It’s August 26, 1970, and the Women’s Strike for Equality is happening in major cities across the country. Male anchors moderate the news coverage surrounding the event — like ABC’s Howard K. Smith, who says that women may take “a little longer” to tame than expected. He quotes West Virginia Sen. Jennings Randolph in describing the women’s liberation movement as “a small band of bra-less bubbleheads.” We meet Jacque Davison, a woman who’s expressing her disagreement with the movement itself. And in the final moments of the segment, we see Davison in a physical fight with a female protester.This was the televised debut of what’s colloquially referred to as the “catfight,” a lens through which men view a physical altercation between women. Male broadcasters used this fight as an example of why feminism would never flourish. Susan J. Douglass, author of Where the Girls Are, explains that the female row became a metaphor in this way, but it was also something of a spectacle. She describes it as “two women, often opposites, locked in a death grip that brought them both crashing down into the muck. Both women were sullied; no one won. Meanwhile, the men, dry, clean, and tidy, were off in some wood-paneled den relaxing, having a drink and a smoke, and being reasonable.”First, let’s define what exactly we’re talking about when we talk about the female fight. According to Douglass, the earliest iterations featured “a traditional wife (blond)” and “a grasping, craven careerist (brunette).” And while physical combat between women isn’t something invented by men, it certainly endures in pop culture because of its appeal to the male sex. As we learned in Seinfeld, “Men think if women are grabbing and clawing at each other, there’s a chance they might somehow kiss.”And while the female fight may have gotten its start on cable news, it’s since made a home for itself in nearly every other genre of television.The female fight holds a seminal place in the nighttime soaps of the 1980s, like Dallas, but Dynasty is perhaps the most notorious example. Joan Collins and Linda Evans played two warring women who tussle inexplicably often and in the strangest of ways. (Once they ended up in a lily pond.) Though the scenes seem silly now, this was just 10 years after that ABC broadcast set up the idea that women fight each other for no reason, that they can't be "tamed," as it were. So, really, did it matter that their skirmishes came seemingly out of nowhere? In a 2007 interview with the Chicago Tribune , Collins reflected on this plot device. “The first time we did it, the ratings went through the roof,” she said. “So, from then on, we had to do it every season afterward.”