Road to the Women’s Evolution: Classic Era
The Road to the Women’s Evolution has certainly been a long one. Women’s wrestling has been around nearly as long as professional wrestling itself, even as the battle for respect and parity continues to this day. While a remarkable amount of progress has been made in recent years, it wouldn’t have been possible without the women who paved the way.
Mae Young
For current WWE fans, the late Mae Young is likely the name most closely associated with the formative years of women’s pro wrestling—she’s the namesake of the annual Mae Young Classic tournament
But many years before that, she established herself as one of the most prolific women wrestlers in history. As the story goes, her career started in 1939 (there’s some dispute over that date; wrestling results sadly weren’t as well-documented then as they are now) when she challenged Mildred Burke, women’s wrestling first superstar, at the Tulsa Coliseum. Burke didn’t accept the challenge, but the ominously named Gladys “Kill ’Em” Gillem did—and ended up no match for Young, going down in seconds.
Young helped take women’s wrestling worldwide, performing in Canada and Japan, all in a career claimed to span a staggering nine decades. She spent much of that time as a boastful heel, wearing a crown and calling herself “The Queen” or “The Great Mae Young,” and held titles including the NWA United States Women’s Championship.
Despite these accomplishments, she was mostly an unknown commodity to contemporary fans when she and The Fabulous Moolah appeared on WWF television in 1999, both at age 76—intentionally presented as relics from another time. Yet that was the beginning of a late-stage career renaissance no one could have expected, with Mae and Moolah acting as comedic agents of chaos for many years later. Young was a part of numerous infamous-but-iconic moments, including being powerbombed through a table (twice!) by Bubba Ray Dudley, participating in a Falls Count Anywhere handicap match against Michelle McCool and Layla at age 87, and, in one of the indelible moments of its era for better or worse, giving birth to a hand. (According to the storyline, she had been impregnated by Mark Henry. Don’t ask. Please.)
In October 1999, Moolah and Young had a match against each other on SmackDown for the WWF Women’s Championship—at a combined age of 152 and complete with some spirited brawling outside the ring.
Young passed away in 2014 at age 90, and the focus of her legacy is now mainly (and deservedly) on her in-ring accomplishments, with events like the Mae Young Classic and her induction in the WWE Hall of Fame in 2008. But there’s no doubt that she was proficient in both the sports and entertainment sides of the business—distinguishing her as a true pioneer.
Wendi Richter
The most storied era of professional wrestling might be the Rock ‘n’ Wrestling days of the early 1980s, the boom in business that propelled the World Wrestling Federation into a global entity thanks in large part to key mainstream exposure. Along with names like Hulk Hogan, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Mr. T, Wendi Richter was a major part of that movement. In fact, Richter arguably should’ve been just as much a household name as her contemporaries as a result.
Like Mae Young, Richter’s career is also closely associated with The Fabulous Moolah—Richter learned to wrestle at Moolah’s school and teamed with her in her first WWF matches in 1982. Yet the name she’s most famously associated with in pro wrestling is Cyndi Lauper—yep, the same Cyndi Lauper known for hits like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “Time After Time.”
It all started with the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” music video—the father, yelling, “What you gonna do with your life”? That was
A few months later, Richter continued to make history by appearing at the first-ever WrestleMania in March 1985. At the show, Richter—once again with Lauper in her corner—regained the Women’s Championship in a match against Leilani Kai, who was seconded by Moolah. Even though Richter was such a high-profile part of WWF history at this time, her run was ultimately cut short amid controversial circumstances, when she lost the title later that year to Moolah, in disguise as “The Spider.” (You’ve probably heard of The Montreal Screwjob, but this was The Original Screwjob, 12 years earlier.)
After leaving WWF, Richter’s career wound down by 1989, and was limited to scattered appearances after that. Following well-documented animosity over how her time in WWF ended, Richter was inducted to the WWE Hall of Fame in 2010 by Roddy Piper, and appeared on Raw in 2012 alongside Lauper and Piper in a Rock ‘n’ Wrestling reunion—culminating in Lauper smashing a gold record on Heath Slater’s head, because some days are just like that.
Alundra Blayze & Bull Nakano
While women’s wrestling was a key part of the ’80s wrestling boom, it had mostly vanished from WWF by the early 1990s. In 1993, WWF looked to course-correct by bringing back its dormant Women’s Championship, and hiring Alundra Blayze—previously known worldwide as Madusa—to be a focal point of the initiative.
Blayze became the WWF’s first new Women’s Champion in more than five years, quickly establishing herself as a dominant force in the revitalized women’s division. But a champ is nothing without a good rival, and within a few months Blayze had one of the best—Japan’s Bull Nakano.
While Blayze was friendly but fierce, Nakano was downright intimidating—physically dominant and with wild makeup and a gravity-defying hairstyle that added to her menacing presence. They had a title match at SummerSlam 1994 with Blayze surviving an onslaught of power moves and submissions, but Nakano won the rematch—and the Women’s Championship—three months later at the Tokyo Dome. Nakano’s reign lasted for more than four
Blaze later became a part of the Monday Night Wars when she moved to WCW in 1996, furthering the growing animosities between WWF and WCW by pointedly throwing the WWF Women’s Championship belt into a trash can on TV (an image you’ve surely seen if you’ve seen any documentary on the Monday Night Months). In WCW, Blayze—back to wrestling as Madusa—resumed her feud with Nakano, having several more matches with her famous
After years of tension following the trash can incident, Blayze was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2015 and has made occasional subsequent appearances on WWE television, including as a backstage interviewer during last year’s Mae Young Classic. Nakano shifted paths rather dramatically and became a pro golfer, but has occasionally returned to the wrestling world—including at a December 2017 RISE Wrestling independent show in Los Angeles. At the show, Nakano and Blayze once again reignited their feud—with Nakano in the corner of international star Kris Wolf and Blayze managing local favorite Shotzi Blackheart.
While Blayze and Nakano helped further defy expectations of how intense and athletic women’s wrestling could be, the revived WWF Women’s Championship they fought over once again faded into obscurity shortly after their wars—until the Attitude Era once again put women’s wrestling in the spotlight (to a drastically different degree), which we’ll cover in our next stop on the Road to the Women’s Evolution…