The Rise of Women’s Boxing
INSIDE ICONIC / THE RISE OF WOMEN’S BOXING
HOLLY HUMPHREY
The Rise of Women’s Boxing
The history of women’s boxing in the United States is an enduring chronicle of resistance and cultural transformation. Dissimilar to the relatively linear progression of men’s boxing, which found legitimacy through regulation and media spectacle, the female counterpart has moved through trying periods. The earliest recorded reference to women boxing in the United States dates to 1876, when Nell Saunders and Rose Harland fought at the Hills Theater in New York. This bout, although informal, marked the beginning of women’s boxing being relegated to novelty entertainment rather than a respected athletic competition.
Despite scattered appearances in public exhibitions, such as women’s boxing being featured as a display event during the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, female fighters were actively prohibited from participating in sanctioned competitions. Throughout the early and mid-20th century, athletic commissions refused to license women. This institutional exclusion began to crack in the late 1970s, notably with the 1977 lawsuit filed by Cathy Davis against the New York State Athletic Commission. Denied a boxing license on the basis of her sex, Davis successfully argued that such discrimination violated her rights, therefore paving the way for female fighters in New York and across the country. Her subsequent appearance on the cover of the Ring Magazine in 1978, as the first woman ever featured, was symbolically significant, even as the sport still lacked formal infrastructure to support female athletes.
The legal victories of the 1970s set a precedent for further activism in the decades to follow. In 1993, Dallas Malloy, a 15 year old amateur boxer from Washington state, sued USA Boxing after being denied the opportunity to compete. A judge’s injunction permitted her to fight, resulting in the first sanctioned amateur women’s boxing match in the United Staes, which she won at age 16. In conjunction with this, the International Boxing Association began to incorporate women’s boxing into its global framework by the end of the 1990s. It sanctioned the first European Cup for Women in 1999 and the Women’s World Championship in 2001.
The culmination of this long struggle came in 2012, when women’s boxing was included in the London Olympic Games, a decision by the International Olympic Committee that came just three years after an unexpected announcement in 2009. Yet while Olympic inclusion has opened the door for new generations of amateur fighters, disparities in pay, media coverage and professional opportunities remain stark.
Today, women’s boxing is not simply an auxiliary to the male-dominated mainstream, it is a vibrant and dynamic sphere in its own right. As institutions evolve and audiences diversify, women’s boxing is poised not only to grow but to reshape the very definition of the sport itself.
