This article began under an entirely different title, the hyper-rad alliterative gem “A Brace of Buxom, Brawlin’ Broads Battle Bitches, Bros, and a Big Bag of Baby-Back Bullshit in the Gilded Age,” featuring different people and with an entirely different tone. I pushed the non-Adah Menken related article and the title to a future post and delved into Adah Menken, because it is one of the most insane stories of which I have ever written, and one that is largely untold because no one seems to have looked at this woman’s life from the perspective of an athlete. At first glance she was simply a sexy vaudevillian who managed to become the highest paid actor in America in spite of being a mixed-race woman, owing in large part to her instruction in the fighting arts by a man I previously identified as the most interesting man in the world, Col. Thomas Hoyer Monstery. I then realized that the only person to whom Menken was ever compared (she was basically considered to be peerless in everything other than writing) was also a student of Col. Thomas Hoyer Monstery and predates Menken by a few years- a courtesan and actress named Lola Montez.

As I dug for more information, I found that people have written about several intensely different Adah Menkens in particular, and that their descriptions of Lola Montez are almost equally nuanced in bizarre ways. Where most sources describe Lola Montez simply as a high-dollar whore who single-handedly brought down the Bavarian crown and paved the way for German and Italian unification in Europe, others paint her as the action star of Western theater who blazed the trail for Adah Menkin, and others simply as one of the colorful Europeans of the 19th century, but none do all three. Her story will follow Adah’s, as the first in anything is rarely the most influential, but the parallels in their lives and lifestyles are so closely intertwined that the women seem nearly related, and almost certainly crossed paths.

As you would imagine, Adah Menken’s life is told in a similarly fractured way, wherein in some they paint Adah as the first Jewish pop culture superstar, as a sort of 19th century Madonna who also worked as a Jewish activist; others paint her simply as a woman who paid her bills with acting, but who truly wished only to be a poet and was a major part of the Antebellum Bohemian culture of New York City (which I didn’t even know existed, but they were badass hippie artist culture a century before that shit existed); martial arts history buffs know her as an early proponent of fencing for women and one of the most skilled swordswomen on the era; others call her a slut and “the most dangerous woman in the world,” while others portray her simply as a forgotten actress of the 1800s.

What emerged at the end was the picture of a an uber-“Renaissance Man” of a woman who died at 33 the richest woman in America and the highest paid actor of the era was also a gambler, brawler, drinker, expert swordswoman, gymnast, a peerless horse rider, comedian, and artistic, intellectual sex goddess who defied every single social norm and lived exactly as a woman of the 21st century in spite of the fact that as a “black” woman her life was as near to worthless in the eyes of Americans as a life could be.

Between her refusal to acknowledge the opinions of idiots as valid, her love of fucking, fighting, gambling, intellectual pursuits, and drinking, in addition to the fact that her completely self-made rise from abject poverty to insane riches seems to be the ultimate “self-made man” tale, Adah Isaacs Menken is indisputably the Ultimate American and the embodiment of the American ideal.

Beyond that insane list of rad personality traits, however, lies her influence on pop culture and women’s rights, both of which are essential to the story of America, because without Adah Menken and her courtesan predecessor Lola Montez, we would likely not have seen women gain the vote in the US and Germany until far later, might have had to wait until the 21st century to see women fight professionally (which would have only added another ten years to the preposterous date boxing was sanctioned in most Western countries). Furthermore, they seem to have created the role of action star, as both of them relied extremely heavily on their appearance, physicality, and fight skills to carry their careers long before anyone else did, and in doing so presaged the careers not just of people like Ronda Rousey, but also people like Sylvester Stallone, JCVD, and Scott Adkins.

If you’re curious about why these stories aren’t told more widely, I’ll go out on a limb and say that misogyny is really not the root- it’s a confluence of events that have left these stories partly or completely untold. From my perspective, it’s difficult to find information on women participating in any kind of sporting event is difficult primarily because sports news was a shockingly recent development (the first official sports writer wrote for the National Police Gazette, which was a borderline tabloid along the line of the NY Post or the Daily Mail in the US and UK, respectively) that really only got going in the last 120 years.  Between a couple of New York publications and the Police Gazette we have a little bit of information on athletes of the pre-1900s, but it grew as time passed- between 1880 and 1920 the percentage of the average newspaper devoted to sports went from .4% to 20%. 

Wondering why that is? Life expectancy in the US in 1900 was 47, non-farm workers worked an average of 60 hours a week, and 56% of the population would be considered below the poverty line by modern standards (Matthews). Those combined factors meant that most people had little time, money, or interest in sports participation or spectating in most of the population.  Shit was far worse 50 years prior to that, as life expectancy was only 38– you didn’t even have time to figure out what you were good at before you were on your fucking deathbed at that point, nevermind time to learn how to play a sport that you were likely too hungry and tired to participate in anyway.

And then there was the social strictures on behavior ranging from class to gender to race, all of which were as stupid as they are frustrating to recount, given the fact that I likely had family members who shared these views in the past.  It wasn’t just that women were ignored, disallowed from voting or unable to legally drive- it was that in addition to their legal strictures, men generally encouraged women to be as frail, useless, and sickly as possible, and they arranged women’s lives to facilitate that.

“Many women were described as frail, unable to get out of bed, depressed, and in the new signifier of the era, suffering from some form of hysteria. Male physicians encouraged their female patients to withdraw from any and all creative pursuits, limiting their daily activities to the rearing of their families and their caring for themselves.” Even the best doctors were pathologically incapable of delivering useful advice to their female patients, prescribing women to “live as domestic a life as possible… Have but two hours intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live” (Jennings 17).

Compounding that was the fact that women had somehow found themselves trapped in corsets that were literally killing them.  Broads had to wear layer upon layer of clothing, all over steel and whalebone corsets that caused health problems ranging from horrific lung disease to indigestion, and broads fainted constantly for lack of air.  Then, they had a fake ass strapped to their backside called a bustle, which was a ludicrous abomination filled with horsehair I’ve only just realized was the 19th century version of the ass implant every lazy halfwit on the planet seems to be getting these days.  In short, even if they had somehow managed to find themselves socially and legally allowed to participate in sports, they were physically incapable due to their clothing and the health problems arising therefrom.

As you can see, when women were occasionally allowed to take a day off from beaten and ignored, they did have their active frivolities, but they were anything but strenuous.

“Running, walking, dancing, cricket, ice skating, shooting, and even yard games, for instance, blind man’s bluff, were popular pastimes for women in free time. But while feminine activities could include those popular pursuits, girls and young women were principally expected to prepare themselves for the prospective role of motherhood” (Jennings 13).

It is for this reason that women fighters of the era are so interesting- they were bloodied and battered renegades and misfits who embodied an archetype most women likely didn’t even know was possible.  Fighting women were the freest women on the planet, drinking and gambling and smoking where their socialite contemporaries stayed locked in the house fucked up on morphine, and lifting weights and training alongside men with a big bag of I’ll-fuck-your-dumb-ass-up for any dude who had shit to say.  Moreover, they were freer than a lot of the poor male weaklings who couldn’t fight to improve their station in life, which likely aroused as much femdom-inspired horniness as it did brutal beatings to their wives when they returned to their filthy, stinking, firetrap tenements- as I’ve mentioned many times, life was abject misery basically everywhere and for everyone on the planet until the middle of the 20th century.

About the only thing that made life worth living, especially in the American Southwest of the time, was the vaudeville-style entertainment that fighters provided alongside actors and musicians, and it was the travelling show that seems to have created the environment the West needed in order to normalize active women doing active shit. Without the examples of Lola Montez and Adah Menken in popular culture, it would likely have taken a hell of a lot longer for women to realize they were capable of badassery and men to allow them to pursue it, and for that reason these women are indispensable to our cultural history.

The “Frenzy of Frisco,” Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868)

It was into this world that our three heroines were thrust, and mixed-race actress Adah Menken was born (1835-1868) led the way for every badass broad who followed in her wake by popularizing muscular, quick-fisted chicks who could drink and fight with the boys before throwing on some makeup and strutting her stuff as the hottest thing on two legs when she went onstage.  And this veritable goddess, this unholy combination of Kim Kardashian, Amanda Gorman, and Zoë Bell, might has only lived 33 years, but she spat in the ugly-ass face of Reconstruction-era America by becoming the highest-paid actor (male or female) in America at the time. Thought by most simply to be a wooden actor with a phenomenal ass, Jackie Chan-esque death-defying stunt skills, and the ability to whip just about anyone’s ass, Menken was also an outspoken convert to Judaism who cheated on every single man she ever met, never actually performed nude (in spite of every rumor to the contrary), wrote an extremely well-received book of poetry as part of a New York literary circle that included Walt Whitman, performed ballet in Paris (which is like a Congolese Muslim woman successfully performing country music at the Republican Convention), apparently had the literal voice of an angel, and married and divorced every manner of man from a Jewish actor to the first ever heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

“Earlier in the nineteenth century the hands, feet and face were regularly washed as in previous centuries, and the rest of your body every few weeks or longer. However the tides quickly changed.”

Every inch of the world in 1835 was unspeakably shitty by our standards, but the United States of 1835 was shitty by the standards of much of the rest of the world as well.  Although it is easy to forget it now, 19th century America was a tiny, shitty, undeveloped backwater filled with the horrifyingly unwashed dregs (people in the West idiotically stopped bathing nearly altogether in the 18th Century when they switched from wool to linen clothing) of every European nation and a multitude of captured slaves from at least three continents.  As such, it was not a hotspot destination for foreigners, nor was it anything anyone was puffing their chest out about… all 34” of chest for the average American man of the time (which I’d surmise is a fairly inconsiderable fraction of your current waistline, the ridiculous vanity sizing of your jeans notwithstanding).

And in what was already a shitty country, Adah’s parents managed to land their family in the South, which remains a terrible place to be anything but rich and white. Adah Menken was born to a freed slave father and a mixed-race Creole mother in the American South, though the exact site of her birth is disputed.  At some point her family moved to the modern Texas backwater Nacadoches, a town small and unremarkable enough that I was surprised to discover it was pivotal in Texan history.  When Adah’s family moved to the town, it was a part of the brand-new Republic of Texas, whose independence was begun with an uprising in Nacadoches.  By the time Adah was 11, Texas had become a state and their home of East Texas had become a real hotbed of Southern fun, with white men lynching freed slaves, people with brown skin, and anyone other than a white man with utter impunity, immune to legal repercussions because Southern people gonna Southern. It was there however that she learned to ride and shoot, and by the time she hit her teens Adah had become her family’s sole breadwinner by performing with the circus.

Despite the obvious cards stacked against her, as she grew older people could not deny that she was hot as shit, and she parleyed that attention into a burgeoning career as an actress.  Seeing theater as a way out of the grinding poverty anyone with even a serious tan got to enjoy in the racist-as-fuck post-Civil War period of American history, Adah threw herself into it wholeheartedly, but found that the racist shitbags of East Texas and Louisiana wouldn’t pay to see someone of her racial heritage, so she set about finding a husband who could help her reinvent herself.

“Twenty year old Adah began her quest for stardom in Liberty, Texas.  She made a living giving public readings of Shakespeare’s works, writing newspaper articles and poems, and teaching dance classes.  She began to search for a rich husband to support her acting career by placing an advertisement in the Liberty Gazette newspaper on November 23, 1855:  “I’m young and free, the pride of girls with hazel eyes and nut brown curls. They say I’m not void of beauty–I love my friends and respect my duty.  I’ve had full many a BEAU IDEAL, yet never found one real.  There must be one I know somewhere, in all this circumambient air; And I should dearly love to see him! Now what if you should chance to be him? Alexander Isaacs Menken, a well-to-do pit musician and conductor, was touring the Texas Panhandle when he came upon Adah’s delightful poem.  He wrote to her, and the two met, instantly firing one another with passion and ambition.  They were married the following April in Galveston, Texas” (Enss). 

Isaac Menken had no idea his new wife was the product of an illegal mixed race marriage, that his betrothed was a vicious gambler, or really much of anything about her, and he quickly became a bitter anchor tied around Adah’s neck. While he spent money and groused at the attention she was getting, Adah revelled in the attention from her fans, and the two quickly found the only thing about which they agreed was Judaism. Failing miserably in his efforts to turn a ho into a housewife, Isaac Menken directed the pair to Cincinnati, which was at that point the mecca for what would be the closest thing to a Jewish tent revival in US history. There, she and he acted and worked as unpaid activists against anti-Semitism, which was enjoying a resurgence of popularity in Europe and the US alongside more conventional racism like the hatred of anyone with a deep tan. If it matters to you, the matter of her birth religion is up for some debate- Jewish sources usually claim she was born Jewish while gentile authors claim she converted when she married Menken. To my mind, it makes more sense that she converted, as getting labelled a “Jewess” would certainly cut down on accusations of blackness, and would help explain what I can only assume was a somewhat cappuccino complexion.

At this point, however, Menken was hardly a hot commodity in spite of her appearance. As she was known to be an utter hardcase at the time, wearing her hair in men’s cuts, rocking pants, and smoking in public almost a hundred years before white men claimed it was copacetic, and she married heavyweight boxer John Heenan who fought in the world’s first true international heavyweight championship boxing match against British fight legend Tom Sayers. The two were part of the “sporting” scene, as it was called at the time, and surrounded themselves with the hardest of hard people- gamblers, gangsters, fighters, and hookers. In 1860, Heenan fucked off to Britain to fight British champion Tom Sayers for the international heavyweight boxing title, then remained in Britain to tour with Sayers. Upon returning to the states, Heenan and his British mistress were treated like returning heroes, while Heenan claimed he had never married Adah and her ex husband began publicly claiming they had never divorced, and that Adah Menken was a bigamist. With that hardstyle cancel culture from the salty MGTOWs of the 19th century, theaters stopped booking her and Adah found herself destitute, living in a hovel in New Jersey.

Adah’s life at this point was split between three apparently unrelated social circles, though all three did tend to intermingle in the burgeoning vaudeville scene- the Antebellum Bohemians of New York City, Colonel Monstery at Monstery’s gym, and the “sporting” crowd she’d met through Heenan. Though completely destitute (Heenan had been paying her bills, but ceased doing so upon his return with his British trollop), this self-taught poet became part of an in-crowd that included “America’s Poet,” the Gandolf-looking Walt Whitman, needlessly verbose one-time GOAT fiction author contender Charles Dickens, and occasional visits by eco-activist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, and her friendship with proto-feminist author Ada Clare helped direct the course of her career. This is important because without knowing it, Adah embodied exactly the same spirit expressed by master artist Leonardo, her instructor Col Thomas Hoyer Monstery, and the rocket scientists and neurologists of the original Culver City Westside Barbell Club, and because Adah and Ada’s friendship helped steer the course of Adah Menken’s life as the two became travelling partners and coworkers on the theater circuit until Adah’s untimely death.

“Menken’s deepest desire was to be known as a serious poet. She built friendships among an international literary elite that included Charles Dickens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alexandre Dumas the Younger, Algernon Swinburne and George Sand, who served as godmother to Menken’s second child. Menken was accused of having affairs with Dumas and Swinburne, neither of which can be confirmed, but the constant hint of scandal wherever she performed did little to discourage box office receipts” (Feldberg).

Despondant but hopeful that she could truly become a star, Adah decided to embrace her physical abilities fully so that she could play to her own strengths, which lay in stunts and comedy. In a move that would preface Keanu Reeves’ training for John Wick by over 100 years, Adah put herself under the tutelage of the most accomplished swordsman and fighter of the era, swashbuckling mercenary and champion dueliest Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery, to prepare herself to play the lead in an action-packed performance of Marzeppa. That role had heretofore been played by a combination of male actors and dummies strapped to a horse (the play ends with Marzeppa strapped naked to a horse and sent up several flights of winding stairs, and no man had yet attempted the feat himself before an audience), but Adah clearly had use for neither of those things.  

Up next, we will cover the training Adah Menken and Lola Montez received under Colonel Monstery (and later strongman William Miller) that enabled them to become masters with a blade and their fists, and the muscle to impose their will on anyone, along with the rest of the Adah Menken story and the entirety of Lola Montez’s sex-drenched whirlwind tour of the world.

Click here for Female Fustigators Part 1: Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes

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Sources:

Adah Isaacs Menken.  Jewish Virtual Library.  Web.  30 Mar 2021.  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adah-isaacs-menken

de Leon, Arnoldo and Robert A. Calvert.  Civil Rights.  Reprinted from 1976 original. Texas State Historical Association.  20 Oct 2020.  30 Mar 2021.  https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/civil-rights

Enss, Chris.  Wild women of the West: Adah Menken. Cowgirl Magazine.  14 Jun 2020.  Web.  31 Mar 2021.  https://cowgirlmagazine.com/adah-menken/

Isaac, Susan.  The dangers of tight-lacing: the effects of the corset.  Royal College of Surgeons of England.  17 Feb 2017.  Web.  22 Mar 2021.  https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/library/blog/effects-of-the-corset/

Mannen, Amanda.  The essay about farting– that argued for women’s rights.  Cracked.  13 Mar 2021.  Web.  31 Mar 2021.  https://www.cracked.com/article_29667_5-social-side-effects-disinformation.html

Matthews, Don.  The free market: lifting all boats.  Foundation for Economic Education. 1 Apr 1997.  Web. 22 Mar 2021. https://fee.org/articles/the-free-market-lifting-all-boats/

Menken, Adah Isaacs. Encyclopedia.com. Web. 31 Mar 2021.  https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/menken-adah-isaacs

Menken, Adah Isaacs. Lehigh University. Web. 30 Mar 2021. https://pfaffs.web.lehigh.edu/node/54132

Miller, Ben,  Colonel Thomas Monstery, and the Training of Jaguarina, America’s Champion Swordswoman.  Martial Arts New York.  31 Mar 2015.  Web.  4 Aug 2020.  https://martialartsnewyork.org/2015/03/31/colonel-thomas-monstery-and-the-training-of-jaguarina-americas-champion-swordswoman/

Porath, Jason.  La Jaguarina.  Rejected Princesses.  Web.  23 Mar 2020.  https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/prin8cesses/la-jaguarina

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