Yip, Chun, with Danny Connor. 1993. Wing Chun Martial Arts: Principles
and Techniques.York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser.Women in the Martial Arts:
Britain and North America
During the early 1900s, feminists often regarded combative sports such as
boxing, wrestling, fencing, and jûdô as tools of women’s liberation. Be-
cause these sports were historically associated with prizefighting (in Shake-
speare’s time, prizefighters were fencers rather than pugilists) and saloons
(the Police Gazettewas holding “Female Championships of the World” in
New York City saloons as early as 1884), the middle classes publicly de-
spised such activities.
Nevertheless, around 1900, combative sports started becoming more
fashionable. Fencing was particularly popular with women, partly because
of its exercise value, partly because it was said to build character, and
mostly because it was not a contact sport.
During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, jûdô classes became
popular with upper-class women. Partly this was due to the Japanese army
claiming that jûdô was the secret weapon that made its soldiers invincible
in the trench fighting around Port Arthur, and partly it was due to the ex-
aggerated claims of jûjutsuteachers and sportswriters. For example, in The
Cosmopolitanof May 1905, a Japanese visitor to New York named Kat-
sukuma Higashi boasted that given six months, he could teach any 110-
pounder of good moral character to “meet a man of twice his weight and
three times his muscular strength and overcome him under all circum-
stances.” This was hyperbole rather than fact—within the year the 120-
pound Higashi himself proved incapable of beating either a 140-pound
professional wrestler, George Bothner, or a 105-pound jûdôka (jûdô
player), Yukio Tani. Nevertheless the myth persists. Witness, for example,
the enormous popularity of The Karate Kid,a Hollywood film that saw its
youthful hero change from chump to champ during the seven weeks be-
tween Halloween and Christmas.
Jûjutsu was first introduced to England in March 1892. The occasion
was a lecture given by T. Shidachi, secretary of the Bank of Japan’s London
branch, and his assistant Daigoro Goh (Smith 1958, 47–62). Seven years
later, Yukio Tani introduced jûjutsu into British music halls, and by the
time “The Adventure of the Empty House” appeared in Strand Magazine
in October 1903, Sherlock Holmes was using a Japanese-based system of
wrestling called baritsu to free himself from the clutches of Professor Mo-
riarty. From the 1890s there were also jûdô and jûjutsu practitioners in the
United States, several of whom, like Tani, worked as professional wrestlers.684 Women in the Martial Arts: Britain and North America