October 30, 2016 — TD Garden, Boston. For nineteen years, Hell in a Cell had belonged to the men. Thirty-three Cell matches, zero women. Then Sasha Banks and Charlotte Flair closed a pay-per-view inside the structure — and the argument about whether women belonged in it ended the night it started.
The Setup
The Cell had been WWE’s most feared gimmick since 1997. Undertaker and Shawn Michaels invented it. Mankind fell off it. Triple H and Batista bled in it. It was the match you got when a feud had gone past the point of no return — and for nearly two decades, that was a door only men were allowed to walk through.
2016 had already been a year of firsts for WWE’s women. The Divas division was retired at WrestleMania 32 and replaced with a Women’s Championship, presented as a serious title for serious wrestlers. Charlotte Flair and Sasha Banks spent the summer and fall trading that title back and forth in a rivalry that kept getting bigger — and on the October 10 Raw, Banks issued the challenge herself: Hell in a Cell. Charlotte accepted. General Manager Mick Foley made it official, and then made it bigger still: the match would close the show.
That last part mattered as much as the Cell itself. WWE billed the night as a “triple main event” — Roman Reigns vs. Rusev and Kevin Owens vs. Seth Rollins also fought inside the Cell — but only one match can go on last. For the first time in company history, a women’s match would main-event a pay-per-view main card.
The Match
It started before the Cell even lowered. Charlotte jumped Banks during her entrance, and the two brawled through the crowd and up the side of the structure. Then came the spot that set the tone for everything after: Charlotte powerbombed Banks through an announce table at ringside. Medics brought out a stretcher. For a few minutes, it looked like the historic match might end before it officially began — Banks nearly carried out, Charlotte nearly declared the winner by forfeit.
Banks got off the stretcher. She walked into the Cell under her own power, and the match was on.
What followed was twenty-two minutes of everything the Cell is supposed to be. Banks paid tribute to Eddie Guerrero with the Three Amigos and a frog splash. Charlotte slammed her back-first onto a steel chair. Banks hit a Meteora off the Cell wall. The story of the match was Banks’ back — the table spot had supposedly wrecked it, and Charlotte worked it relentlessly. In the closing sequence, Banks tried to powerbomb Charlotte through a table, but her back gave out. Charlotte took over, threw Banks onto the table twice, and finished her with Natural Selection to win her third Raw Women’s Championship.
Why It Still Matters
Ten years on, the debate around this match is almost as interesting as the match itself. Was it a genuine glass-ceiling moment, or a marketing checkbox — a company that had kept women out of its most violent structure for nineteen years suddenly deciding the time was right?
Here’s the thing: both can be true, and the match itself is the rebuttal to the cynical half of that argument. Banks and Charlotte didn’t just occupy the Cell; they used it. The brawl before the bell, the table spot, the stretcher tease, the back injury worked through to the finish — it was a Hell in a Cell match in structure and in spirit, not a regular match that happened to take place inside a cage. Bleacher Report graded it the best match of the night. The crowd in Banks’ hometown of Boston — the same building where she grew up dreaming about this — treated it like the main event it was.
And the door, once opened, stayed open. Women’s Cell matches, women’s main events, women’s Royal Rumbles and WrestleMania main events all followed — none of them happen without October 30, 2016, when two wrestlers walked into a structure that had never held women before and made it impossible to argue they didn’t belong there.
Sources: Hell in a Cell (2016) ; Bleacher Report — Sasha Banks vs. Charlotte: Winner and Reaction from WWE Hell in a Cell 2016 ; Cageside Seats — Hell in a Cell 2016 results and reactions
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