Circus Strongwomen of the 19th Century
By: Dayna Latham
Tags: Strength, Feminism, Cultural Studies, Fitness, Counterculture

Such performers and their success are an often cited element of counter culture, in response to rigid victorian era expressions of femininity.

Elise Serafin Luftmann

Luftmann is one of the earliest documented strongwomen circus performers, touring Europe in the 1830s.

It is worth noting that Luftmann didn’t share the same muscular, bodybuilder-esque appearance of her successors. Her appeal lay in the element of surprise, her ability to perform strength acts whilst still upholding victorian feminine ideals of grace, beauty and delicacy.

She was famed for the supposed juxtaposition of her femininity, and her strength and skill. It would take time for society to be ready for the acts of those to follow.

2. Katie Sandwina (Lady Hercules)

Katarina Brumbach was born in Vienna, in 1884 to Bavarian parents who were part of the German circus circuit. As part of her act, she would ask for male volunteers, then wrestle them, and compete in a ‘lift off’ against them

She remained undefeated until retirement and thus proved she wasn’t merely ‘strong for a girl’ to anyone who dared to doubt it.

One of the men to volunteer themselves at her show was Eugene Sandow — often considered the father of modern bodybuilding. It was after this famed victory against Sandow that Brumbach created the stage name Katie Sandwina. Sandwina is to this day considered to be one of the strongest female athletes to have ever lived.

She was also the subject of one of the first positive articles on this topic, written by Kate Carew, one of the first women of popular culture interviews, in April 1911.

3. Josephine Shauer Blatt (Minerva)

Minerva is most famous for her 1895 contribution to the Guinness Book of World Records, for the largest weight ever moved by a female — a staggering 3,564lbs. She regularly performed deadlifts of 700lbs, and single arm snatches of 100lbs on stage.

Minerva grew up training gymnastics and got into bodybuilding at an early age. She married an American strongman, Charles B. Platt and the couple toured the US as a husband and wife strength show.

Along with her rival Vulcana, Minerva was one of the first strongwomen to amass enough in wages to actually retire and raise a family with fiscal ease. This — inconceivable to Luftmann only half a century prior — showed the degree of rising popularity that such circus acts benefitted from as a growing form of counterculture.

Truly, circus strongwoman performers were the first exposure many of their audience members had to the notion that women could be celebrated for traditionally masculine traits. These women started to pry open male spaces, and demonstrated that women could in fact have autonomous lives, in a career of their own prerogative.

In this way they pioneered the inclusion of women in the fitness industry of the 20th century. In particular, they can be credited with starting the womens’ competitive strength sports movement. Circus strongwomen were celebrated for their strength over 100 years before women were able to compete internationally in Weightlifting, Powerlifting or Strongman.

Many arguments were made throughout the 20th century that weight training would de-feminise women, make them infertile, prevent them from fulfilling ‘maternal duties’, and even ‘turn’ them homosexual…

Most of these, naturally, came from men who felt de-masculinated by women athletes, who felt authority, control and privilege slipping through their fingers in the boom of and subsequent quasi-democratisation of the fitness industry.

All of these arguments were disproven over time but the misconception that weight training will make women ‘bulky’ still lingers, and is still deterring many women from ‘lifting heavy’ today.

Despite the greatly commendable feminist overtones of their work, and their incredible achievements, the sad truth is that such women were treated rather badly.

They were seen largely through a patriarchal lens — as human oddities, essentially ‘freaks’ to be exhibited, exploited, objectified, and laughed at in the name of entertainment.