In The Promise of Women’s Boxing, the follow up to her book A History of Women’s Boxing, author Malissa Smith covers the international developments in women’s boxing between 2012 and 2014. The book is published by Rowman and Littlefield.
(This will likely be my last book post for a while as I’m due to start a creative writing MA in September and need to turn my attention to the reading list for that course. I will still be reading books about boxing; I still have a few unread books here at home, and there are a few titles I’m looking forward to which are due to be published in the next six months. Whatever I do get around to reading, I imagine my posts will be much more sporadic. However, Lizzy and I will continue to put out issues of our new boxing fanzine, The Spit Bucket, which we hope to do every two months. Coincidentally, Malissa Smith will feature in issue two, due out 1 August, with a piece of prose writing, alongside some other fantastic work.)
This book, by virtue of its scope, is a much more concise view of a burgeoning sport, simply because it ‘only’ looks at a twelve year period rather than trawling through 300 years of intermittent and incomplete historical records. Historical records which were often overlooked or deliberately obscured. Whilst the past twelve years has been packed with developments for women’s boxing, both amateur and professional, and is deserving of its own branch of research, it has offered Smith a space to relax into somewhat.
Whether this is because it is such a recent period, and we live in a time where (for the most part) a discourse around women fighters is publicly welcomed, or because she gets to fall back on notes and records she has kept herself throughout the period, Smith’s writing in this new volume has a much more relaxed and confident style. It may, of course, be that Smith has simply grown in confidence as an author but I suspect a great deal of that confidence is born from having lived through, and so closely alongside, the developments covered in the book. Either way, it’s a blessing to the reader as the sheer volume of information could easily be overwhelming without an informal touch in places.
Beginning with the likes of Claressa Shields, Nicola Adams, Natasha Jonas and Katie Taylor returning to their respective amateur club gyms after their experiences at the 2012 London Olympic Games, the book charts the impact of women finally being granted the opportunity to perform on the biggest amateur stage. This, of course, was a vital step in the sport’s development because for so long the argument had been made that the professional code would never develop if girls and women weren’t allowed to compete earlier in their careers and hone their craft.
The 2012 showing, added to the continued support and success of the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, not only proved that women deserved their place on that stage, but the repeated success of Nicola Adams and Claressa Shields (and even the unexpected exit of Katie Taylor) created a groundswell of enthusiasm, with young girls pushing parents to allow them to join their local boxing gyms.
The period of 2012-16 is important in the book as Smith discusses the quandary that many female amateur boxers faced at the time: whether to remain amateur and pursue medal-glory or turn professional, into a business which offered few opportunities for career development and, on the whole, very small purses. As Smith makes clear, Mexico and Argentina were among the first countries to offer reasonable financial incentives to women pro boxers, which goes a long way to explaining why so many British and Irish women are regularly matched with fighters from Argentina. It’s understandable that there is the depth of talent in that country to promote boxers from that part of the world as ‘gatekeepers’ and tests of ability, as matchmakers attempt to manoeuvre their fighters toward world titles.
As the brightest amateur talent spent this period weighing up the pros and cons of ‘turning over’, and the best time to do so, the most insidious side of the media’s attitude towards women’s boxing was spotlighted. While media outlets and promoters began to scramble for the signatures of Olympic and World medalists the tendency was to talk of the birth of a completely new sport, almost entirely erasing the women who had been, and still were, boxing professionally at the time. Where have we heard/read about that before?
For many of these established pros it may have felt as though nothing had changed for them in the aftermath of the first Olympic Games, to allow women to box competitively. In many ways this highlights that the women’s code was hurtling toward a form of equality in professional terms: the imbalance and inherent unfairness of who has money thrown at them by promoters, which of course has traditionally been Olympic gold medallists. Everyone with even a passing interest in boxing will be able to point to a boxer with great talent who never seems to get big (money) opportunities, simply because a promoter hasn’t thought of a way to market them to fans.
Incidentally, the scope of the two books on this subject published by Smith (which can be viewed as two volumes of the same book) is so vast that the impact of this research and collation probably won’t be realised properly until it feeds naturally into a wider network of research and papers. As the women’s side of the sport grows so, naturally, will the recording of it – I’m certain Smith’s contribution will be a foundation of any future records.
I wrote recently that, by and large, boxing books are only ever concerned with the past. In fact, boxing culture revolves around looking back constantly, putting contemporary fighters’ careers into context by comparing them to the records of past pugilists. It’s very rare that a book makes any attempt to look forward and speculate on what might be next. Perhaps because Smith feels as though the branch of the sport she loves is still in its infancy it is easier to ‘face forward’? The consequence of the erasure of a past? The result of standing at a crossroads?
Either way, I was pleased to read some of Smith’s thoughts and concerns on the following subjects:
– Will women’s boxing fully embrace three-minute rounds? and based on what research will that decision be made? Would purses increase accordingly?
– What would the implications be on women’s boxing if the IOC decide to completely turn their back on the sport? Of course, this would be devastating to men’s amateur boxing but it would be a particularly cruel blow to women and girls looking to capitalise on recent successes. (On this note, whenever asked I always hold amateur boxing up as the most balanced and equal of sports when it comes to gender – no other sport will offer, literally, the same platform to men and women, girls and boys, at the same events.)
– The ongoing research into the impact of concussion on women’s brains. This also includes a delicate discussion around why ‘equality’ so often leads to women assuming the same traditional roles men have held – why are we asking if women should box three-minute rounds, rather than asking if it would be safer for men to box only two-minute rounds?
As I face a period of cutting down my interaction with boxing literature I’m glad that, for a significant time, visitors to this blog will see this book on the front page. I’ll be back as soon as I can with more boxing books. I’ll end this post with a word form Malissa Smith, taken from the end of this latest book:
What’s clear is that the women of boxing have persevered. Bringing each other along through the camaraderie of the gym, and the willingness to push the boundaries of the sport to make it better for the next woman who stands for a moment on the apron of a ring before entering the field of combat. That spirit endures, through hardships and disappointments, but most assuredly as the moments of grace that shine through to make it all seem new again.
Writers on Boxing 
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