Bayley vs. Lee: Thrilling Women's MMA Showdown!

Bayley challenges AJ Lee for the Intercontinental Championship on Monday's "WWE Raw. " WWE via Getty Images On Monday night, Bayley will step into the ring like she has for the better part of the past 20 years. It should be a feeling and a moment she’s experienced thousands of times before, yet there’s something undeniably different — intangible — when it comes to this go-round.

“That seems like a sentence that could have never been said, even two years ago,” Bayley confessed in an interview with Uncrowned. To lift the curtain, Bayley is referring to her upcoming Women’s Intercontinental Championship match against AJ Lee, slated for Monday’s “WWE Raw. ” It will be far from Bayley’s first championship match — it won’t even be her first match against the recently returned Lee — but, in many ways, it's a culmination of how hard Bayley and countless others have worked to get women’s wrestling to where it is today.

“[The women’s division] is definitely the strongest it’s ever been, and that’s saying a lot,” Bayley said. “I grew up wanting to do this based on how amazing the women were in the Attitude Era with Trish, Lita, Gail Kim, Victoria, Molly Holly. Right now, I think we have such a strong division, with women who come from all over the world, from all different backgrounds — it’s really cool to think that we have something or someone for everyone.

Everybody is a little bit different and I think that’s what draws in such a large audience. ” Trish Stratus and Lita aside, Bayley is part of perhaps the most influential group of women in the history of professional wrestling, The Four Horsewomen. Alongside Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks (now Mercedes Moné), the quartet helped usher in a new era for the sport in the mid-2010s, coined the Women’s Revolution.