included Eleanor Baldwin Cass, and students included Marion Fish and
Natalie Wells.
1881 A Swedish woman named Martina Bergman-Osterberg becomes
the superintendent of physical education for London’s public schools. By
1886, she had trained 1,300 English schoolteachers in the methods of
Swedish gymnastics. “I try to 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 270
women to see how fast they can punch; he finds that the men average 18
feet per second, with a maximum speed of 29 feet per second, while the
women average 13 feet per second, with a maximum speed of 20 feet per
second. In other words, although some women could hit harder than the
average man, most women could hit only 55 percent as hard.
1884 A 20-year-old American woman named Etta Hattan adopts the
stage name 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
certainly Amazon enough to defeat many men at mounted broadsword
fencing during her fifteen-year professional career.
1887 Circus magnate P. T. Barnum hires wrestler Ed Decker, the Lit-
tle Wonder from Vermont, as a sideshow attraction, offering to pay $100
to anyone who can pin Decker, and $50 to anyone who can avoid being
pinned within three minutes. Despite weighing only 150 pounds and stand-
ing only 5 feet 6 inches tall, Decker reportedly never lost to a paying cus-
tomer. Of course, some matches were harder than others, and as a British
sideshow boxer told a reporter a 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 sideshow promoter of the 1960s, “My grandmother used
to challenge all comers. She wore protectors on her chest, but she never
needed them. Nobody she ever went up against could even come close to
hitting her” (undated clippings in Joseph Svinth collection). The most fa-
mous of these British fairground pugilists was probably Barbara Buttrick,
who was the women’s fly and bantamweight boxing champion from 1950
to 1960. This said, not all the female pugilists were female. For instance, a
carnival shill named Charles Edwards told A. J. Liebling about a turn-of-
the-century Texas circus that had a woman stand in front of the tent prom-
ising $50 to any man who could stay three rounds with her. Once inside
the dimly lit tent, the mark then found himself boxing a cross-dressing male
look-alike.
1889 Female boxing becomes popular throughout the United States.
Champions included Nellie Stewart of Norfolk, Virginia; Ann Lewis of
Cleveland, Ohio; and Hattie Leslie of New York. The audiences were male,
and the fighters sometimes stripped to their drawers like men. Savatefights,
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