The Boxing Gordon Sisters

It's been awhile since we had any video clips, but I've got a good one for you today. Here are the Gordon Sisters, filmed on May 6, 1901 by Thomas Edison - having a boxing match in frilly dresses accessorized with leather boxing gloves. They are fighting in front of a backdrop of a lovely formal garden, for some reason. Minnie Gordon is the one wearing the white dress, and Bessie - who seems to dominate most of the match - is in the black dress. In 1898 Bessie (billed here as Belle) had made an earlier boxing film for Edison, called "Comedy Set-to," in which her opponent is a man, Billy Curtis.

Bessie/Belle and Minnie Gordon were popular on the East Coast vaudeville circuit at this time. The New York Clipper of November 2, 1902, quoted in the Library of Congress page linked below, stated that Bessie also did a bag-punching act, and that the sisters were playing with the Oriental Burlesquers. In the late 1890s Belle was the Police Gazette Champion Lady Bag Puncher. The National Police Gazette was one of the first men's magazines, founded in New York City in 1845, with an emphasis on sports and vaudeville.

I have not found the Gordons on the census (yet) but suspect that they were New Yorkers. If I can find out more about them - and I would really like to - I will come back and edit this post. They were mentioned in a New York Times account of an accident in Brooklyn in 1904. Among the witnesses who helped the injured were "Miss Bessie Gordon and Miss Freda [possibly another name used by Minnie], her sister, who appear in a vaudeville boxing match at Coney Island." Bessie/Belle was the most famous of the boxing sisters (including at least Belle, Minnie and/or Freda and Alice, see note below).

And now - without further delay - here are the Boxing Gordon Sisters:



The fabulous photo of Belle Gordon is from Chinese Swords Guide, where there are other Belle pictures, too.

Sources

"Horse Killed At Bridge," New York Times, Aug. 26, 1904, p. 1.
Musser, Charles, ed. Edison Motion Pictures 1890-1901 (Smithsonian, 1997), p. 437.
Schrock, Joel. The Gilded Age (Greenwood Press, 2004),, p. 176.
Streible, Dan. Fight Pictures (University of California Press, 2008), p. 300.

Another terrific photograph of "Belle Gordon, Champion Lady Bag Puncher of the World."

The Gordon Sisters at Weird Wild Realm (more on other early boxing films, too)

And more on early women's boxing here.

National Police Gazette - more information here.

Comedy Set-to at IMDB.

The Library of Congress agrees that the two sisters in the film are probably Bessie and Minnie; but Bessie and a third sister Alice, went on the boxing circuit a few years after this.