Her Own Hero

This innovative history reveals the untold story of the women’s self-defense movement and its origins in the Progressive Era.

In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women began taking up boxing and jiu-jitsu in record numbers. The new trend was both a reflection of and a response to the broader cultural issues of the time, including the women’s rights movement and the campaign for the vote. While some of these women simply wanted to protect themselves from strangers on the street, others sought to reject gendered notions about feminine weakness.

As women’s self-defense grew into a movement, it challenged longstanding myths about the nature of violence against women, provoking discussions about the less visible violence that many women faced in their own homes. The movement also forged a new image of women as powerful and self-reliant. Whether or not women consciously pursued self-defense for these reasons, their actions embodied feminist politics. This book is a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the movement they created, and the ways it echoed through the twentieth century.