![]() In the late 1800s, Nell Saunders and Rose Harland fought the first women’s boxing match in the United States the prize was a silver butter dish. For six years, Hyfield fought both men and women professionally, wearing “close jackets, short petticoats, coming just below the knee, Holland drawers, white stockings and pumps,” according to the same newspaper advertisements. The first female boxer dates back to 1722, when Elizabeth Wilkinson challenged Hannah Hyfield to a bout through an ad she placed in the London Journal: “I, Elizabeth Wilkinson, of Clerkenwell, having had some words with Hannah Hyfield, and requiring Satisfaction, do invite her to meet me on the Stage and Box me.” It was around the same time that men’s boxing was being promoted as a barroom spectacle. Women’s boxing has never been an easy sell. Wearing shorts is not a good way for women boxers to dress.” In 2012, at the London Games (where skirts were optional), all the women’s bouts, including the gold-medal finals, were fought in the afternoon while men fought in prime time the women fought on consecutive days with only one rest day, while the men fought every other day to include rest. ![]() The Polish national boxing coach went so far as to tell BBC Sport that he’d made the skirts mandatory, saying: “By wearing skirts, in my opinion, it gives a good impression, a womanly impression. In 2010, the International Boxing Association introduced skirts - yes, skirts - to help “distinguish” the female fighters from the men, as if the audience couldn’t tell the difference otherwise. And it goes all the way through women’s boxing, at every level. “It feels like they’re being sexist in the professional game,” Shields says. Showtime hasn’t had a women’s boxing match since 2001 HBO and P.B.C. Boxing’s biggest broadcasters - HBO and Showtime - have been reluctant to feature women’s fight cards. Shields went on to talk about something a lot of professional female boxers have mentioned before: that there isn’t support for women’s boxing on a professional level. I’m not gonna pretend that isn’t part of it or part of me.” ![]() Just before Shields left for Rio, where she will compete again as a middleweight boxer, she told me: “People say the way I talk about boxing is too mean and too tough, but I do enjoy hitting people, or I wouldn’t be a boxer. They could not figure out how to sell her in spite of her ready-made biopic childhood - a narrative riddled with disadvantage, abuse and sexual violence that ends in winning Olympic gold. They had no idea how to sell her, even after she was featured in a multimedia photo essay in The New York Times, profiled by The New Yorker, heard on NPR or highlighted in any number of other media appearances. But for a woman to admit that she likes aggression, relishes controlled rage, thrives on ferocity and enjoys the feeling of gut-punches, well, that is unfathomable, or it seemed so to the Team U.S.A. It would be used as a selling point to hype fights, as it always has. If she were a man, that bloodlust, that taste for combat, would be courted. The paradox is clear: Shields cannot visibly enjoy fighting to succeed financially as a boxer. Then she looks at Shields and says: “I would love for you to stop saying that you like beating people up and making them cry.” Team U.S.A.’s public-relations consultant, a woman named Julie Goldsticker, goes into an incomprehensible description of why sponsors are attracted to certain people. ![]() Names like Ryan Lochte and Gabby Douglas are tossed out as the sort of Olympians to whom sponsors flock. are discussing her sponsorship opportunities. She has returned home after four decisive victories, having won the first American gold medal in women’s boxing. representatives and her coach, Jason Crutchfield, in a nondescript lobby after glory and fanfare have receded into a post-Olympic haze. ![]() There’s a scene in “T-Rex” - a documentary that follows the middleweight phenom Claressa Shields from her hometown of Flint, Mich., to the 2012 Olympic Games in London and back again - that perfectly illustrates the biggest problem faced by women’s boxing. ![]()
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