She is tough, she is rough, and with her victory this week she managed to get right up the noses of those in the boxing fraternity who find the thought of two women boxing distasteful and even offensive.
When men engage in the socalled noble art, it's heroic, they reason. When women do, it's barbaric. Jane Couch's application for a professional licence was rejected by the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBC) last year. The BBBC spent 20 minutes discussing her case and then decided against it on what it said was medical grounds.
With the help of the Equal Opportunities Commission, Couch took the case to an industrial tribunal in south London. At a hearing last month one of the reasons put forward against licensing women was that they were too unstable during menstruation to be allowed in the ring.
On Monday, the tribunal condemned the board, saying that there was "incontrovertible evidence" that Couch had not been treated in the same way as a man. It ruled that the board must reconsider the application and treat it fairly this time.
Couch was understandably jubilant. "When you are a training athlete, it is an insult to any woman to be called unstable because you have periods. I do what I do and I do it well. I was very shocked with the defence used in the tribunal and what the board had to say," the women's world welterweight champion said.
The decision means that, assuming her new application is accepted, she can now make a living in the country where so far she has only been allowed box as an amateur. The curly-haired pugilist is also seeking six-figure damages for sexual discrimination and loss of earnings.
Couch must be pinching herself. Three years ago, she freely admits, her life revolved around cigarettes, beer and chips.
The daughter of a fisherman, she grew up in the small port of Fleetwood, Lancashire. Aggression had always been a way of sorting out problems for Couch. She was expelled from school for throwing a typewriter at a teacher and beating up a headmaster when he told her not to come back.
Out of school she gutted fish for a while and later worked for £80 a week making sticks of rock in a Blackpool factory. On Friday nights she went on the tear, invariably getting involved in pub brawls - with both men and women - at a variety of the resort's hostelries. The most oft-reported skirmish occurred when one incensed pub landlord knocked himself out after he butted his rowdy customer in the head. Couch emerged from the melee completely unhurt. Irish woman boxer Deirdre Gogarty played a part in Couch's conversion to the sport. Three years ago, Couch was watching a documentary which featured the Irish boxer. The woman now known as the Fleetwood Assassin said: "I could do that" and persuaded a local all-male boxing club to let her train there. She won her very first fight against a policewoman.
It was nice, she said afterwards, to beat up a police officer without getting arrested. Couch was celebrating her fourth amateur win when she met the man who has moulded her career for the last two years. "We were drinking everyone else under the table and I said to her, `you are a lovely girl, what a shame you can't box'," says Tex Woodward, who has trained Lennox Lewis and Frank Bruno. Couch responded to the taunt with a challenge. She told Woodward that if he agreed to train her they would go to America and she would become world champion. Woodward invited her to move in with him and his wife in Gloucestershire. Two years ago she won her world title. The defending champion, a French woman, spent three days in hospital recovering from the bout.
Because Couch could not get a licence, she had to turn down an offer of £10,000 for a fight in Wembley Arena last year. And although she has defended her world title twice in America, where women are allowed to box professionally, her manager says that financially they are "just about breaking even". But all that is to change, they hope.
Her manager still describes her as a fairly inexperienced boxer - "just out of the novice stage". She loves dance music and the occasional drink. Her preferred beverage is Jack Daniels whisky. Her relationship with her fisherman boyfriend came to an end because of her boxing career but they are still good friends. Not everyone is pleased about her recent victory. At least one boxing commentator says that Couch, rather than being the Emmeline Pankhurst of boxing, has set back the cause of the sport for women in Britain - primarily, he claims, because she is "an abnormally bad boxer".
"The newspapers love her talk of barroom brawls in Blackpool," he says, "and now she actually believes she is a good fighter. They have created a monster."
The real monster, however, may be the rampant chauvinism that caused former boxer Henry Cooper to comment in the wake of Couch's victory that "women are for loving, not for hitting". Certain other professional boxing figures are apoplectic at the thought of women being allowed to join their hallowed ranks.
So in terms of posterity it is largely inconsequential how good or bad a boxer Couch actually is. It may be some time before she gets to fight in her home country - she may even lose her title by then.
It doesn't really matter. For future female British boxing champions, indeed, all women who choose to box, her name is set to acquire all the resonance of the most prominent suffragettes.