Katie Sandwina

6 May 1884 – 21 January 1952 · Vienna, Austria → New York

Katie Sandwina, born Katharina Brumbach into a German circus family, was the best-known strongwoman of the early twentieth century. Her two seasons in the centre ring of the Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1911 and 1912, lifting her husband Max Heymann overhead with one hand, made her a national celebrity in the United States.

At a glance

• Height and weight: measured by a panel of physicians at Madison Square Garden in April 1911 at 5 ft 9¾ in (1.77 m) and 210 lb (95 kg). Circus posters claimed 6 ft 1 in and 220 lb.
• Best-known feats: pressing her husband (about 156–165 lb) overhead with one arm; holding three men overhead; a 242-lb overhead lift witnessed by Edmond Desbonnet in Paris in 1906.
• Stage name: "Sandwina", a feminine form of Sandow.

Origins

Brumbach was born on 6 May 1884, according to the historian Jan Todd in or just outside Vienna, in the wagon of her parents' travelling circus; some sources give Essen, Germany, instead. Her parents, Philippe and Johanna Brumbach, were both circus performers — her father reputedly one of the strongest men in Germany in the 1890s — and she was the second of fifteen or sixteen children, several of whom also performed as strongwomen. As a teenager in her father's show she wrestled challengers from the audience for a prize of 100 marks; her husband, Max Heymann, said he met her that way, though the romantic version of the story is doubted by historians. According to the couple's 1930 census return she was nineteen when they married.

The work

By 1905 she and Heymann were performing in Europe as "The Sandwinas", and Desbonnet wrote about the act in Paris in 1906. They played small-time American vaudeville in 1908 and the Orpheum circuit in 1909 — their first son, Theodore, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on 25 January 1909 — before returning to Europe. John Ringling saw them in Paris in 1910 and engaged them for the Barnum & Bailey Circus, which they joined at Madison Square Garden in March 1911. Moved into the spotlight after a press event at which physicians declared her "a perfect woman", she became one of the main draws of the 1911 season and was brought back for 1912, when the circus billed her as the strongest woman that ever lived.

Her later career included circus work for the WPA in the 1930s. In the 1940s she and Heymann ran a café and tavern in Queens, New York, where she would still perform small feats for customers. She died of cancer in New York on 21 January 1952. Her second son, Alfred, born in 1918, became an actor.

"Carelessly, laughingly, she tosses her husband about as though he were not flesh and bone, but merely an effigy of inflated rubber." — Marguerite Martyn, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1911

Notable feats

The feats most consistently reported from Sandwina's career are:

• Pressing Max Heymann overhead with one arm — he was 5 ft 6 in and 156–165 lb by contemporary reports — repeated nightly in her circus act.
• Lifting Heymann and their son Teddy together, more than 200 lb, with one arm, at the April 1911 press event at Madison Square Garden.
• Holding three men overhead with one hand, the finale of her act at the Olympia in Paris in 1910.
• An overhead lift of 242 lb witnessed by Desbonnet in Paris in 1906, the bar shouldered "in the German style" by rolling it up the body.
• Bending steel bars and resisting the pull of horses.

Method

Sandwina left no training book, and her own accounts are contradictory. In 1911 she told reporters she had never trained to be strong — "I was just born strong and big, that's all" — and did only a little light dumbbell work to keep supple; physical-culture writers of the time claimed she had trained systematically since childhood. She was performing up to the evening before her first son's birth.

Legacy

Sandwina showed that a strongwoman could be a headline attraction in the largest American circus and be marketed as a model of health and beauty rather than a sideshow curiosity. She remains the reference point for later strongwomen and for the history of women's strength, including Pudgy Stockton and Minerva. Jan Todd's research in Iron Game History is the most careful modern account of her career.

Disputed and unresolved

Strength historians have long argued over how much Sandwina actually lifted overhead and in what style, and even Todd declines to list her "best lifts" for that reason. The most famous story — that in New York in 1902 she lifted 300 lb overhead after Eugen Sandow could only bring it to his chest, and took her stage name from the victory — is widely repeated but rests on later publicity, not contemporary reports, and does not fit the record that she and Heymann were working in Europe in those years. A claimed overhead record of 296 lb, said to have stood until Karyn Marshall surpassed it in 1987, is similarly unverified. Her birthplace (Vienna or Essen) and the date of her marriage also vary between sources.