Here’s Why WWE Honors Fabulous Moolah
Much of the way WWE presents female wrestlers still stinks of the Billy Wolfe/Fabulous Moolah formula.
On Monday, WWE announced the first ever Fabulous Moolah Battle Royal at WrestleMania 34 to a chorus of criticism from those who actually knew who the Fabulous Moolah (Lillian Ellison) was and what she stood for. To the casual resident of the WWE Universe, Moolah was a pratfalling old lady from the turn of the millenium who was involved in some classic (if somewhat tasteless) physical comedy bits and had a memorable feud with recent WWE Hall of Fame inductee Ivory. However, to those who live in the Actual Universe (you know, the one with Google), Moolah is one of the most problematic figures in wrestling history, and it’s breathtakingly tone deaf that WWE would use her name to market any aspect of its self-created wave of feminism.
Here’s the issue within the issue, though: even in the era of the Women’s Revolution, so much of the way WWE presents female wrestlers still stinks of the Billy Wolfe/Fabulous Moolah formula: compartmentalize women as an added value sideshow, group them together collectively to weaken their identities as individual performers, and make sure you’re always slicing the payoffs up enough different ways to keep any one of them from turning into a negotiating powerhouse. WWE isn’t brainwashing anybody with drugs or pimping them out to local businessmen, but they’re still using legacy anti-feminist tactics to pay lip service to the importance of women in wrestling and the world at large without actually treating them as equals to their male counterparts. That’s why the WWE honors Moolah: she helped write the playbook.
Let’s start by looking at compartmentalization. From the 1950s through the early ‘80s, women wrestlers (or “girl wrestlers” in the parlance of the time) were not regulars on any territorial rosters. Sure, each promotion had a collection of valets, ring girls, and the travelling companions of their top male performers, but those women weren’t “wrestlers” per se; they were cursory performers on a wrestling show. The full-fledged female workers existed as members of tight troupes that dipped into territories one at a time to help pop a house during the build for a big show or prop up a territory whose strongest talent had gone to work elsewhere for awhile. To those who wish to see this period through rose-colored glasses, that meant the women were a “special attraction.”
What it really meant, though, is that the people who organized and booked the troupes of female wrestlers (first Wolfe, then Jack Pfeffer, then Moolah herself) had all the real power, and the individual performers were largely at their mercy (if you’re familiar with the D.E.N.N.I.S. system, this is the first N: “nurture dependency”). Even though women wrestlers were drawing crowds and helping territories, their management teams always took pains to keep them separate entities unto themselves. Members of Moolah’s troupe almost exclusively came in to fight each other. In many territories, they either had their own dressing room or were instructed to come to the building dressed. They weren’t paid by the promoter but instead had their money filtered through the leader of their troupe, which generally meant a healthy cut was taken off the top. At every step of the way, pains were taken to make sure that female performers were compartmentalized as their own entity, with minimal connection to the rest of the show.
These tactics persist today in 2018 WWE, where Asuka is constantly referred to as the “Women’s Royal Rumble winner” and Alexa Bliss is called the “first Women’s Elimination Chamber winner.” Their victories are compartmentalized as being “women’s” accomplishments and always qualified as such, as though the WWE is worried people might turn on the TV after not watching for a few months and be outraged that Asuka defeated 29 men to challenge for the WWE Championship at WrestleMania. This is a perfect example of the doublespeak used for decades by wrestling promoters and other employers: “Women have more opportunities than ever here!” (meaning “we have created new positions for women” rather than “we are hiring more women to fill our most important positions”). By compartmentalizing women and giving them their own women’s brass rings to reach for, WWE has side-stepped ever having to fully integrate women into the show; instead, they’ve created a separate track for women’s drama to play out on, just like Wolfe, Moolah, and the NWA promoters of old did.
Another reductive, exploitative tactic still widely in use today is collective grouping of women wrestlers. In the 1950s, when female performers were some of the biggest draws around the country, they were generally known collectively as “the women” or “the girls.” Champion Mildred Burke might have gotten her name on the marquee, but otherwise, audiences were promised things like “a thrilling exhibition of the country’s most vicious and beautiful lady wrestlers.” The psychological intent and impact of this kind of language is pretty transparent: rob each performer of her individual identity and make her most marketable, emphasized quality the fact that she is one of many females who wrestle.
If you’ve been watching the WWE since the beginning of the then-Diva’s Revolution, that kind of behavior should sound pretty familiar. The WWE insists on introducing new women in groups of no less than three members, essentially refuses to feature women’s singles matches on their monthly specials (even the Smackdown Women’s Title match at Fastlane had interference from multiple members of each participant’s crew), and generally seems determined to get as many women as possible in each segment of TV time allotted for women. Just as it was 50 years ago, the goal is to get people excited about “the women” and see “the women” as a draw; if anything, the goal is not to create a singular female star. They know the paces a wrestler should go through to become a top tier act (see: everything they’ve done with Roman Reigns for the last four years), and in spite of their self-professed commitment to women’s wrestling, they still haven’t done that for a woman on the main roster. Charlotte’s pedigree gives her a unique, undeniable credibility, and Asuka was built incredibly strong in NXT before arriving, but aside from the two of them, it’s essentially portrayed that any given woman could beat any given woman on any given night. Everybody in the division is collectively interchangeable.
It’s one thing to discuss compartmentalization, grouping, and interchangeability as problems with WWE’s writing, but it would be irresponsible not to discuss the most direct and real way those issues impact wrestlers in the WWE Women’s Division(s): pay. When women are constantly booked in six-person tags and other all-hands-on-deck matches and talking segments, they’re being denied the chance for the paycheck that comes with having a one-on-one match on a big show card. It’s just another way true stardom is being refused to them. The Fabulous Moolah herself was notorious for ensuring her charges made just enough money that they desperately needed her to book them and take care of them. She made sure that her slice of the pie was always suitably big, and that always came at the expense of the wrestlers who were thrilling the crowds and doing the majority of the physical work. Similarly, the WWE has used the Women’s Revolution to capitalize on the rising wave of feminism and turned increased TV time for female performers into some of their most profitable and well-covered years.
Some people say it’s crazy that WWE is honoring the Fabulous Moolah at WrestleMania, but if we’re being honest, it makes total sense. She’s the Pete Rozelle of this ish.
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