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In opening "Without Apology: Girls, Women and the Desire to Fight" with Joyce Carol Oates' rant against women fighters in "On Boxing," Leah Hagar Cohen gets right to the heart of the matter -- there's a squeamishness in our culture about physically demonstrative women which reads female boxers as "monstrous." As a boxing aficionado, a jock and a woman, I'd dismissed Oates' misguided proclamation years ago: How dare a weasely little pipsqueak of a woman writer think she can settle for all time that women’s instinct to express themselves physically paired with their natural aggression is aberrant?



Cohen, herself an admitted pipsqueak, delves deeper into Oates’ charge in "Without Apology" in two ways. First she profiles a group of adolescent girls from Boston’s inner-city and their female boxing coach – and follows their training for most of a year. Also, Cohen chronicles how she succumbs to the visceral hunger to test herself in the ring.

The second half of this equation would seem to have been done before, with Kate Sekules' "The Boxer's Heart," in which the author comes to admire the craft of boxing, then also takes up the sport for its physical challenges and release. Sekules' book is good, but in boxing she never allows herself that release -- rather, she never unleashes herself. And ultimately the reader can't make out the whys of Sekules' angst about that holding back, mostly because the writer herself never figures it out; instead, she gives up, hoping her appreciation of boxing will be enough to sustain her.

Cohen never gives up. Which is surprising because she tells us from the outset that she's spent her life avoiding sports and competitive exertions just as she intellectualizes away her body's need to exist and assert itself in the world. Cohen draws herself here as a disappearing act; she tells us she avoids confrontation, starves in the vain hope that her carnal and emotional needs will dissipate, and prides herself on her civilized, fainting-violet view of the world. We see the rationalizations of a wimp at work.

We discover over the course of her awakening, though, that Cohen is one tough cookie. The way she deadeyes her subject matter -- not just boxing, but the myth of women's inherent fragility -- shows her depth of insight and her willingness to work through rough patches. Cohen digs deep to understand her prickly teenaged fighters and their coach’s quiet ferocity, and each of these women’s hard-boiled need to fight. But this writer makes her bones in owning up to middleclass women’s dispossession of their animal selves, though perhaps she didn't know this until she surprised herself by climbing into the squared circle and putting up her dukes. In doing so, Cohen accomplishes something Sekules couldn’t push through to, something most women refuse even to consider for fear of upsetting the gender-role status quo.

The girls Cohen follows aren’t so determined. One by one they fall away from boxing, as one suspects they might from the beginning. The Rodriguez girls – Jacinta, who’s 15; Sefina, 12; and Candi, 10 – are far more interested either in being kids or in acting as the feminine nurturers to whoever’s having a bad day at the gym. Jacinta’s best friend, Nikki, whose high spirits and deep reservoir of fury could be the perfect combination for a fighter, nonetheless quails in the two sanctioned fights she gets. With a helpless but abusive mother as well as her own budding lesbianism piloting the ship, Nikki can’t find her way to take boxing seriously. By the end, all of the girls drift away, though one could argue none had been fully there from the start. The girls’ trainer, Raphi, loses her fire too, transferring her energies as a coach into motherhood and her increasingly troubled marriage.

Cohen and the reader want more from these women, and are disappointed when their boxing stories crumble under the slightest pressure. Though it doesn’t help the storytelling aspect of “Without Apology,” women’s boxing is still in its infancy, and without the facilities, structure, training and sparring opportunities necessary to sustain it, young women like the Rodriguez sisters will have a hard time hanging in there. Cohen also knows that, ultimately, women must find their own paths to being alive and vital. And just as we see the Rodriguez girls and Raphi tethering themselves to traditional feminine roles, both Nikki and Cohen herself bravely strike out in search of how much more they can be. “Each time I return to the gym,” she writes, “it’s as though I recover substance, ferocity, vigor.” Truly this is a woman’s work, and it’s never done.

Cohen’s writing itself is a joy. This is a book at once light on its feet but still cogent, measured and deliberate. A novelist and author of two nonfiction books, Cohen writes about boxing as if instinctually, her prose perfectly paced and always packing the right punch. Also, she's as observant a student of the human psychology of power and weakness as Angelo Dundee or Cus D'Amato, however more tempered her reactions are to it. And just as Cohen is being seduced into the fight game, so are we captivated by this woman’s reach into the furthest recesses of herself for what it means to be human.