- — Plutor
Eliza Waddle
From The Great Outdoor Fight
Eliza Waddle (1888-1907) was among the first women to openly compete in the Great Outdoor Fight. She is also the first woman to be killed in a Fight.
Born to a middle class Bostonian family, Eliza Waddle was a bicurious and opinionated young woman. Influenced at an early age by the Suffrage Movement and other forms of early feminism, Waddle was especially inspired by the (somewhat romanticized) story of brave women in battle, such as Molly Pitcher in the American Revolution. Naturally, when she learned that a disguised woman had won the Great Outdoor Fight, she was inspired to take up the struggle.
Had she bothered to find out the truth, she would have learned that Shirley Randolph had not been kept out of the fight because she was a woman, but instead because she was of Irish descent. However, the romantic view of Randolph was that she had disguised herself as a man and defeated all the men who opposed her. Waddle was entranced and firmly convinced that she could do anything a man could do. Quite without telling her family, she boarded a train and travelled to Bakersfield.
Unfortunately, while women like Randolph, Antonia Pery and Sammie Logue certainly could hold their own with any man, Eliza Waddle was wholly untrained, unaccustomed to hardship, and not possessed of significant strength. She believed that any physical shortcomings could be overcome by prodigious will. Further, she refused several invitations to join armies, not seeing any point in allying herself with men "I should just have to defeat later, anyhow."
Sadly, Waddle found herself completely outmatched. Boris Kowalewski, a rather misogynistic immigrant, targeted Waddle and proceeded to beat her to death with his bare hands. The brutality of Kowalewski's actions sickened several witnesses, and Kowalewski found himself the target of several other fighters. He died within twenty minutes of Waddle.
Waddle's death -- particularly given the brutal circumstances of it -- led to a popular backlash. This was reinforced by Buck Faast's use of a broken bottle (which seemed too much like an illegal edged weapon to some) making the Fight seem less a ritual of the gentlemanly art of combat and more an outlet for quasilegal murder. Investigations were opened, but discreet financial inducements and the championship of the Fight by several of the Yellow papers led to the outcry dying down.
Waddle's dark bonnet, book of (self penned, moderately turgid) poems and umbrella are all in the permanent collection of the Great Outdoor Fight Museum.
[edit] Record
- 1907 - eliminated 1st day, 2977th last standing (deceased).
