Minerva (Josephine Blatt)

c. 1869 – 1 September 1923 · New York / New Jersey

Josephine Blatt — performing as Minerva — was the most publicised American strongwoman of the 1890s. Backed by Richard K. Fox of the National Police Gazette, she claimed the women's heavyweight lifting championship, and her hip-and-harness lift at Hoboken in 1895 was for many years listed by Guinness as the heaviest weight ever raised by a woman.

Origins

Accounts of her early life disagree. Census records cited on Wikipedia make her Josephine Schauer, born in New York around 1869 to German immigrant parents; an 1893 interview in The Mirror of Manchester, New Hampshire, has her born in Hamburg in 1865; later press placed her youth in Hoboken or Elizabeth, New Jersey. Her early challenge letters were signed "Josie Wohlford" (also spelled Wahlford). In that interview she said she met the American strongman Charles P. Blatt in 1887 and went on the stage with him; the two reportedly married in 1888, and Fox is said to have suggested the stage name Minerva.

The work

Almost all evidence for Minerva's career comes from the Police Gazette, a sensational weekly that mentioned her more than twenty-five times in the 1890s. Her published challenges covered dumbbell lifting with one or both hands, the harness lift, horseshoe breaking and the catching of cannonballs. She claimed a victory over the London strongwoman Victorine, and Fox presented her with a championship belt on 19 December 1893; a long exchange of challenges with her rival "Yucca" never produced a reported match.

With Blatt she toured North and South America and Europe for about twenty years — with the Orrin Brothers Circus in Mexico in the early 1890s, briefly running a resort in San Antonio, Texas, in 1892, and reportedly with Barnum's circus, the Rentz circus in Europe and on the vaudeville circuits. She also wrestled, and has been called the first woman to win a wrestling championship in the United States; she later lost that title to Alice Williams.

At a glance

• Size: about 5 ft 8 in and 165 lb as a young woman, by a later Gazette writer's recollection; 185 lb in an 1892 San Antonio report; her husband later put her usual weight at around 230 lb.
• Hip-and-harness lift, Bijou Theatre, Hoboken, 1895: the contemporary Gazette report (4 May 1895) describes eighteen men on a platform, about 3,000 lb in all. The often-quoted 3,564 lb with twenty-three men comes from a 1937 Strength & Health article and was later adopted by Guinness, which gave the date as 15 April 1895.
• Fox presented her with a gold trophy for the lift on 29 April 1895. The belt and the trophy are both lost.
• Her heaviest claimed overhead barbell press was 185 lb.

Later life

Minerva retired in 1910 and, by most accounts, invested in real estate, living in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and Tottenville, Staten Island. She died on 1 September 1923.

Legacy

Jan Todd's 1990 study in Iron Game History argues that Minerva received more mainstream publicity than any professional strongwoman before or since, with the possible exception of Katie Sandwina — whose American arrival came almost exactly as Minerva retired.

Disputed and unresolved

Her real name, birthplace and birth year are uncertain. The 3,564 lb figure cannot be traced to any contemporary source; Todd found only the Gazette's figure of eighteen men and about 3,000 lb, including the platform and chains. David Willoughby, in The Super Athletes, argued that the lift was helped by pulling inwards on the chains and suggested that a strict harness lift of 2,800–2,900 lb was within her reach, though he cited no evidence.