Patricia McCormick, arguably the greatest female bullfighter of all time and known as the “Texas Torera”, has died:
When Patricia McCormick realized she didn’t have a future in music, she chose a career as filled with drama, passion and death as any of the operas she longed to sing.
She became a matadora, breaking long-standing barriers against women and Americans in machismo-saturated Mexican bullrings and performing before enthusiastic crowds in more than 300 fights. In 1963, Sports Illustrated wrote that McCormick “may well be the greatest woman bullfighter who ever lived.”
Over more than 10 years, she was gored six times, once so brutally that a priest administered last rites over her mangled body. But she recovered and fought a few more years before finally exiting the arena in the early 1960s, complaining, among other things, that the bulls had become too small.
She spent the rest of her life far from the public eye, pouring herself into her watercolors of horses and bulls and working as an administrative assistant at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design.
Her career spanned ten years in the 1950s, facing more than 600 bulls. She was gored six times. Of her a renowned bullfighter once said “She fights larger bulls than does any other woman … and she kills well. Her only defect is that she is a woman.”
Her accomplishments would have been remarkable at any time or place but they’re all the more so in the 1950s in the land of machismo.
I’ve been reading lots of Hemingway lately, I wonder what he thought of her?
And I wonder how many people she dealt with as an Admin that would have had their jaws fall off if they only knew?
I find stories like hers fascinating. Things that go beyond the stereotypes.