Women Flocked to Wrestling in the 1950's

Source: The Winchester Star
Winchester — Does the feminist movement of the 1960s owe a debt to professional wrestling?
Professor Chad Dell, associate professor of communications at Monmouth University, recently laid out some connections between the two for members of the Center for Sport and Media and the women’s studies classes at Shenandoah University.
Dell’s talk was part of a new series of lectures and performances to spotlight Women’s History Month, according to Amy Sarch, director of Women’s Studies at Shenandoah University.
“He broke through that stereotype of women in the 1950s,” Sarch said of Dell. “He breaks down the illusions. I appreciate that.”
Dell is the author of “The Revenge of Hatpin Mary: Women, Professional Wresting and the Fan Culture in the 1950s.”
“This is a story of violence, sex, wrestling, attractive men and ugly men, and interesting women,” Dell told the group in the Hester Auditorium.
The sport of wrestling has roots in antiquity, but it’s modern version is really “performance sport,” Dell said.
“It’s like going to a play and seeing MacBeth,” he explained. “You get involved in the story. Wrestling has been that way since the 1800s.”
Women, Dell said, have always been part of the audience for wrestling. But, after World War II, they became the majority of spectators, both at the events and for televised matches.
Women made up 60 percent of audiences in the 1950s, he said, and 90 percent of the television viewers.
Wrestling was “the first early ‘hit’ on television.”
The primitive technology was one reason wrestling was the darling of early-televised sports programing.
Because cameras were large and clumsy, and set up far from the action, sports such as football and baseball weren’t as interesting when the players “looked like ants,” Dell said.
And, while boxing, like wrestling, was confined to a small ring, it wasn’t as easily controlled. With a knockout, a boxing match could be over in the first few minutes.
Wrestling, “because it is scripted, you can be assured that it will fill the hour,” Dell said.
Fifty years ago, this sports melodrama, like a male soap opera, consciously attempted to appeal to women.
Wrestlers such as “Gorgeous George,” who wore gaudy robes and sported marcelled hair, weren’t trying to lure male viewers.
Announcers, including Dennis James, Dick Lane, and even Steve Allen in his early career, made a point to describe the color and brilliance of the wrestlers robes and costume flourishes, something more likely to engage women viewers on the black and white television screens.
“How many people here know what a peplum is?” Dell asked, after reading an announcer’s description of one wrestlers’ robe. That piece of clothing was more likely known to women than men, he added.
But why were women coming to and interested in, professional wrestling.
Well, certainly it was an opportunity for women to “turn the tables” on men in one regard, Dell said.
For generations, women had been “arm candy,” for men, he explained. They were “objects” to be looked at and whistled at.
But wrestling reversed that role. Here, the men with well-built bodies, were looked at and often whistled at, by women.
Women fans at ring side would bring pies and gifts and even propose marriage to the professional wrestlers performing for them.
“You had women objectifying men, and doing it in public!”
And that may have been important as a spur to the rise of feminism, Dell suggested.
To some extent, women moved into the workforce during World War I, he said, but it was World War II, that gave them the opportunity, like never before, to work their way up into positions of authority.
But, when 11 million servicemen came home looking for jobs, government and industry quickly redefined the role of women and pointed them back into the home.
Dell noted the “image” of woman in the 1950s was Barbara Billingsley’s portrayal of June Cleaver, the mother on the sitcom, “Leave it to Beaver.”
And, while Marilyn Monroe was one female icon of the 1950s, television introduced Donna Reed and Harriet Nelson as role models.
Lucille Ball, as Lucy Ricardo, drew laughs when she tried to escape her fate as a “housewife” to do something interesting outside the home.
But, in that same time frame, women wrestling fans were able to escape, to be outrageous, raucous and playful, and to do it on television.
Dell described one woman taking a big puff on a cigarette, getting up and approaching the ring and blowing the smoke in the “villain’s” face.
“The audience is just as much a part of the show as the wrestling,” Dell noted. “Wrestling offered a stage for women.”
Some of them even became “stars,” as the title of Dell’s book shows.
Eloise Patricia Barnett, aka “Hatpin Mary,” was one extreme example.
The Bronx resident wore a hat to matches, anchored with a hatpin.
“She was famous for taking that hatpin and jabbing it into the thigh of wrestlers she didn’t like.”
There is a famous photo of her at ringside, fighting with one of New York’s finest, Dell added.
“There was a ‘Hatpin Mary’ at every arena.”
Pittsburgh had its “Ringside Rosie.” “She would insert herself into the performance. Everybody in Pittsburgh knew who Ringside Rosie was.”
Women who once would have had a male escort, began going to matches with their girlfriends, even their mothers and daughters, and getting into the spirit of the performance, and sometimes, into the act.
Wrestling matches gave women, who men saw as “June Cleavers,” a chance to act out, Dell said.
“I think some women were really angry,” Dell said, “that they were shoved out of good jobs and told to go back home and serve your husband and not have a public life.”
In the early 1960s, Betty Friedan introduced the concept of feminism and women began to desert wrestling for other venues.
At that point, wrestling adapted itself to a new audience, pointed toward adolescent males, like himself, Dell said.
In Philadelphia, “I grew up watching wrestling,” Dell said, along with other 12 year olds.
In the 1960s, wrestling magazines changed their focus and started featuring bloody faces and steriod bodies.
And television no longer featured wrestling on major networks.
Women were moving out of the home and into the work force and demanding equal rights, and apparently had other options to “act out.”
But Dell thinks wrestling may have played its own small part in that great sea change.