The phenomenon of women fighting, often referred to as "catfights," has a long and complex history, evolving from early 19th-century depictions to modern-day professional wrestling. The term "catfight" itself was first recorded in an 1824 mock heroic poem by Ebenezer Mack, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
In the United States, its usage to describe a fight between women appeared in an 1854 book by Benjamin G. Ferris, who wrote about Mormon women fighting over their shared husband. Feminist historians trace the term's use to label female opponents back to 1940, when American newspapers characterized a dispute between Clare Boothe Luce and journalist Dorothy Thompson as a catfight.
Culturally, the term often conjures images of bikini-clad women slapping and wrestling each other. However, the reality is far more diverse and nuanced. Catfights first began appearing in American popular culture in the 1950s when postwar pioneers of pornography such as Irving Klaw produced film clips of women engaged in catfighting and wrestling. Klaw used many models and actresses in his works, including Bettie Page. The popularity of watching women fight increased in the postwar years and eventually moved into the mainstream of society.
A University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business survey found that both female and male observers judged female vs.
More than any other aspect of the catfight in today's culture, the catfight's sexually arousing potential is exploited for numerous purposes. The phenomenon of catfighting as erotic entertainment for straight men is widely documented throughout the Internet, television, film, and even pornography. web users are overwhelmingly presented with catfighting as highly sexual, even pornographic. Venturing onto ... these pages will lead a viewer to an abundance of videos and images of objectified women fighting with each other by pulling hair, scratching, and even biting each other.
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Catfights in Entertainment
The entertainment industry has long capitalized on the concept of catfights. Here are some examples:
Joan Collins and Linda Evans in Dynasty
- Dynasty: This show starred John Forsythe as an oil tycoon and patriarch of a wealthy family that lived in Denver. The show co-starred blonde Linda Evans and brunette Joan Collins. The two women had a number of fights, both verbal and physical, during the show's 9-year run on ABC.
- OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies: Academy Award winning director Michel Hazanavicius directed this 2007 French spy spoof that featured a clothes shredding catfight between Bérénice Bejo and Aure Atika.
- Destry Rides Again: Marlene Dietrich and Una Merkel engage in "one of the most famous female vs female fights ever captured on film." The New York Times review of the 1939 movie said "The scene that really counts though is the cat-fight between Miss Dietrich's Frenchy and Una Merkel's outraged Mrs. Callahan ... we thought the battle in 'The Women' was an eye-opener, now we realize it was just shadow clawing. For the real thing, with no-holds barred and full access to chairs, tables, glasses, waterbuckets and as much hair that can be snatched from the opponent's scalp, we give you not 'The Women' but the two women who fight it out in Bloody Gulch." Adaptations of the movie include Frenchie starring Shelley Winters and Marie Windsor as the combatants and Destry starring Mari Blanchard and Mary Wickes. The Dietrich-Merkel match-up, a riotous tooth-and-nail catfight lasting over two minutes, took five days to film. Dietrich was adamant about doing as much of her own fighting as was possible on the screen. Co-star Merkel realized that Dietrich wasn't pulling any punches and opted to do her own fighting as well. Both actresses became carried away in the moment in front of the Hal Mohr's camera and came away with scrapes, bruises and splinters. A first aid station was set up off the soundstage for injuries. Pioneering stuntwoman Helen Thurston filled in for Dietrich when the action became too heavy .
- From Russia with Love: In the role of James Bond, Sean Connery watches two gypsies engage in what many consider to be one of the entertainment industry's most iconic catfights. The black-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned "gypsy" combatants were Martine Beswick and Aliza Gur.
- Kansas City Bomber: Raquel Welch stars in this feature film about the sport of female roller derby. Portraying a divorcee and single parent, Welch in the role of K.C. Carr, engages in a number of fights, most notably against actress Helena Kallianiotes who plays the role of a fading roller derby star, Jackie Burdette. Two weeks into the shoot, Welch suffered a cut lip and swollen face during a fight scene with Kallianiotes.
- Charlie's Angels: Iconic 1970s TV show starring, in its first season, Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Jaclyn Smith. Dressed in a white bikini, Smith fought Rosemary Forsyth in the first season's third episode titled "Night of the Strangler". Smith later engaged stuntwoman Heidi von Beltz in a locker room fight during the season-two episode "Angels in the Backfield" (von Beltz would later become quadriplegic as a result of injuries sustained while performing a stunt in The Cannonball Run).
Catfights, both real and staged, are a staple of daytime television talk shows and reality television shows such as The Jerry Springer Show, The Bachelor, For Love or Money, and The Real Housewives series, where women are frequently presented as being in continual competition with each other for love and professional success.
In 2002, an SABMiller television commercial called "Catfight" featured two young beautiful women drinking a beer in an outside cafe. Their polite conversation quickly turned into an argument about whether Miller Lite beer's best aspect was its taste or the fact that it was less filling than other beers. The argument led to a fight where one of the girls knocked the other into an adjacent pool. The women quickly lost most of their clothes and continued the fight clad in only in their underwear. Before the fight came to a conclusion, the scene faded out and the viewers saw that it was a fantasy dreamed up by two men in a bar discussing what would make a great commercial. The scene would later cut to the girls, stripped down to their underwear, wrestling in a mud pit. An "uncensored" version was also filmed that included an alternate ending where the mud-covered girls kiss.
Lucha Libre: Women Take Center Stage
Love but little money for Mexico's female fighters
In Mexico, women's wrestling, known as lucha libre, has seen significant growth and recognition. With its roots in 19th century carnival performances, the part-sport, part-spectacle of lucha libre, declared an “Intangible Cultural Heritage” by Mexico City’s government, held its first professional fight in 1933 and now attracts audiences as far away as Tokyo. Women competed during its early years, then were banned in the 1950s.
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Coronavirus closures of arenas and gyms between March 2020 and May 2021 forced lucha libre federations and promoters to try more innovative approaches, says Olivia Domínguez Prieto, coordinator of the Seminar of Anthropology of Sports and Games at the National School of Anthropology and History. They staged fights without live audiences, selling broadcasts over the internet to audiences in search of entertainment to break the lockdown’s monotony.
“We managed to see a significant change,” Domínguez says. “Being able to show that they are part of the same sport, on par with men, that they are just as good as men, the fact that the audience has begun to respond to them and they find it attractive to see women wrestling.
In September 2021, for the first time, a women’s match headlined the anniversary event for the Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (World Wrestling Council), Mexico’s oldest wrestling organization.
As arenas and gyms have reopened, interest in luchadoras has grown - which encourages more women to enter the sport. Óscar Madrigal, a women’s wrestling promoter, says his roster has grown from 35 in March 2020 to 63 in November 2021.
Sagittarius says she prefers to fight male opponents, both to show off her strength and demonstrate that women belong in the lucha libre ring.
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When Sagittarius, 19, began her lucha libre career three years ago, there were only five women fighting in her home state of Veracruz, in eastern Mexico.
“It’s because nowadays there are very good pioneer luchadoras,” she says.
The culture shift is clear to Concepción Ramírez, 74, who has sold lucha libre merchandise outside of Arena México, a professional wrestling venue in Mexico City, for the past 54 years.
In the past 18 months, she has gotten more requests - from both genders - for masks, capes, mugs, cloth dolls, photos and posters featuring luchadoras.
Before their shows, most luchadoras sell their own merchandise to help build their brands and fund their training.
Financial success would be nice, many say, but it’s rarely their primary goal.
“It has cost us a lot to get to where we are, to build up female lucha libre,” Amapola says.
Evelyn Stevens: A Wrestler's Rise and Fall
Evelyn Stevens in a Midwest wrestling match
Evelyn Stevens shocked the wrestling world by pinning Fabulous Moolah in 1978, only to vanish from view soon after. Stanley Weston, founder of the Pro Wrestling Illustrated magazine and its sister publications, believed that “broads and blood” is what sold the magazines. Evelyn Stevens shares the cover with "The Destroyer" Dick Beyer in the August 1968 issue of Wrestling Revue.
Evelyn Stevens won the title on October 8th, 1978, but had it for only two days. Moolah never acknowledged Evelyn Stevens’ title win when speaking about her decades-spanning championship reign.
Later Vince McMahon Sr. stepped in and obliged Sue Green to return the title. Some sources claim Green held it for a couple of days, but Green, in an interview on Dan and Benny in the Ring, assures that it was for five months. It is unclear whether the current NWA recognizes these women as world titleholders, and currently, there is no information on their official page.
Once the two divorced, Stevens kept the Jardine surname and married Frank Riegle, a bodybuilder fitness center owner.
About a year later, a couple’s disagreement would turn tragic. Evelyn’s divorce attorney, Diane O’Heir of Bandera, said that her client, who was under psychiatric care, had filed a police report stating that Frank Riegle threw her across the room.
The book Sisterhood of the Squared Circle, written by Pat Laprade and Dan Murphy, adds that Evelyn shot Frank Riegle three times at point-blank range during the argument.
Evelyn Jardine Riegle only served five years of a 20-year prison sentence after being paroled to Western Colorado.
While imprisoned, a nationwide clemency movement specifically for battered women gained traction. Its goal was to free inmates who, like Stevens, had documented evidence of prolonged domestic abuse and acted in self-defense.
Evelyn’s story embodies the highs and lows of an era when women in wrestling fought for respect both inside and outside the ring. From her audacious victory over Fabulous Moolah to the personal challenges that followed, her journey reflects resilience amid controversy.
Decline of the Term "Catfight"
In a 2019 article in The New York Times titled "Me-OW! It's the End of the Catfight", pointed how the term has been slowly falling out of favor in light of the #MeToo movement, "calling any conflict between women a catfight is understood to be sexist, and enthusiasm has generally dampened for women fighting".
| Year | Event | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1824 | First Recorded Use | The term "catfight" appears in a mock heroic poem by Ebenezer Mack. |
| 1933 | First Professional Fight | Lucha libre, part-sport, part-spectacle, held its first professional fight in Mexico. |
| 1940 | Feminist Historians | Feminist historians trace the term's use to label female opponents back to 1940, when American newspapers characterized a dispute between Clare Boothe Luce and journalist Dorothy Thompson as a catfight. |
| 1950s | Popular Culture | Catfights first began appearing in American popular culture in the 1950s when postwar pioneers of pornography such as Irving Klaw produced film clips of women engaged in catfighting and wrestling. |
| 1978 | Evelyn Stevens Wins Title | Evelyn Stevens defeats Fabulous Moolah but holds the title for only two days. |
| 2021 | Lucha Libre Milestone | For the first time, a women’s match headlines the anniversary event for Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre. |
| 2020-2021 | Pandemic | Coronavirus closures of arenas and gyms between March 2020 and May 2021 forced lucha libre federations and promoters to try more innovative approaches. |
| 2019 | #MeToo Movement | The term "catfight" begins to fall out of favor due to its perceived sexism. |