Lady Tyger and the Politics of Hunger: Activism, recognition, and what women’s boxing is taught to forget

‘Hunger was not the cost of fighting – it was the language through which injustice was made visible’. 

Marian ‘Lady Tyger’ Trimiar was one of the earliest licensed professional women boxers in the United States and a former Women’s World Lightweight Champion. Yet her legacy is rarely invoked in today’s stories of women’s boxing. In 1987, two years after her final bout, Lady Tyger undertook a 38day hunger strike to demand equality for women boxers, targeting major promoters and calling for licensing, fair pay, media coverage, and access to the sport for girls and women.

© Thomas Moran. All rights reserved. Used exclusively for Boxing is Love.

This research by Dr Sarah Crews and Solomon Lennox examines Lady Tyger’s hunger strike not as spectacle or martyrdom, but as embodied political activism. Hunger, in this context, becomes both literal and symbolic: a response to the systematic underfeeding of women’s boxing, economically, institutionally, and culturally.

Media coverage at the time fixated on Lady Tyger’s physical deterioration, how much weight she lost, and how close to death she appeared. What went largely unreported was what the hunger meant. Lady Tyger was not seeking pity or sainthood. She was demanding recognition for herself and for the hundreds of women boxers whose labour, training, and sacrifice went unseen. Drawing on theories of hunger, embodiment, and resistance, the research shows how Lady Tyger used her own body as a contested site of protest. Her hunger strike exposed how women’s boxing relied on women’s endurance while denying them legitimacy, pay, and institutional support. Like other pioneers, including Jane Couch in the UK, Lady Tyger paid a heavy personal price for forcing boxing to acknowledge women as serious athletes.

‘When the only way to be noticed is to suffer publicly, something is deeply wrong with the system’. 

Although women’s boxing has gained visibility since the Olympics and through highprofile promotions, Lady Tyger’s story reveals what is often lost in contemporary celebration. This is especially evident in recent broadcast presentations of women’s boxing, where polished mythmaking, spectacle, and narratives of destiny present women’s boxing as a sudden moment of arrival, while rarely acknowledging the histories of protest, hunger, and legal struggle that made such visibility possible.

Lady Tyger’s activism reminds us that progress in women’s boxing has never been given freely. It has been fought for, often outside the ring, and sometimes at profound personal cost. Remembering her is not an act of nostalgia. It is a reminder that recognition, justice, and sustainability in boxing still require more than belief and spectacle. Read the piece of research 'Lady Tyger: A legacy starved into existence' here.