Making the Physical Political: Feminist Martial Arts in the 1970s

In the 1960s and 1970s, amidst rising crime rates and a burgeoning feminist movement, women began to enroll in self-defense courses in record numbers. These trainings offered students vital strategies, but critics argued that the lessons did little to address the “sex-role conditioning” that kept women in a perpetual state of fear and subjugation. Alternatively, a cadre of women devoted themselves to an explicitly feminist strain of martial arts, designed to ameliorate women’s social, psychological, and physical deficiencies and, ultimately, to advance sex equality. Members of the group Cell 16, for example, argued that learning to fight was “an absolutely necessary step in eradicating male supremacy and dominance.”

Few historians have considered the roles that active women’s bodies play in U.S. feminisms. In this project, I adapt the maxim, “the personal is political” to assert that the physical is political by locating prohibitions against female physical activity within the broader political system that disenfranchised girls and women; by identifying active bodies as a form of political action; and by considering the ways those bodies fostered female autonomy and respect. Using oral history interviews, archival research, public culture representations, I examine what feminist martial arts meant to its advocates in the 1970s and how they made active bodies central to contemporary women’s movements. What began as a series of tactics designed for women to survive an isolated physical attack developed into an assertive and potentially revolutionary commitment to martial arts that they made part of a broader strategy in women’s liberation.