A History of Women's Boxing by Malissa Smith
by Sarah Deming
The first time I spoke to author Malissa Smith, proprietress of the indispensable blog girlboxing, we argued about skirts in the ring. This was right before the 2012 Olympic Trials, and I had called to get her take on the competitive field in Spokane.
The internets were buzzing over the proposal that women boxers make their Olympic debut in skirts, but I didn’t want to talk about that. I was sick of the media posing female fighters in evening gowns or talking about their history of sexual abuse. Couldn’t we just treat them as athletes?
“The skirt thing is a non-issue,” I said.
Malissa’s rage exploded from my cell phone. “It is not a non-issue! It’s a profound insult to the athleticism of the women entering this sport. It completely undermines them.”
“I’d fight naked if I could be in the Olympics,” I said.
Malissa sighed. Ours was a typical feminist argument, the kind where you’re both really on the same side.
She told me about Katie Taylor, the great Irish lightweight, threatening to boycott London rather than box in a skirt. She explained the historical and symbolic resonance of ring attire. She suggested that feminizing the costume sent the message, “This isn’t really boxing; these are women." She enlightened me, because that’s what she does.
Along with such fierce witnesses as Raquel Ruiz, Sue Jaye Johnson, Ariel Levy, and Christy Halbert, Malissa Smith would teach me that I could not write about women in the ring without acknowledging their struggle to get there.
The struggle does not end once a woman reaches a certain level of technical proficiency or accomplishment. It can ambush her at the door to any boxing gym, the press row of any fight.
“You do a project like this, you walk away a radical feminist,” Malissa told me last week.
We were brunching in honor of A History of Women’s Boxing, hot off the presses from Roman and Littlefield, which began as her Master’s thesis in Liberal Studies and ended as a history of the sport from 1700‘s London to the modern day.
Palo Santo has strong sangria, but Malissa’s stories were what got me drunk. We talked about Nellie Bly, the first woman to ever interview a fighter, who practiced New Journalism before it was called that; about Djuna Barnes, who covered Jack Dempsey and submitted to force feeding in solidarity with fasting suffragettes.
“If you look at what these women were doing, if you look at the trenches, it’s just like what happens in the ring,” Malissa said.
The hardcover sat on the table between us, shiny as a championship belt. I dug the indefinite article in the title. Malissa hears the polyphony at the heart of things. She knows hers is one of many possible histories, but it is the only one for me.