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Empowering the Physical and Political Self: Women and the Practice of Self-Defense, 1890–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2014

Wendy Rouse  and
Beth Slutsky
Wendy Rouse*
Affiliation:
San Jose State University
Beth Slutsky
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

First-wave feminists in the Progressive Era found ways to make the political physical by empowering their bodies. As the women's suffrage movement gained momentum, advocates for women's self-defense training in England and in the United States insisted that all women were physically capable of defending themselves and should learn self-defense not only to protect themselves physically but to empower themselves psychologically and politically for the battles they would face in both the public and private spheres. Militant suffragettes used their bodies to convey discontent and resist oppression through marches, pickets, and hunger strikes. Yet, and perhaps more importantly, even average women, with no direct association with suffrage organizations, expressed a newfound sense of empowerment through physical training in boxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu.1 This paper considers the ways in which women during the first wave of feminism empowered their bodies to fight assault, sexism, and disfranchisement through their training in the “manly art” of self-defense. Although not all women who embraced physical training and martial arts had explicit or implicit political motives, women's self-defense figuratively and literally challenged the power structure that prevented them from exercising their full rights as citizens and human beings.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 470 - 499
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2014 

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References

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3 After Berger successfully thwarted the attacker, disbelieving policemen asked for a demonstration. Much to their amusement, Berger offered a brief tutorial of her technique on Detective Frank Gard, as a few reporters watched in astonishment. Berger even received letters from adoring male admirers who offered proposals of marriage. She politely declined these requests. Ibid.; “Social Sets of Other Cities,” Washington Post, Sept. 10, 1909, 7.

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70 “What Chance Has a Burglar against Girls Like These?” San Francisco Chronicle, Standard Magazine section, June 11, 1922, 3. A 1925 article details yet another case of a woman trained in jiu-jitsu who successfully defended herself against a thief. The author used the incident to illustrate why all American girls should learn self-defense and further made the link between self-defense training and the new liberated woman: “All Honor to Miss Howry and other girls who carry the doctrine of equal rights into the practical field of self-defense!” “A Girl's Jiu Jitsu, Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1925, 6.

71 Louise Le Noir Thomas, “How a Woman Can Protect Herself upon the Street,” Ogden Standard, Magazine Section, Apr. 14, 1917.