Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

young man from Bordeaux. Marie was hit in the thigh with the first shot,
leaving Aimée free to marry the young man. (Or so said the popular press.)
1722 Elizabeth Wilkinson of Clerkenwell challenges Hannah Hyfield
of Newgate Market to meet her on stage and box for a prize of three
guineas; the rules of the engagement require each woman to strike each
other in the face while holding a half-crown coin in each fist, with the first
to drop a coin being the loser. These rules perhaps suggest how bareknuckle
boxing began, as James Figg was a chief promoter of women’s
fighting. For example, in August 1725, Figg and a woman called Long Meg
of Westminster fought Ned Sutton and an unnamed woman; Figg and Meg
took the prize of £40. Nevertheless, says historian Elliott Gorn, the sporadic
appearance of women in English prizefights only “underscored male
domination of the culture of the ring” (Gorn 1986, fn. 69, 265).
1727 After his army takes heavy casualties during a slave-raiding expedition
against Ouidah, King Agaja of Dahomey creates a female palace
guard and arms it with Danish trade muskets. By the nineteenth century this
female bodyguard had 5,000 members. One thousand carried firearms. The
rest served as porters, drummers, and litter-bearers. These Dahomeyan
women trained for war through vigorous dancing and elephant hunting.
They were prohibited from becoming pregnant on pain of death. They
fought as well or better than male soldiers, and they were said by Richard
Burton to be better soldiers than their incompetent male leadership deserved.
1759 Mary Lacy, a runaway serving girl who served twelve years in
the Royal Navy, gets in a fight aboard HMS Sandwich. “I went aft to the
main hatchway and pulled off my jacket,” wrote Lacy, “but they wanted
me to pull off my shirt, which I would not suffer for fear of it being discovered
that I was a woman, and it was with much difficulty that I could
keep it on.” The fight then developed into a wrestling match. “During the
combat,” said Lacy, “he threw me such violent cross-buttocks . . . [as] were
almost enough to dash my brains out.” But by “a most lucky circumstance”
she won the bout, and afterwards she “reigned master over all the
rest” of the ship’s boys (Stark 1996, 137).
1768 After disguising herself as a boy and shipping out with the
French navigator Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Jeanne Baré becomes the
first female to circumnavigate the world. Women also served in the British
navy. These women avoided discovery because European seamen seldom
bathed and invariably slept in their clothes.
1768 In the Clerkenwell district of London (perhaps at the London
Spa), two female prizefighters mill for a prize of a dress valued at half a
crown, while another two women fight against two men for a prize of a
guinea apiece. And at Wetherby’s on Little Russell Street, the 19-year-old
rake William Hickey sees “two she-devils . . . engaged in a scratching and
Women in the Martial Arts 673