The Revenge of Hatpin Mary: Women, Professional Wrestling and Fan Culture in the 1950s by Chad Dell

Abstract

The Revenge of Hatpin Mary: Women, Professional Wrestling and Fan Culture in the 1950s Chad Dell. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Upon seeing Chad Dell's book on wrestling in the 1950s, I immediately thought of my grandmother, an Italian immigrant living in Pittsburgh, who was huge fan of the television show Studio Wrestling and never missed it on Saturday night. Thus, I smiled when I read the title of Dell's first chapter: My Grandmother Was Huge Fan. Dell grew up in Philadelphia and, as boy, enjoyed watching wrestling on television and favored Bruno Sammartino, the same hero as my grandmother. Years later, as he began researching broadcast audiences, he discovered trend. It did not matter whom I spoke to, he writes, waiters, executives, mechanics, academics-especially academics. They all had die-hard wrestling fan somewhere in their family tree, and usually it was woman (1). Dell set out to find who these 1950s women were, what they found so attractive and meaningful about professional wrestling, and what purposes their fandom served. His results may surprise. Aided by the new medium of television, wrestling matches, which could be easily recorded with one or two simple cameras, gained unprecedented popularity. Attendance at events had risen 800 percent in eight years, from three million in 1942 to twenty-four million in 1950. A majority of the wrestling audience, both for live performances and on television, was women. One Eastern promoter claimed that women made up as much as ninety percent of the audience, and wrestlers began gearing their performances expressly to them. At time when women like June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, and Donna Reed inhabited the television screen, real life women were seeking out other images and lifestyles as well, challenging traditionally defined gender roles. Participation in the fan culture of wrestling was one of the ways in which they did. According to Dell, professional wrestling served many functions for the female audience in the 1950s. As performance sport, it offered women a classic story of good and evil, morality and immorality, performed by burly, athletic men in abbreviated attire (11). Women derived entertainment from the highly constructed dramas played out in the arena; they also found pleasure in their ability to gaze upon the scantily clad, physically attractive male body in socially acceptable way not available to them in other realms of society. Women of all strata of society often came together to watch wrestling either live or on television, providing an opportunity for female bonding. According to Dell, women in fur coats sat beside women in simple dresses at ringside, and wealthy women watched on television at home with their maids, all of them free to yell, laugh and carry on without fear of recrimination (123). …