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A random thought on why I think FeMMA will take off much farther than women's boxing:
The culture of the martial arts is far more accepting of female fighters than the culture of boxing.
Women have always been part of the martial arts culture over the past few thousand years, and up to the present day.
A young woman named Yim Wing Chun (her name means "beautiful springtime") is said to have invented Wing Chun, for example. Ng Mui, a Shaolin abbess, one of the legendary Five Elders who survived the destruction of the Shaolin temple, is said to have invented the White Crane style. In Japan, the naginata (Japanese polearm) has been wielded mostly by women since the Tokugawa period of the 1600s, and its associated martial art, naginatajutsu, is a part of school curriculums for women.
Today, there seems to be relatively greater acceptance for women to be engaged in a martial art such as judo or karate, rather than boxing. In popular media, female martial arts fighters are commonly depicted, e.g. the female martial artists in Hero and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, or the female fighters in fighting video games like Tekken and Street Fighter.
In contrast to the thousands of years of female involvement in the martial arts, Western boxing, which arose from British bare-knuckle prize-fighting in the 1700s, began as an exclusively male preserve. Women only began to break into Western boxing in the latter part of the last century.
In sum, FeMMA isn't really something new: I see it as a progression to martial arts as it used to be, when the women fought alongside the men.
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