Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

childless Blackfeet women to participate in horse-stealing expeditions.
Cross-dressing men (berdache) also accompanied Plains Indian military expeditions.
The cross-dressers provided supernatural protection, and the
women did the cooking. Native Americans were never as sexually obsessed
as the European Americans, and ethnographic evidence suggests that most
rapes attributed to the American Indians were actually done by European
or African Americans. (Although tales of female sexual bondage to the Indians
have been a staple of English and American literature, theater, and
movies for 300 years, most Indian cultures required warriors to go through
lengthy cleansing rituals before having sex with anyone, male or female.
These rituals were taken seriously, too, as failure to accomplish them properly
could cause a man to lose his war magic.)
1850 Theater manager A. H. Purdy introduces the spectacle of “Amazons,”
or uniformed women performing close-order drill, to the New York
stage. Female drill teams remained popular with North American audiences
for the next 150 years; just look at football halftime exercises.
1854 In New York City, an Englishman named Harry Hill opens a
concert saloon at 25 East Houston Street; although prizefights are illegal in
New York, Harry Hill’s nightly shows include boxing and wrestling acts.
Most pugilists were male—both William Muldoon and John L. Sullivan
started at Harry Hill’s—but could be female. In 1876, for instance, Nell
Saunders boxed (and beat) Rose Harland for the prize of a silver butter
dish. A drawing published in the National Police Gazette on November 22,
1879, shows Harry Hill’s female boxers wearing T-shirts, knickers, and
buttoned shoes, and showing a scandalous amount of arm and thigh.
Harry Hill’s had two entrances. The main entrance was for men, who paid
twenty-five cents’ admission. The side door was for women, who paid
nothing. Hill’s drinks were overpriced, and the air was a cloud of tobacco
smoke. Other than that, Hill ran a respectable house, and his boxers circulated
among the crowd to keep it that way. Reform politicians finally
caused Harry Hill’s to close in 1886.
1857–1858 Forty-seven battalions of Bengali infantry and several independent
principalities rebel against Britain’s Honourable East India
Company. Although most rebels were men, the best-known rebel was a
woman, the 25-year-old Rani of Jhansi. She rode into battle armed and armored
like a man, and died of wounds received near Gwalior in June 1858.
Rani’s counterpart on the British side, a woman whom the modern Indians
revere much less, was an equally redoubtable Afghan widow from Bhopal
named Sikander Begum.
1864 In volume 1 of a text called Principles of Biology, the English
philosopher Herbert Spencer coins the phrase “survival of the fittest.”
Spencer saw nature as a state of pitiless warfare, with the elimination of the
Women in the Martial Arts 677