Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Pat Laprade has been involved in pro wrestling for 15 years and has contributed to many women’s wrestling promotions, including SHIMMER and Femmes Fatales. He co-wrote Wrestling Observer’s 2013 book of the year Mad Dogs, Midgets and Screw Jobs as well as a biography of Maurice “Mad Dog” Vachon. He lives in Montreal, Quebec. Dan Murphy has been a writer for Pro Wrestling Illustrated since 1997 and has overseen PWI’s annual female 50 ranking since its inception in 2008. He lives in Buffalo and has written four books on the history of his native western New York. Trained in the legendary Hart Dungeon, Natalya is a former WWE Women’s Champion. She lives in Tampa, Florida.

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Documenting the rise of women's wrestling from sideshow to WWE main event

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NXT,the Revolution, and the Return of the Women’s Title

As late as 2012, when Sasha Banks was hired by WWE, their vision of women’s wrestling was very different from what it is today. “When I first started, we were told to wrestle like Divas,” Banks recalled on WWE 24. “No strikes, no hitting, pull the hair, catfights.” Consequently, of all WWE’s big-stage women’s matches between 1988 and June 2013, only four had been given at least three stars by Dave Meltzer. But in the following years, that ratio would change quite a bit.

At the TLC PPV on December 15, 2013, Divas champion A.J. Lee and Natalya would have one of those matches. Although Natalya was praised for her performance, to her credit, it was Lee’s second three-star match that year, the first one being against former partner Kaitlyn in what was the best women’s match in WWE since Trish and Lita. Four months later, in Little Rock, Arkansas, during a Main Event taping, the tandem did it again, upping their game with an even better 14-minute match. Meltzer, who gave the match three and a half stars, wrote that it “was the best women’s match on WWE TV in so long I can’t even remember, and better than anything women’s wise in WWE or TNA since the Gail Kim vs. Taryn Terrell matches.”

Unfortunately, the company was unable to transfer that energy into WrestleMania that year, where a multiwoman match didn’t place high in anyone’s rankings. Although the situation wasn’t constant on the main roster, down in Orlando, Florida, a number of women were starting to flourish.

Paul Levesque’s brainchild, NXT, is the developmental territory of WWE. In February 2014, Levesque produced the first two-hour special to be presented on the WWE Network, NXT Arrival. Paige, the NXT women’s champion and perhaps the first one to separate herself from the pack, wrestled Emma, who was caught in a comedy act with Santino on the main roster. They were given more time than usual for a women’s match, and they had a good match. “For me I always felt like our Divas and women were underutilized. It was about treating them like the athletes they are,” said Levesque on WWE 24.

Since Paige was called up to the main roster a few months later, she vacated the title and a tournament was held to crown the next champion. On May 29, 2014, NXT TakeOver would become a game changer. In the tournament final, Ashley Fliehr — better known as Charlotte, Ric Flair’s daughter — was to face another competitor with wrestling in her genes, Natalya.

Charlotte won the match and the title, but that’s secondary. In a show where Sami Zayn faced Tyler Breeze and Neville squared off with Tyson Kidd, Charlotte and Natalya, with Flair and Bret Hart in their respective corners, had the best match on the card, something completely unheard of by WWE standards.

“It came across as the epic women’s match in modern WWE,” wrote Meltzer, who gave the match a whopping four stars. “It was presented differently than any women’s match, almost like a world title match, was given time and it was the performance of a career of Natalya to insiders. But it also was the breakout performance of Charlotte, who came across like a future superstar if the women’s division in its future changes from models doing short matches to women wrestlers doing serious pro wrestling.”

If WWE was still presenting Divas, NXT became the place to watch great women’s wrestling. It didn’t matter which male wrestler was on the show; at every NXT special since that night, a women’s match has been one of the highlights at the end of the night.

Around the same time, a new phenomenon was the talk of the town in women’s combat sport, and her name was Ronda Rousey. Between February 2013 and August 2015, she won her six UFC fights, totaling less than eight minutes in the Octagon. She was put in the main event of a PPV on her first night in with the company, something seen as a gutsy move at the time as it was also UFC’s first women’s fight ever. But UFC proved to be right. Her fight with Liz Carmouche drew 450,000 buys on PPV, destroying the previous record for a women’s fight main-eventing a PPV, held by Laila Ali vs. Jacqui Frazier (respectively the daughters of Muhammad and Joe) in a boxing match in 2001 with more than 100,000 buys. Rousey would become one of UFC’s biggest draws ever. She had the ability to connect with people, she was dominating her opponents, and she was presented as a star from the get-go. Rousey became in a way what any woman performing in combat sports wanted to be.

“It kills the out-of-date and stupid idea that women can’t fight and cannot generate any attention from the public. She is the proof that good women fighting works,” said LuFisto. “She’s a great role model for all us women — and definitely, I feel like she’s a huge part of the Divas’ revolution too,” added Paige.

Rousey’s success and ability to draw is the reason McMahon and Levesque decided to put more emphasis on the women’s division and to make a pitch for a revolution to begin in the WWE. So in the summer of 2015, they brought up Charlotte, Sasha Banks, and Becky Lynch all at the same time, with the idea of showcasing women to a degree the company had never done before. But if Levesque is the one in charge of NXT, the last word goes to his father-in-law when it comes to WWE. In a conference call for the NXT TakeOver: Respect show in October 2015, Levesque summed up Vince McMahon and his vision of women’s wrestling: “Is there a different way that he wants to present it in his mind on the main roster, whatever, sure. That’s where he is with it.”

And that’s probably why the concept never truly transferred from NXT fans to WWE fans. All the things that made those NXT matches so great, all the things that made Rousey a superstar — almost nothing of that was used at first for the women on the main roster. And even if there has been some change lately, still very few WWE events are main-evented by women.

Instead of letting the ones who could actually give a four-star performance work together, creative mingled the Divas and the wrestlers. Instead of letting personalities get over to create feuds, creative decided to play teacher, with Stephanie making teams on air like a high school teacher would do. Instead of letting the fans slowly witness the changes, seeing the upgrade in the workrate and the presentation and organically becoming fans of the product, creative pushed the “Divas Revolution” expression down their throats to the point the fans couldn’t take it anymore and simply decided to reject the whole idea. At the end of the day, WWE wasn’t willing to recognize Divas as wrestlers yet; the fact that the NXT title was called the women’s title, while in WWE it was still called the Divas’ title, expressed it the best.

THE DEATH OF THE DIVAS TITLE

It took almost a year before WWE presented its women differently, when it was announced at WrestleMania 32 in Dallas, Texas, that the company had officially dropped the Divas title and the term Diva as Lita unveiled a new white championship belt with a bright red face plate (evocative of All Japan Women’s signature red belt) and announced that the winner of the triple-threat match between Charlotte, Becky Lynch, and Sasha Banks would be recognized as women’s champion.

The change in terminology was widely praised and was seen as a change in mentality, presenting female wrestlers as athletes as opposed to prima donnas. The “butterfly...