarah Stock
Sexy Star
United Kingdom
Saraya Knight
Australia
Madison Eagles
Chapter 10 — Dave Prazak’s Crazy Idea: SHIMMER
The Women of the independents
Allison Danger
Mercedes Martinez
Malia Hosaka
Lexie Fyfe
Cheerleader Melissa
LuFisto
MsChif
The Canadian Ninjas: Portia Perez and Nicole Matthews
Jessicka Havok
Santana Garrett
Chapter 11 — NXT, the Revolution, and the return of the women’s title
The death of the Divas title
Charlotte
Sasha Banks
Bayley
Becky Lynch
Paige
Emma
Asuka
Sara Amato
Chapter 12 — Stephanie McMahon: Holding the Future of Women’s Wrestling in Her Hands
Ronda Rousey: The Biggest Prospect Who’s Not Even a Wrestler Yet
What Does the Future Hold?