#17: ‘My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight’ by Djuna Barnes

‘My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight’ is an article taken from ‘Vivid and Repulsive as the Truth’, a collection of the early works of avant-garde writer Djuna Barnes.

The article describes Barnes and a group of women friends attending a boxing event in 1914, at Brown’s Athletic Club in New York, headlined by a bout between Phil Bloom and Willie ‘Young’ Gradwell. I’m not a fan of this type of journalism from the early to mid part of the 20th Century, as there is always a sense (if not more) of the journalist ‘slumming it’ with the proles in order to get a feeling for aspects of their culture, and it usually ends up a bit patronising. That being said, the article does offer a good insight into what boxing events were like during that period, and how popular they were as live events.

Obviously, it is also rare to get a report like this about boxing written by a woman, though Barnes had already established a career in which she felt entitled to move freely through different spaces and social strata, regardless of her gender.

This article is the only piece in the book to deal with boxing (unless I’ve missed something), but there are numerous other articles in which she explores the lives and jobs of others, which are worth reading if that’s of interest.