ABSTRACT

Over the decades, the colorful sport of professional wrestling has entertained billions of people around the world in person and via radio, television, and the internet.  The ways in which professional wrestling is consumed by audiences has changed a lot since its inception in the mid 19th century;  one of the most significant changes to the sport, arguably, has been the inclusion of women’s matches. But by looking at the sport’s event cards, one notices that women’s matches are held much less frequently than men’s. For example, in an event with eight matches, women will have just one match, or none. This is a trend that has persisted.  To quote champion wrestler (and math whiz) Big Poppa Pump, “The numbers don’t lie.”  Today, there are more female wrestlers than ever, but women’s matches are still held far less often.

This project, Gender Disparities in Professional Wrestling (GDPW), uses professional wrestling data to reveal a continual gender disparity in the number of final matches scheduled.  Information will be gathered from Cagematch, the international database for professional wrestling.  GDPW will extract data on the final yearly events at New York City’s Madison Square Garden from 1934 to 2024 and create interactive visualizations, using Tableau, to illustrate that women professional wrestlers have fewer year-end events than men.  These visualizations will be published in a WordPress narrative, which will allow visitors and fans of professional wrestling to reach their own conclusions about reasons behind the gender disparity.  

In an industry that is often seen simply as a producer of contrived, over-the-top entertainment, there are nonetheless serious issues of gender equity worthy of examination. GDPW: The Numbers Don’t Lie begins this by highlighting the gender disparity in key professional wrestling events.

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

• Martin Bueno: Project Lead, In-Person Outreach, and Data Extraction
• Cathy Melamed: Researcher, Editor and Online Outreach
• Elijah Nunez: Lead Web Developer and Data Visualization Support
• Madison Watkins:  Lead Data Visualization, U/X Design and Front End Support

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING

Wrestling is one of the world’s oldest combat sports (Fields, 2005), out of which grew the popular, theatrically campy entertainment known as professional wrestling.  A highly scripted spectacle, professional wrestling unites serious athleticism with even more serious flamboyance: the wrestlers’s personas, costumes, storylines and moves are crafted into flashy, melodramatically fun events.  It is 1985: picture the outrageously muscular Hulk Hogan, a deeply tanned, oil-slicked bleach blond in a sparkly gold Speedo, as he slingshots off the ropes to “clothesline” an equally muscular Randy “Macho Man” Savage, knocking him flat.  Macho Man, in a red satin Speedo with his name blazed across the rear, jumps to his feet, climbs to the top of the ropes, and leaps onto Hogan, slamming him to the mat so hard that Hogan bounces and flails in exaggerated agony.  The crowd is roaring, but the announcers calling the match are distracted, heatedly arguing over which wrestler deserves the beautiful female “manager,” Miss Elizabeth, who quietly paces outside the ring in a purple sequin gown. 

Professional wrestling started in the United States around the time of the Civil War (Hester, 2010), when soldiers learned and practiced how to defend themselves during repose between battles as a form of entertainment to make quick money. From about the late 1800s, professional wrestling became more respected and organized as a form of mock combat entertainment. The first title belts were introduced around this time. 

The early 1900s brought wider popularity and greater theatrics. The biggest names of this era were Martin Burns and Frank Gotch. Frank Gotch became the first world champion in 1908, and he retired in 1912 (Stone and  Elias, 1971). Gotch’s retirement left professional wrestling without its one true champion, and many wrestlers subsequently claimed to be the world champion themselves. This brought about the start of organized companies providing wrestling entertainment, with promoters taking control over who would be the champion. Previously, a wrestler and his managers decided who won and who lost (Hester, 2010).

This was also when the first female wrestlers entered the scene. Cora Livingston began wrestling both women and men at carnivals around the country in 1906, when she was 17. She became the first Women’s World Champion in 1910 (“Cora Livingston,” 2025).  Fierce and athletic, Livingston was known for a self-aggrandizing swagger and for scandalously dressing in leggings (Jennings, 2016), despite the fact that male professional wrestlers had always worn the skin-tight, form-fitting uniform known as a singlet.  Women’s wrestling was outlawed in many states during this post-Victorian period, but, where legal, it became an attraction at men’s events (Laprade, 2017), albeit with a sideshow pretense. “When promoters needed an extra gimmick to draw a crowd, they’d present a women’s wrestling match,” Keith Elliot Green wrote in his book Pro Wrestling: From Carnivals to Cable TV (2000). 

World War II saw women’s professional wrestling, like other sports, experience a burst of popularity as female wrestlers replaced male wrestlers serving in the military.  During this period, it is estimated that 40% of the national wrestling audience was female (Laprade, 2017).  This was also when Cora Livingston began mentoring the powerful 5’2” Mildred Burke, who became a three-time Women’s World Champion and one of the most famous personas in women’s pro wrestling.

Over-the-top, theatrical characters had become the norm in the sport by this point: Burke became famous for making grand entrances to her wrestling matches wearing a rhinestone robe, and for wearing mink coats and diamonds outside the ring (Laprade, 2017). The campy personas exploited female sexuality and beauty: Burke and her mega-promoter husband, Billy Wolfe, founded a women’s wrestling school in Ohio in the late 1940s based on the formula “sex, muscles and diamonds.”  Wolfe’s gym also sponsored the first Black women wrestling stars, including Babs Wingo, Ethel Johnson and Marva Scott.  Another Wolfe alumna, Lillian Ellison, went on to become The Fabulous Moolah, the 1956 world champion who held the title for 28 years before becoming a formidable trainer and promoter herself (Laprade, 2017).  Moolah was key in legalizing women’s professional wrestling in New York in June of 1972, and she became the first woman to wrestle at Madison Square Garden the next month  (“The Fabulous Moolah,” 2025).  

Men’s professional wrestling was first televised in the late 1950s and subsequently evolved into a national sensation.  Despite the enduring (if still second-string) popularity of women’s wrestling, the first women’s match wasn’t televised until 1984, when pop star Cyndi Lauper and her “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” music video co-star, wrestling manager Captain Lou Albano, arranged for a match between Moolah and Wendi Richter on MTV.  Prior to the televised matches, women usually appeared on screen as managers, valets, ring announcers or love interests for male wrestlers.  Later, women’s matches were billed as “catfights” between “Divas,” and their already oversexualized personas were further fetishized for a national television audience.

The wrestling industry’s effort to focus more on women’s athleticism and less on women’s sexual appeal began to take shape in the early 2010s, and was deliberately articulated in 2015 when the name “Divas” was dropped from the titles of women’s matches. (A lack of athleticism, though, had  never been an issue: in 2023, critic Gerry Chisolm, writing about Lady Wrestlers, Chris Bournea’s 2018  documentary on the Black female stars of the 1950s, noted that the women “performed some of the industry’s most difficult moves and introduced new ones, which became their signature. [Ethel] Johnson’s flying dropkick and other aerial maneuvers made the women more exciting to watch than the men.”)   

Some might say that today, women’s professional wrestling is more focused on athleticism than ever.  Still, no one watching women’s matches today could miss the unmistakable sexualization of the athletes.  Indeed, a 2024 study for the journal Feminism & Psychology concluded that, after watching 20 contemporary women’s matches, stereotypical motifs remain dominant (Hill-Cann and Burr, 2024).  Perhaps this should be unsurprising; as Roland Barthes famously wrote, “The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess,” (Barthes, 1957).  Referencing Barthes’s comment in The Paris Review, writer Mairead Small Staid adds that, with women wrestlers, the excesses highlighted in the ring are unfortunately not their athletic achievements, but age-old antifeminist tropes (Staid, 2018).  

NARRATIVE

ENHANCING THE HUMANITIES

Shortly after its inception, professional wrestling featured women in its male-dominated world.  However, gender inequality is a historical problem in all areas of society, appearing in the household, workspace, and academia (Huang et al., 2020).  Ever since women stepped through the doors of professional wrestling in the early 1900s, they have yet to be equally featured in the same number of matches as men. 

The GDPW project will use data to showcase gender disparity in professional wrestling by extracting information about the year-end matches at Madison Square Garden for each year from 1934 to 2024. Madison Square Garden was chosen as it has the most available data on professional wrestling matches and represents the excitement of professional wrestling in New York City. The final events of each year have no particular significance other than they provide a constant variable to extract data from; the events may be sponsored by different promotions, or wrestling organizations.  Another purpose of choosing the final event of each calendar year is to avoid extracting data that may actually have more women on the card than the beginning of the month or another date. 

The issue of gender disparity in professional wrestling is a topic that is explicitly visible when a fan watches a wrestling show, whether on a streaming device, television, or in person. However, it is a topic that is rarely discussed in wrestling discourse, and even through academia, the issue can be drowned out by other sports that also have gender disparities. GDPW can be of value to those involved in the Women’s and Gender Studies program and the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center, as it sheds light on an issue of disparity in a field that is not often examined or discussed.  In the same sense, it can also benefit those who study topics on feminism and sports history.

GDPW has the potential to inspire examinations of gender inequality in sports beyond professional wrestling, including other sports not often discussed in academia. Creating this website with interactive data visualizations will make it clear that, at least at one venue within the last 90 years, there has been a gender disparity at a major event in a sport that features both men and women.  And for fans of professional wrestling, providing an interactive data visualization will allow them to look at the data themselves and reach their own conclusions on the matter as well.

Importantly, GDPW is not attempting to fault Madison Square Garden for not allowing more women to wrestle in their arena.  One of the essential bases of this project is to keep a sole focus on a local venue with a history of showcasing professional wrestling, which has been around the same length as when women were introduced as competitors. If our project focuses on other venues and cities, there will be too much data overflow, and it will be difficult to extract the data without exceeding the time restraint for one semester.

ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN

GDPW is unique and this first presented a difficulty in finding comparable projects, but a couple did emerge.  A digital project created at the Pratt Institute in 2016 by KMeizner, Gender Representation in the WWE Based on Wrestlemania Data 1985-Present, also examined gender inequality in wrestling, focusing on televised World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Wrestlemania events from 1985 through 2015.  The author extracted data on the length of men’s matches versus women’s matches and the amount of screen time allotted to men and women.  The data for this project came from Wrestlemania’s published “Results Tables” and “Every Diva Ever” features.  Three visualizations were created, and together they show a stark inequality in both the length of women’s matches and the length of their televised appearances during Wrestlemania events.  

Although KMeizner’s project was the only digital study we identified for the scan, we found several online articles and essays on the topic of women in professional wrestling.  There was even one dissertation, An Exploration of the Race and Gender Representations in Professional Wrestling in the United States: A Qualitative Case Study, authored by Lucas P. Luther and published at Georgia Southern University in 2024.  Luther examined race and gender focused storylines found in wrestling magazines and videos, and noted a clear disenfranchisement of female and Black wrestlers.  The goal of Luther’s study is to highlight the need to “confront widespread normative biases that privilege White male wrestlers and disenfranchise Black wrestlers and females of all colors.” (2024)

Projects were found that could center GDPW in other fields of digital humanities, such as feminism and sports history. The relevance of the feminist projects lies in their approach to gender studies, which can be applied to the analysis of gender disparity in professional wrestling. It was fascinating learning about these, such as the Women Writers Project and The Orlando Project.  The environmental scan additionally brought up data and statistics for a broader area: sports, mainly the site Sports-Reference.com.  There is also an interesting article, Doing Sport History in the Digital Present, in The Journal of Sports History, which states the importance of digital humanities in sports history: “Digital humanities projects can connect institutions— archives, libraries, museums, and universities— all of which are uniquely relating to the digital era, their collaborations combining to create vastly larger and more diverse communities, allowing for a revisioning of their missions. This vision of digital humanities also encourages unlimited contributions from citizen scholars, including amateurs, archivists, librarians, public historians, and academics, and actively solicits their help in the form of crowdsourcing to generate content and edit material.” (Sterling, et al., 2017) Though wrestling is not specifically mentioned in the sports journal, sports history within digital humanities–and Matthew K. Gold’s influence in the field–are mentioned. The inclusion of sports history in digital humanities proves that there is indeed a place for professional wrestling, as much as there is the goal of how it can engage and use digital humanities tools to create and distribute our findings.

GDPW fits into the field of digital humanities as there is an issue that can be explored and analyzed with digital tools for a problem that has been touched upon before, which is that “women who value athletic participation have been fighting an uphill battle to gain recognition from and parity with men.” (Jarratt, 1990).  While some say there has been improvement in how women in wrestling are presented as equals in the world of professional wrestling, the available data say otherwise. 

There are other digital tools that we could possibly use to explore this issue further. For example, text analysis of wrestling websites and publications could shed more light on gender disparity.  But the GDPW project will exhibit much more than data: it will feature interactive data visualizations that allow users to engage with the data. Since “digital humanities projects often use data, tools, and methods to examine particular questions, the work supports interpretation and exploration” (Spiro, 2012), we want the audience to explore this data and interpret it themselves as well.  The strength of digital humanities projects lies in that unless someone pulls up data and does something with it, new understandings will go unexamined.  

The projects we encountered during the environmental scan, with their data visualizations used as the primary tool to display data in many forms, have sparked ideas about how our data on women’s professional wrestling can be exhibited on WordPress.

WORK PLAN, STAFF AND MANAGEMENT

The first steps in creating the GDPW website fall upon the Project Lead, Martin Bueno, who will be responsible for extracting the data.  During this time, Researcher Cathy Melamed will begin to examine and document the history of women’s professional wrestling for the project proposal.

The Project Lead will gather data from Cagematch, the world’s largest wrestling internet database. The Cagematch data used by GDPW will be unbiased, as it will not reflect specific promotions or random dates.  Data from each year will be needed for the last event that took place at Madison Square Garden, which is likely to always have been in December. This yearly wrestling data also allows for a more manageable workload. The data required for each yearly event will consist of: how many matches took place, how many were men’s matches, how many were women’s matches, the date/year, how many men performed, how many women performed, broadcast type, name of event, and name of promotion. The best thing about the Cagematch site is that it provides all this information; no one will need to sit through all these matches and watch them! Lastly, the Project Lead is responsible for tidying the data, as it’s important to ensure it is clean (Wickham, 2014).  If GDPW needs to expand its focus and include additional data for comparison, Cagematch has data for Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum venue dating back to 1974.

When the first ten years of data have been extracted and cleaned, the Project Lead will share it with the Data Visualization team to allow them to begin designing the visualizations. Data Visualization Lead Madison Watkins will present handwritten and hand-drawn rough drafts of how the data could be represented in Tableau.  At the same time, Website Designer Elijah Nunez will need to commence creating the GDPW site on WordPress. They must take into consideration whether plug-ins will be needed, as well as how they will add accessibility features to the site. When the site is opened, it is crucial that the Website Designer sends a wireframe of how they envision the site and what it should look like for the project. 

Less than halfway through the semester, at about week five or six, the data extraction for each year of wrestling in Madison Square Garden should be finished and submitted to the Data Visualization team, who can begin creating intricate and interactive data visualizations using Tableau. At this point, the Project Lead will work closely with each staff member to ensure that all data on Tableau and WordPress are being handled to align with the project’s initial vision. The Data Viz experts should have at least three to four different visualizations towards the end of the project, but only three will be used, and at least one will need to be submitted weekly so that the Web Designer can attach the Tableau data to WordPress. Each data visualization presented will require a summary of what the data means and what can be learned from it.  Throughout the semester, the Researcher/Editor must submit a weekly summary of what they have adjusted or fixed for their part in the project and what they need from other members in order to progress.  This will allow for communication between staff members on what is missing or needs attention. The Researcher/Editor will also oversee writing the summaries of how to use each data visualization so that the web designer can include it in WordPress.  They will also coordinate writing the GDPW white paper.

The Researcher/Editor must then thoroughly check all the information on Tableau, WordPress, and the white paper to ensure everything is correct and accurate. Next, importantly, all staff members will take part in copyediting so that everyone has an understanding of what the final product experience will be.  It is key that everyone takes time to thoroughly proofread all audience-facing text, as mistakes in this area are distracting for the user.

As the project moves forward, there will be a need for a consultant in fields related to wrestling/sports/NY history to weigh in on our progress.  Someone with vast knowledge in these fields can help us ascertain more nuanced information for our site.  Online outreach will begin, and in-person outreach strategized.

During the final weeks, all staff members must complete each task and submit any last-minute changes before presenting the final product. The project manager must thoroughly check the data; the Data Viz and U/X experts must ensure the visualizations and site are working fluidly; the web designer must check if there are any broken URLs and if the page has public accessibility.  Information provided by all staff members must be vigorously cited and connected to actual sources; the use of OpenAI is prohibited, as this project needs to be free of any outside influence besides the tools necessary for the project (Excel, Tableau, WordPress, and Google Docs).

If any team member is unwell or needs help to do work for a particular week, the project manager should be notified, and proper time will be given to allow us to finish up any work that needs to be done. 

All of this is doable in one semester. 

WORK PLAN TIMELINE

Feb 4 – 18 (Phase 0)

• Pitch proposal, assign roles, supervision/guidance (MB)
• Documentation and Research of necessary historical content, start upcoming group blog post (CM)
• Creating WordPress, creating Links, create social media accounts (Reddit and BlueSky) (EN)
• Install Tableau or any software that will be used for data visualization, and look at samples of data visualization. (MW)
• Establish a form of group communication and a Google Drive
• Discuss gender disparity and professional wrestling
• All members should provide any input before the revised proposal pitch due date. They should also add additional writing to the group blog post.
• Possible Zoom meet-up on Feb 18 to discuss anything important and provide updates for upcoming Phase 1.

Feb 19 – Mar 4 (Phase 1)

• Data Extraction, discuss and provide essential interpretation of data, supervision/guidance, floater (MB)
• Provide sample data visuals, sort through data, assist front end (MW)
• Provide sample data visuals, start WordPress web design, sort through data (EN)
• Research any additional information, documentation, crucial user-facing information (CM)
• All members should keep posting their weekly group and solo blogs and should reach out for any concerns.

Mar 5 – 24 (Phase 1.5)

• Oversee all progress of current roles, provide any feedback, update timeline if necessary, float (MB)
• Begin a paper outlining and drafting for the final group paper (CM)
• Create data visuals; provide a summary of why you chose these visuals (EN)
• Create data/map visuals; provide a summary of why you chose these visuals (MW)
• We will vote on which visuals to use moving to Phase 2
• Everyone should be thinking about what they want to include in the final paper and possibly start writing About Us page (CM coordinate)

Mar 25 – Apr 11 (Phase 2)

• Float, supervise, and begin discussion of outreach implementation (MB)
• Writing drafts/documenting and working with the project manager to determine what written information will be added to the site (CM)
• Upload and submit final data visuals to Google Drive and assist the front end with web design (MW)
• Upload and submit final data visuals to Google Drive and commence implementing web design (EN)
• All members should check in from April 8 -11 to see if everything is in order, provide any concerns, request feedback, and ask or check if anything else needs to be done before moving on to Phase 3.

Apr 12 – 20

• Spring Break! Enjoy It!
• Do reach out to the group if anything

Apr 21 – May 5 (Phase 3)

• Supervise and commence outreach implementation (MB)
• Begin adding visuals to the website and finalizing web design (EN)
• Write up and summarize what the audience should be thinking when looking at the data visuals and assist front end (CM)
• Commence outreach on social media and establish a presence; any documents/drafts and updated docs should all be on Google Drive (CM)
• All members should start drafting and/or writing their portion for the final and solo papers.
• In addition to that, personal information should be included on the About Us page.
• The weekend leading up to class on May 5, everything should be completed at this point

May 6 – 18 (Phase X)

• Dress Rehearsal (May 6)
• Last minute fixes, additions, and project polishing (May 7 -12)
• Showcase! (May 13)
• Finalize project reports and submit individual papers (May 20)

FINAL PRODUCT AND DISSEMINATION

The final GDPW digital project will consist of a WordPress site with three different data visualizations that depict the gender disparity in professional wrestling matches throughout the years in New York City. The website will be distributed online within wrestling communities on platforms such as Reddit and BlueSky. It is important that we invite commentary from many perspectives on the inequality gap that persists for women after almost 90 years of inclusion in professional wrestling.  Moreover, other communities may want to examine how the disparity we highlight is comparable to that in other sports. The project lead will publicize the website in person at local wrestling shows within the tri-state area, emphasizing the interactive nature of the visualizations created for this project so that people can form their own opinions.          

Though GDPW may seem small in scale at first, it aims to keep building on the group’s findings. This continuation may include the use of other digital humanities tools that can further ground the project in both academia and the sport of professional wrestling.  The long-term goal is to include data from other venues, dates and cities besides New York and Madison Square Garden.  Expanding the project to include data from a wider range of sources will allow it to gather more eyes on gender disparity in professional wrestling. And though more data can be added, there are sustainability considerations, as staff members may need time to balance workloads from other academic projects, personal lives, and employment. 

In conclusion, the goal of the GDPW project is to create a WordPress website with interactive data visualizations made in Tableau that reveal the gender disparity in professional wrestling in New York City, using data from the final event of each year at Madison Square Garden from 1934 to 2024.   This project has much to offer, as it intersects sports and feminism to examine how gender disparities can be observed through the digital humanities lens.

WORKS CITED

“1980s Professional Wrestling Boom.” 30 December 2024. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_professional_wrestling_boom#:~:text=Lauper%20asked%20Albano%20to%20appear,process%20expanding%20Hogan’s%20young%20fanbase

Barthes, Roland. 1972. “The World of Wrestling.” Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang.

Chisolm, Gerry. 26 December 2023. “Remembering the Black Lady Wrestlers.”  Black Belt Magazine. https://www.blackbeltmag.com/remembering-the-lady-wrestlers

“Cora Livingston.” 29 January 2025. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cora_Livingston

Fields, Sarah K. 2005. “Wrestling.” Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America, pp. 102-120. University of Illinois Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xcnqq.9

Greenberg, Keith E.  2000. Pro Wrestling: From Carnivals to Cable TV. Lerner Publications. ISBN 978-0-8225-3332-0. https://books.google.com/books?id=QsCizgeX_ngC&dq=Mildred+Burke&pg=PA31

Hester, Matthew. 11 August 2010. “The History of Pro Wrestling In The U.S (Part 1)” Bleacher Report. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/433611-the-history-of-pro-wrestling-in-the-us-part-1

Hill-Cann, A., & Burr, V. 2024. “As tough as she is beautiful”:  Discourses of female professional wrestlers in World Wrestling Entertainment’s ‘Evolution.’”  Feminism & Psychology, 34(1), 3-25. https://doi.org/10.1177/09593535231173236

Huang, Junming., Gates, Alexander J., Sinatra, Roberta, & Barabási, Albert-Lázló. 2020. Historical comparison of gender inequality in scientific careers across countries and disciplines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(9), pp. 4609-4616. 

Jarratt, Elizabeth H. 1990. “Feminist issues in sport.” Women’s Studies International Forum 13(5): pp. 491-499. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/28892

Jennings, L.A. 2016. “Cora Livingston and the Spectacular Sport of Wrestling.” Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/cora-livingston-and-the-spectacular-sport-of-wrestling/

KMeizner. 2016. Gender Representation in the WWE based on Wrestlemania data 1985-present. Retrieved 13 February 2025 from  https://studentwork.prattsi.org/infovis/visualization/gender-representation-wwe-based-wrestlemania-data-1985-present/

Laprade, Pat. 2017. Sisterhood of the Squared Circle: The History and Rise of Women’s Wrestling. 9781773050157. Toronto: ECW Press.

Lucas, L. 2024. An exploration of the race and gender representations in professional wrestling in the United States: A qualitative case study. Doctoral dissertation, Georgia Southern University. Retrieved 13 February 2025 from https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4084&context=etd

Spiro, Lisa. 2012.  “This Is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. University of Minnesota Press.

Sports Reference. 2025. https://www.sports-reference.com/

Staid, Mairead S. 2 August 2018.” The Spectacle of Women’s Wrestling.” The Paris Review. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/02/the-spectacle-of-womens-wrestling/

Sterling, Jennifer J., Phillips, Murray G., & McDonald, Mary G. 2017. Doing Sport History in the Digital Present. Journal of Sport History 44(2), pp. 135-145. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/666540.

Stone, Gregory P., and Elias, Norbert. 1971. “Wrestling: The Great American Passion Play.” In Sport: Readings from a Sociological Perspective, edited by Eric Dunning, pp. 301-336. University of Toronto Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt1gxxrtw.26

“The Fabulous Moolah.” 9 February 2025. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Moolah

The Orlando Project. 2025. https://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/orlando/

Wickham, Hadley. 2014. “Tidy data.” Journal of Statistical Software. https://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.pdf

Women Writers Project. 2023. https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/