AFTER many years and a prolonged struggle for mainstream recognition, women’s boxing has arrived.

A sold-out Madison Square Garden in New York last weekend witnessed Ireland’s Katie Taylor and Puerto Rico’s Amanda Serrano make history as the first women’s world title clash to headline at The Garden, boxing’s most iconic venue.

Co-promoted by Eddie Hearn and YouTube boxer-turned promoter Jake Paul, and broadcast live by US streaming giant DAZN as a pay-per-view event, Taylor won a 10-round split decision after what many have described as one of the best and most exciting fights The Garden has ever hosted, regardless of gender.

Given the litany of classic fights that have played out there during its long association with boxing, this is a serious accolade.

Credit where credit’s due, Hearn got behind women’s boxing when other promoters did not, determined to establish its recognition within a rigidly male-dominated sport and culture.

His devotion to the career of Taylor in particular has taken on the character of a personal crusade since she turned pro in 2016.

It’s a personal crusade that reached its climax last weekend with Taylor retaining her undisputed female lightweight title in front of a sold-out arena in New York to wide acclaim.

However what many have described as a classic was at times hard to watch, given the brutal exchanges that took place between both women at certain points.

The last 30 seconds of the climactic 10th round in particular crossed the fine line that exists between educated boxing and its antithesis.

Non-stop punches unleashed by both fighters one after the other with little thought of defence, and with many of the punches thrown connecting flush, it was more brute violence than sport at this point.

That the violence was unleashed by women rather than men made it even more uncomfortable, forcing this writer to re-evaluate his own prejudices in this regard.

It brought to the fore the question of the ethics of women fighting at all and whether it is compatible with a woman’s physical, anatomical, psychological and emotional make-up. 

Perhaps, though, the answer does not lie in any predetermined categorisation of women, qua women, extrapolated by a male writer suffering the lingering effects of patriarchy.

Perhaps instead it lies in specific environmental and social factors that have combined to increase the aggressive impulse of women in response.

In an extensive article published by The Royal Society in 2013, author Anne Campbell analyses “the evolutionary psychology of women’s aggression.”

In the article’s abstract, she writes that “evolutionary researchers have identified age, operational sex ratio and high variance in male resources as factors that intensify female competition.

“These are discussed in relation to escalated intrasexual competition for men and their resources between young women in deprived neighbourhoods.

“For these women, fighting is not seen as antithetical to cultural conceptions of femininity, and female weakness is disparaged.”

“Deprived neighbourhoods” are, it would seem, critical to understanding female aggression in the same way as deprivation is critical to understanding male aggression, though according to Anne Campbell for different reasons.

It brings us back to the fundamental role of class in determining an individual’s lived experience and how her or his personality and character is shaped thereby.

Boxing is a sport rooted in deprivation and poverty, which given that women as much as men suffer the ravages of both, would seem to make obvious that it’s a sport that could never be confined to male participation forever.

But then how to explain that for generations women’s boxing, and also to extend the subject, women’s football, were non-existent as mainstream sports? After all, deprivation and poverty are nothing new and have long affected the lives of women as much as men.

Here we arrive at the struggle for sexual equality engaged in by women over decades and the need to examine what actually defines equality between the sexes, supposing there could ever be one absolute definition.

The wider woman’s liberation movement grew out of the growing presence of women in the labour market in the late ’60s.

It gave rise to a deepening political consciousness on the basis of gender due to the unequal pay and conditions women were subjected to compared to their male counterparts.

In time the women’s liberation movement became the platform for the growth of various radical theories and concepts around the issue of gender and the structural oppression of women under the auspices of patriarchy.

One such current was cultural feminism. In a 2019 piece by Jane Johnson Lewis on cultural feminism, we are told that “the phrase ‘essential differences’ refers to the belief that gender differences are part of the essence of females or males, that the differences are not chosen but are part of the nature of woman or man.”

Cultural feminists, Lewis points out, differ as to whether these essential differences are the result of biology or enculturation, but all agree that they exist and that the qualities identified with women are superior to those identified with men, regardless of whether the product of nature or nurture, due to the supposed destructiveness of the latter and constructiveness of the former.

The key point is that according to the dictates of cultural feminism, women’s boxing represents the negation of the female essence.

The problem with this, however, is that essence cannot be divorced from the social relations and social character forged by a specific environment in the crucible of socioeconomic class.

Putting it another way: are we supposed to believe that a woman living in a rundown council estate has more “essential differences” with men living in the same socioeconomic environment than she has with women living in conditions of affluence?

The question surely answers itself for those who cleave to a materialist conception of society and human affairs.

For some then, women’s boxing stands as a perversion of the struggle for women’s liberation, while for others it represents its apogee.

For the likes of Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, meanwhile — along with a sold-out Madison Square Garden in New York last weekend — women’s boxing has at last taken its rightful place alongside men’s boxing as a mass spectator sport.

Whether it ought to matters less, ultimately, than the fact that it has.