Plague of Strength

In the modern era, it seems like making a statement about how lifting doesn’t make women musclebound seems wholly redundant- it is like saying one shouldn’t go to Guinea-Bissau for elective medical care, or that keeping the butterflies and bees from dying off just might be good for the planet and humanity. Nevertheless, I find myself having to remind my female clients that there is no chance they’ll one day awaken to find themselves so musclebound they have to shop in the Men’s department, and that they don’t need to start shopping for briefs to accommodate the massive clit they’ll apparently grow from squatting heavy. I also find myself reminding people that vaccines exist to prevent the spread of disease and refusing to partake just fucks over the rest of the nation (and the developing world, who is denied the vaccine doses these useless limp dicks let spoil rather than taking them like dignified adults), so reminding people of basic and obvious facts seems to be entirely within my wheelhouse of late, in spite of the massive irritation it causes me.

Let us first dissect the belief that lifters like Dana Linn Bailey are musclebound ogres- any person under 140 pounds cannot be an ogre, no matter how hard they might try, because ogres necessarily weigh more than tiny little physique stars. Hell, the largest female bodybuilders of all time are still dwarfed by even average male bodybuilders of the same height, as evinced by the fact that Dana Linn Bailey is a half inch taller than me, yet 60 pounds lighter in spite of the fact that I barely even look like a lifter next to Roelly Winklaar and other professional bodybuilders. It is important to remember the context of a photo when looking at one- whether it’s chick Crossfitters or bodybuilders or strongwomen, those women are almost never as big in real life as they appear on camera (much like most women only resemble their insta pics except that both seems to have a face in them.

Likewise, Stefi Cohen is a pint-sized badass who’s always been accused of using steroids like crackheads use crack, in spite of the fact that if she manages to out-angle your man or your male friends, those motherfuckers need to move out of Lilliput and eat something. Stefi herself is even tinier than DLB, tipping the scales at a whopping 130 [[pounds at her heaviest and never getting over 5’2″, even standing on her tippy toes. Jacked and lean, but manly? Only if you’re shopping for men at middle school dances and the Juniors section of Target. Nevertheless, you’ll forever see both dudes and chicks calling the two of them manly.

Though I would like to state that this phenomenon is new, it’s nothing of the sort- it is an outgrowth of Victorian men getting really salty that they were going to have to share the vote and other assorted “white male only” privileges with women in the 19th century, and modern critics are just retreading the same tired old arguments to publicly disparage women in an effort to make themselves feel less shitty about their limp wrists, inoperative dicks, and insufficiently robust intellects. As I covered in the beginning of the Adah Menken article, women were not only disallowed from participation in most sports until the modern era, but women’s clothing specifically prohibited from any kind of real exertion (in addition to causing massive health problems not simply limited to the total inability to take anything but shallow breaths). As such, their performance relative to men in tests of physical strength and fitness have lagged, as they haven’t had generations of specific instruction and encouragement at participation, in addition to the fact that the stereotypes that linger from the image of women Victorian men artificially cultivated still persist to this day, as legions of micropenised fat shits around the internet still claim that “WimiNZ Iznt SupPoseD tuh LifT bEcAUse ThERe WEEK” and notable halfwit neocon authors Jocko Willink and Joe Rogan said so.

If you haven’t yet caught on, the TLDR of this article is:

ANY MAN OR WOMAN WHO CALLS A WOMAN MANLY FOR HAVING A BUILD THAT DISPLAYS VISIBLE MUSCULARITY SHOULD BE HORSEWHIPPED IN PUBLIC AND THEN SHIPPED TO XINJIANG. WE DON’T NEED THAT WEAKSAUCE BULLSHIT IN THE WESTERN WORLD, AND AS SPOKESPERSON FOR THE USEFUL PEOPLE, WE’D RATHER LET THE CHINESE TORTURE THEM THAN TOUCH THEM OURSELVES.

You never know, after all, if mental and physical weakness can be transferred by touch.

Although there are countless examples from history of women warriors, female generals, and chick badasses in general, not much was made of them prior to the modern era because it was dudes writing history about dudes up until the last quarter of the 20th century, so it has taken some time for modern historians to fill in the blanks on the lengthy history of femme hardcases, and the internet has been integral in allowing historians from disparate sections of the world to combine their local histories in to a more cohesive global picture of history… which means that it is a fucking rad time to be alive if learning the “secrets” of the past blows your skirt up.

The majority of the badass female athletes and fighter of the ancient world seem to have hailed from areas around the Near East- the Mediterranean, Southern Russia, and Central Asia. The earliest accounts I could find of women who were renown for both being hot as shit and brutal fucking athletes were the Spartans (6th to 2nd century BCE). Spartan women enjoyed far more freedom than did other Grecian women, and were pretty much like a cross between hardened military wives and WWE female wrestlers- they dressed like total sluts (by the standards of the other Greeks), trained in the nude, and screamed statements like

“Come back with your shield, or on it!”

and

“Where have you come now in your cowardly flight, vile varlets? Do you intend to slink in here whence you came forth? [pulling up her skirt and pointing at her vag].”

Sparta’s women weren’t just known for being bad bitches, however- they were also considered to b ethe hottest broads in the entire ancient world, in spite of the fact that they were forbidden from wearing any kind of makeup or wear jewelry of any kind. Additionally, they were well-educated, witty, and acerbic, and spurned the vapid, shiftless layabouts their female Athenian peers represented. For slave-owning proto-communists, Spartan women were remarkably modern in their dress and behavior. Basically, Sparta to the Greeks would be like having a single city in Alabama comprised of angry, jacked dudes and the hottest, sluttiest, and most brazen chicks in history jamming their superiority in the faces of their simple, prudish, fatassed neighbors, all while planning to stab a motherfucker if he didn’t bring the goods when he popped his pants off later that evening.

Everyone should know the story of the Amazons, a semi-mythical race of hard-as nails broads who were a part of the Sarmatian culture that ruled most of southern Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria from about the 5th century BCE to the 4th CE/AD. Though now classified as Persian, these people were early offshoots of the first Indo-Europeans who conquered Central Asia in successive waves from the time they domesticated the horse until the fall of the last of the Mongol khanates, which makes them about as “Persian” as just about any white or white-ish person, and makes them part of the genetic lineage of probably half the planet (culture, religion, and ethnicity stop being one and the same as soon as people have the ability to travel, by the way). They replaced the Scythians in southern Russia, and in doing so liberated Scythian women from the kitchen and offered them the opportunity to take the battlefield.

Unlike their Scythian forebears, who treated their women more like the adherents of Orthodox Islam or Judaism do, Sarmatian women were expected to fight and hunt alongside their male peers Amazonian women were so fucking hard that their customs declared that “No girl shall wed till she has killed a man in battle,” they are credited with inventing the double-headed battle axe (the labrys, an axe common in Minoan, Thracian, and Greek culture that ranged in size from 1-6lbs) and with inspiring an entire genre of art (amazonomachy), which features buff, big-tittied, angry broads battling the “virtuous” and “noble” Greek males.

The Romans also had their fair share of women athletes, including female gladiators, who were considered something of a violent sexual sideshow. Domitian regularly held brawls between chicks and little people, for instance, and an inscription at Ostia proclaims that women fought in gladiatorial matches there beginning around 300BC and kept doing so for at least a couple of hundred years. Their motivations certainly varied, but whether they chose to fight out of a desire to impose their will on others, their need to shuck social standards, or just to slake their thirst for blood, women flocked to the arena. So many Roman women attempted to fight in the arena, in fact, that laws had to be enacted to limit their participation in these death matches, but that didn’t prevent women from training their asses off, getting jacked, and shedding some fucking blood for the entertainment of the greasy, unwashed, Roman hordes.

“See her neck bent down under the weight of her helmet.

Look at the rolls of bandage and tape, so her legs look like tree-trunks,

Then have a laugh for yourself, after the practice is over,

Armour and weapons put down, and she squats as she used the vessel.

Ah, degenerate girls from the line of our praetors and consuls,

Tell us, whom have you seen got up in any such fashion,

Panting and sweating like this? No gladiator’s wench,

No tough strip-tease broad would ever so much as attempt it” (Juvenal).

Shoot forward a bit to Central and East Asia and you’ve got evidence of the warrior women who inspired the legend of Mulan- a tribal confederation known as the Xianbei, which stretched all the way from western Kazakhstan to the Pacific ocean, through Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and northwest China. Like most of the nomadic tribal confederations, their makeup was a combination of the rather newly minted Indo-European people (who spoke languages related to modern Turkish and Persian, for the most part) and the various people of Siberia and East Asia. The Xianbei and later Mongols held their women in high regard, and although two warrior female skeletons from the 1st to the 5th CE/AD are our oldest extant examples of warrior women from that region, there are plenty of examples of historic “Mongol” female warriors throughout history, in spite of the Chinese efforts to denigrate and downplay their accomplishments.

“The Mongolian culture didn’t have a written language before Genghis Khan (1162 to 1227), but other cultures, including the Chinese, Koreans and Persians, wrote about the Mongolians, Lee said. By the A.D. 900s, women in Mongolia were enjoying freedoms not found in contemporary cultures; the Mongolians had queens who led armies and received emissaries from the Pope, Lee said. In addition, women were able to inherit property and decide whom they wanted to marry, she said. 

‘If they’re already that independent by 900 A.D., my thinking was that you [can] extrapolate backward, at least a couple hundred years, because it has to come from somewhere,’ Lee told Live Science. 

She noted that the Chinese were writing propaganda about the Mongolian women, “because they were saying that it [women having power] was a bad thing, and that’s horrible and that these women have too much freedom and they’re slutty and they’re horrible wives.” 

In essence, the Chinese were disparaging anybody who lived north of the wall, Lee said” (Geggel).

Building on that tradition and likely cementing Chinese hatred of strong women was a GOAT wrestler of a 13th C Tatar princess named Khutulun. According to David Willoughby, this broad wouldn’t marry anyone she could beat in wrestling, and successfully defeated over 100 suitors over the course of her life. Each man was required to put up 100 horses for the opportunity to wrestle her (which she eventually raised to a thousand), and she allegedly amassed over 10,000 horses by throat stomping every sorry motherfucker who challenged her into the ground. Contemporary sources describe Khutulun as a giant, but given that the average height of a modern Kazakh woman is 5’3”, I highly doubt she was over 6’. Even so, she was reputed to have been stronger than any man in Turkestan (a region in Kazakhstan), and she was a direct decendant of the great Khan himself, Genghis, so it’s likely her ladydick was longer than most of her suitor’s cocks as well, as Genghis was the most virile motherfucker in history not named Wilt Chamberlain, in a time when birth control wasn’t even a remote possibility beyond induced miscarriages.

And if you think societies based on women warriors stopped at that shade on the color wheel or in that era, think again, because the Dahomey kingdom (which occupied about a third of the land of modern Benin) was unique not only in its absolute monarchic system of government, but also for their Amazons. The king of Dahomey had a retinue of badass female guards Europeans called Amazons but the rest of the world called the Mino. Their role was pretty simple- they were shock troops for the king in addition to his bodyguard, and they helped that tiny kingdom become one of the most powerful African nations, as Benin’s chief export was slaves, which they acquired through war with their neighbors. In spite of the shittiness of the enterprise, the Mino were fucking hard- they trained barefoot on acacia needles so they would be inured to pain, had seriously strict physical fitness routines, and threw in a healthy amount of Vodun (voodoo) to ensure they shored up all of their weak spots. For over 200 years these chicks were the terror of central Africa, until most of them died in successive wars against the far better armed French- they liked to fire their rifles from the hip and close the distance on foot to fight it out with clubs and knives, which ended up a disaster against fixed bayonets. In spite of their gender and their race, the French Foreign Legion raved about what badasses these chicks were, and how hard they fought in spite of being vastly outnumbered and outgunned.

Skip forward to the modern era. The first missive penned by a woman that encouraged women to lift weights and exercise appears to have come from an early social reformer named Charlottle Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), a bisexual woman by modern standards (it was only in the Victorian when people started caring about who was fucking whom, for the most part) who believed that the “nuclear family” ideal placed undue restrictions on women, who were basically forced to trade sexual favors for food and shelter. Without a husband, women had little legal standing for doing anything in America, and they lacked even the vote to facilitate the freedom that white men of the period enjoyed. Gilman ended up marrying multiple men to avoid starving to death and keeping mistresses behind their backs, all while battling doctors who told her that the only cure for post-partum depression was being a good little housewife who never spoke out of turn and NEVER wrote, read, or did any kind of art, and that obviously pissed her off.

When Gilman wasn’t pre-empting PETA by suggesting pets would be better off dead and echoing modern Republican views on race and immigration, Gilman railed against corsets, bustles, and female inactivity, encouraging women to throw off those literal shackles so they could enjoy the same freedoms that men did. Unfortunately, the only women capable of doing so were entertainers and the poor, as they comingled at taverns, coffeehouses, gambling dens, and the vaudeville circuit. That curse ended up a blessing, however, as the entertainers were the ones who truly spread the gospel of lifting to women around the country who didn’t live near a significant German population (as they had already brought a love of egalitarianism, democracy, and lifting to the US in 1848). Between the influx of feminism from the bohemians of New York, Philadelphia, and California (of which Gilman was a part), the rise of the women’s suffrage movement in the US, and the rise of muscular female entertainers, fighters, and lifters (including the highest-paid actor of the 19th century, mixed-race proto-Jackie Chan badass Adah Menken), chicks started doing all of the things modern limp-dicked men say they physically cannot at least a century before most people thought they did in the West.

Though the following list of badasses is not intended to be comprehensive, it is intended to show that women who were even muscular by today’s standards were huge draws 100 years ago, and that the phenomenon of women lifting is nothing new, unnatural, or uncool- it is in fact the polar opposite.

Gussie Freeman (1869-1892)

“Her legacy remains one of a joyfully unique woman who lived as she wished to live without adhering to the social standards of the day.”

A broad-shouldered, whiskey-chugging, cigar-smoking Long Island socialite named Gussie Freeman first entered the boxing ring to lump someone up .  Known as the Slasher of the Ropewalks, Freeman was huge for the time, standing almost 6 feet tall and weighing in at a lean and mean 175 pounds, and her size allowed her to take on both male and female challengers with ease.  To give you some perspective, that was considered massively tall and heavy even for a man of the era, as the average US senator around that time was 5’9.5″ without shoes on and were five pounds lighter than Stewart even if they were considered “heavy” for their height.  

Freeman, though high-born, descended into the lowest rungs of the American social order to ply her trade, but she fit right in due to her contempt for social mores.  Never one to let society dictate “proper” behavior for a lady, Freeman was one of the highest draws of the era, fighting both men and women in 4 ounce gloves that resembled modern MMA gloves.  And as with every male boxer of the era, Freeman had a hell of a time controlling her weight, and by the end of her career was tipping the scales at a thoroughly robust 250 pounds, which she used to publicly beat the brakes off of men in the street if they offended her or shortchanged her in a mercantile exchange.

In 1882, Freeman fought the acknowledged female champ of the time, Hattie Leslie, though the fight was declared a draw after it was broken up by the police.  Boxing, called prize-fighting at the time because it was contested for a small prize (in this case a $25 purse), was still highly illegal at this time, and social outrage at chick fights made the outrage at male fights look like a Republican “denouncing” date rape.  As such, no fighter of the day got their due, but Freeman less than others.

After Leslie died of typhoid fever at the tragically young age of 25, Freeman fought the next-most regarded champion, Hattie Stewart, though she lost in spectacular fashion after apparently going berserk in the ring when her hair kept falling into her face.

Thereafter, she opened a bar and began boxing immensely popular exhibitions against a portly male boxer named appropriately named Fatty Langtry.  Langtry was long a vaudevillian, having married one of the hottest broads on the circuit two decades earlier, and the pudgy pair of pugilists made a great draw.  Never one to assent to following social mores, Freeman lived out the remainder of her life as the whiskey-chugging, foul-mouthed, barroom brawler (but definitely not a whore, which was the common belief at the time and often correct) with whom no one in their right mind wanted to fuck, and whom many non-high society women considered a beacon of sensibility in an otherwise nonsensical world of corsetry, anemia, breathlessness, and general misery.

Vulcana (1875 or 1883-1946)

Vulcana was an English pro strongwoman could do a 2 Hands Anyhow of 201lbs (bent press of 145lbs, then clean and pressed 56 lbs kettlebell with the other hand) at a height of 5’4″ and bodyweight of 125lbs. This pint-sized badass saved kids from drowning, caught thieves with her bare hands and delivered them to the police, and pulled horse-drawn carts out of ditches like she was Superwoman. Unfortunately, Superwoman’s kryptonite was automobiles, and she spent the last decade or so of her life crippled and brain damaged from being hit by a car as she was entering old age.

Charmion (1875-1945)

“Any woman- almost any, at least- could be as I am if she would stop eating pudding and pie, exercise on the trapeze and dine twice a day.”

Charmion, like Adah Menken before her, relied heavily on her sex appeal to put her over with the men in her audiences, many of whom were pretty butthurt about chicks with arms bigger than them flexing onstage. Primarily a trapeze artist (which is where she got her sick arms), Charmion was famous for performing a striptease while sitting on a trapeze, and had her performance filmed by Thomas Edison in 1901, making her (alongside fellow vaudevillian and bodybuilder Al Treolar) one of the very first people to be jacked as fuck on video.

Standing 5’1″ and 125lbs with a 36-22-36 figure and 14″ calves (they didn’t measure her arms, but they had to have pushed 16″) Charmion was “‘admired by all men and women for her beautiful form and generally considered the most perfect type of physical culture in women,” but caught a lot of shit from the limp-dicks for her musculature.  ‘[H]er arms,… when she performs any feat of unusual strength, show the muscles of a Sandow, rather than the lovely curves one likes to see in a woman’s arm,’ and it was thought that “Charmion’s muscular build, necessary for her stage antics, rendered her neck and shoulders decidedly unwomanly,” “while ‘violent and severe exercise’ had resulted in shoulder blades that stood out ‘like knobs’” (Erdman 116).

The press was obsessed with female vaudevillians at the time and actually published a copy of Charmion’s diet,

“suggesting the ‘perfect’ body  lay within reach of any woman inclined to make the effort.  For reakfast, some grain mush and milk, plus fruit.  No pastry or coffee.  No intoxicants of any kind.  For dinner, soup, steak or roast beef, and vegetables.  A cold bath every morning completed her regimen.  Charmion liked to suggest that her physical allure was the result of a temperate and modest life. 

In regards to her participance in the temperence movement, which was a very odd move for a performer in the sex-and-booze-drenched vaudeville circuit Charmion blamed drinking for most or all performance deaths, having seen so many fuckups due to intoxication in the industry that she avoided getting lit altogether.  Additionally, the temperance movement was seriously tied to the women’s suffrage movement, and the women’s suffrage movement was tied to anything that allowed women to escape their corsets, and Charmion was definitely about that life.

“Sandwina” Kate Brumbach (1884-1952)

SANDOW ONCE LOST A LIFTING COMPETITION TO A CHICK. You’ve never heard that because it seems there are either a lot of hypersensitive micropenises or a lot of people who don’t read their history in the strength game. The chick who pulled this strength coup (which would be akin to an unknown female lifter beating Mike O’Hearn in a lifting comp) was named Kate Brumbach, and like Arnold, Maxick, and Manfred Hoerberl, sprang forth from the verdant rolling fields of Austria. She stood 6′ and about 200 pounds in a time when the average man was five inches shorter and 55 pounds lighter, and she sported biceps over 17″ and thighs over 26″, which she used to win the hearts and minds of her audiences as a circus performer, wrestler, and strongwomen.

With two strongman parents (her mom had 15″ arms and her dad could pull 500 with one finger), she was primed and ready for the German circus circuit. Since Germany is the size of New Mexico, the family quickly moved to the US so they could reach broader audiences, and the 6′ 200 pound broad began challenging audience members to outlift her. As was his custom, Sandow was in attendance as a ringer, which went badly for him.

Using an adjustable weight dumbbell to increase the weight for a one-arm anyhow from a pittance all the way up to 300 pounds, the woman who was about to become known as Sandwina put the 300 pounder overhead with ease, while Sandow’s attempt stalled at his chest.

And if that wasn’t enough to send the the dumber half of America into a state of apoplexy due to their injured “masculinity,” Sandwina was ready to knock their flaccid red hats even more askew by being an outspoken suffragette (hell, if you can outlift the men, you should probably allowed to drink next to them at the bar, drive places, and vote, right?) who married a Jewish man (a wrestler who was the only man to ever defeat her in a match).

If you’re curious, the dude she’s pressing is her son, Ted Sandwina, who she trained to be a pro heavyweight boxer. He went 48-31-6 with 40 KOs (the last 15 fights were losses to tomato cans like Primo Carnera in mob-controlled fights, so they were almost certainly dives).

Lillian Leitzel (1892-1931)

“At a time when vaudeville and the circus were two of the most popular forms of entertainment, Lillian Leitzel was the biggest star in the world. To fans, she was Queen of The Air. To people who worked with her, she was one Queen Bitch. Lillian Leitzel had the worst temper and temperament of any circus performer in history, worse than Gargantua, even. But people loved her.” 

Lillian Leitzel might be the smallest person in this shortlist of late 19th/early 20th century badasses, but she was likely the most terrifying. At 4’9″ and just under 100 pounds, most of us would scoff at her incessant screaming and would shrug off the roundhouse punches she’d whip at anyone who aroused her ire, but the average man was only 144 pounds at that time, so most dudes weren’t exactly in a position to overpower a gymnastic powerhouse even if they had 40 pounds on her. A Czech by birth, Leitzel quickly became the star performer for the Barnum and Bailey circus and was the first performer in history to get their own Pullman car (a private luxury train car, which would be like being the first performer to get their own space plane in the 21st century).

Leitzel was the shit, and she let everyone know it. The world’s first true master of the Roman rings (more or less the rings used today in competition), she could rip off 27 one armed pullups in a single set, did one-armed planges over and over (each of which dislocated her shoulder) in every performance.

“Lillian was not a trapeze artist. She was an aerialist. She performed spectacular routines high above the ground. Her specialty was on the Roman rings — two wooden rings hanging from ropes, not unlike the rings male gymnasts flip around on in the Olympics today, only Lillian’s rings were suspended fifty feet in the air, and there was no net below. The rings routine was a wonder, but not so special compared to the highlight of her act.  For the “one-arm giant plange,” Lillian would slip her right wrist into a padded rope loop attached to a swivel and ring. A drumroll would commence. Lillian would hold onto the rope with her right hand, then throw her body over her head and swing around vertically like a propeller. With each turn, the drummer would hit the cymbal and the crowd would count the turns in unison — “One! Two! Three!” – Lillian usually did at least one hundred revolutions.  Her record was two hundred and forty-nine.” (Kearns).

… all without a safety net, which killed her when one of her apparatuses broke and she fell 20 feet to the ground. What with medicine still in the “bone saws and mercury phase,” Leitzel died a couple of days later after gamely trying to walk it off and sending her husband back to Berlin to continue their tour.

Luisita Leers (1909-1997)

This rad biceptual broad’s name is Luisita Leers, and she’s almost certainly the only 4’9″ and 95lb female human being who ever successfully out- angled a male strongman. Leers wasn’t even a bodybuilder and seems to never have lifted weights. Like everyone in those days, she built her biceps with shit like rope climbing, working as an aerial acrobat for Ringling Bros. Tragically, she was shipped back to Germany at the outbreak of WW2, where she couldn’t train and all of her costumes for performing were destroyed. The same bombs that destroyed the Leers family home destroyed her career, but you couldn’t let her obscurity get in the way of learning one important lesson from Luisita Leers-

Climb a fucking rope whenever you see one. Your biceps will thank you.

It doesn’t take a big thinker to see that the only thing preventing women from being simultaneously hot and jacked is their willingness to put in the work. Not only are women capable of beating men in the most elite athletic competitions on Earth (if you didn’t get the memo, it’s now happened multiple times in the CrossFit Games), but they have a long history of being hardcore badasses who are capable of a man is- all it takes is putting in the work.

Fuck social stigmas- those “rules” are for followers, not leaders.

Forge your own path.

For those of you with really long memories, this article is a complete rewrite of one I published 15 Feb 2010. I had a request to do another article in this vein and realized the entire series needed to be rewritten, so there will be more to follow, though almost certainly after I finish what has become an insanely dense Adah Menken series.

SUPPORT THE STRENGTH SPORTS UNDERGROUND AND A ROGUE ACADEMIC HELLBENT ON FORCIBLY EDUCATING EVERY PERSON WHO’S EVER LOOKED ASKANCE AT A BARBELL. I AM THE FUCKING TOM BRADY OF PHYSICAL CULTURE HISTORY, BUT BASICALLY UNPAID. HELP A MOTHERFUCKER OUT.

Sources:

Erdman, Andrew L. Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915.  Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2004.

Geggel, Laura.  Two ‘warrior women’ from ancient Mongolia may have helped inspire the Ballad of Mulan.  Apr 2020.  Web.  5 May 2021.  https://www.livescience.com/mongolia-warrior-women-mulan.html

Judd, Cameron. The rise and fateful fall of amazing Lillian Leitzel. The Greenville Sun.  1 Aug 2019.  Web.  3 May 2021.  https://www.greenevillesun.com/news/local_news/judd-the-rise-and-fateful-fall-of-amazing-lillian-leitzel/article_51b104d0-f6e4-5efc-a8db-c59a1bc0a517.html

Juvenal, Satires, c. 2nd C AD. http://ejmas.com/jcs/jcsart_murray_0703.htm

Kearns, Burt.  The queen of the air meets the homicidal young man on the flying trapeze.  Please Kill Me.  22 Jan 2020.  Web.  5 May 2021.  https://pleasekillme.com/lillian-leitzel/

Plutarch. Moralia. “Sayings of Spartan Women.” http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Sayings_of_Spartan_Women*.html

Willoughby, David. The Super-Athletes. South Brunswick: AS Barnes and Co, 1970.

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