Cross sex matches were explicitly banned in the UK for quite some time. (Staging exhibition bouts at fairs had been a workaround the prohibition on boxing for some time.)
As it is, it wasn't until 1998 that Jane Crouch succeeded in a legal action against the BBBC to be granted a licence as a professional boxer.
Most fighters will tell you they can deal with the physical pain of boxing, the jabs, the hooks and the uppercuts. That the most sickening blows take place outside the ring. That the real frustrations are with landing fights, or dealing with agents and promoters. Or in Couch's case, winning her licence to fight in the first place.
She was determined to make change happen. It took her three years to get her day in court. She needed the help of Diana Rose and the late Sarah Lesley, who were both working pro bono, and the backing of the equality opportunity commission.
"It was three women against the establishment, and it was the last male bastion that we knocked down," Couch says.
They were trying to overturn the British Boxing Board of Control's decision to refuse her licence. Part of the reasoning behind that decision was that, being a woman, pre-menstrual syndrome made her 'too unstable to box'.
Couch had been fighting for around four years. Sometimes overseas, other times in unlicensed bouts in the UK. She was a world welterweight champion, but still portrayed as something of a pariah. The oldest boxing paper in the land, Boxing News, steadfastly refused to cover women's boxing at that time, because it wasn't licensed.
In March 1998, Couch was successful in her claim for sexual discrimination against the British Boxing Board of Control. She had won the right to box professionally in the UK. It was a landmark ruling.
"I thought, everything is going to change now, I'll be able to get on shows at home and get better paid," Couch says. "It was a great day. I don't think I'll ever forget it, we three women hugging each other and thinking we're going to change everything.
"But then as I was leaving the courtroom Diana said to me: 'You do realise this is just the beginning'. I never knew what she meant, until now."
Acceptance did not come overnight. The pre-eminent British promoters of the time still didn't want anything to do with Couch and were vocal about it.
One of the most prominent, Frank Warren, didn't promote a female boxer until the latter part of the 2000s. For months after winning her right to fight, Couch still found herself a polarising figure. They asked on talk shows: Was it really OK to allow a woman into the ring?
"I don't know why I carried on, because winning that case had no benefit to me whatsoever," Couch says. "I still had to box abroad, I was still berated by the press. I was still frozen out by promoters in this country. I walked into a room and people laughed. So no, the case wasn't worth it."
The "stigma" as Couch puts it, might be fading but it still exists.
Today, the British Boxing Board of Control lacks female insight. It is the regulator of the sport, overseeing hundreds of shows a year, appointing referees, judges and handing out licences to fighters.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/boxing/52942479