Katie Sandwina

6 May 1884 – 21 January 1952 · Vienna, Austria → United States

Katie Sandwina, born Katharina Brumbach into a circus family, was the most prominent strongwoman of the early twentieth century. Her stage act with Barnum & Bailey from 1911 onwards was watched and reviewed by hundreds of thousands of audiences, and her overhead lifts of her husband, Max Heymann, are among the most credibly witnessed strength feats of the era because they were performed nightly, in front of paying customers, for over a decade.

Origins

Brumbach was born in Vienna in May 1884 to a travelling circus family of fourteen children. Her father, Philip, was a Bavarian wrestler and lifter; her mother, Johanna, performed in the same act. She was lifting on stage by her early teens. Her stage name — Sandwina — was adopted in her twenties as a feminisation of "Sandow," and according to family tradition was given to her after a contest in which she defeated Eugen Sandow himself. The contest is documented in family memoirs but not in Sandow's own; the matter is unresolved.

The work

Sandwina married Max Heymann, a smaller circus acrobat, in 1900; he became her stage partner and the principal weight in her act. She joined Ringling Brothers in 1907 and Barnum & Bailey in 1911, and was advertised in their programmes as "Sandwina, the Strongest Woman in the World." Her act centred on overhead lifts: she pressed Heymann from her shoulder to arms' length with one hand; she carried him across the stage with one arm extended; she shouldered a small cannon for cannon-firing routines. She also bent iron bars, broke horseshoes, and resisted teams of men in tug-of-war setups.

She remained with Barnum & Bailey, then Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey after the 1919 merger, until the early 1920s. After leaving the circus she ran a tavern with Heymann in Queens, New York, and continued to give occasional exhibitions. She was elected the first vice-president of the Ladies' Barbell Club of New York in 1948.

"Mrs. Sandwina lifted her husband from the stage, raised him over her head with the right arm only, and held him there until the band finished the chorus."

Notable feats

The figures most consistently reported from Sandwina's stage career are:

• One-hand overhead "press" of her husband, Max Heymann, weighing approximately 165 lb (75 kg). Performed nightly during her Barnum & Bailey years, 1911–1918.
• Two-hands overhead lift of three men on a barbell apparatus weighing, with men, in the region of 600 lb (272 kg).
• Bending iron bars of 0.75 in (19 mm) diameter into a horseshoe shape across the back of her neck.
• Resisting two horses harnessed in opposite directions with a chain held in her teeth.

The press-with-husband is the most evidentially solid feat in her record: it was reviewed in the New York and Chicago press as part of every Barnum & Bailey season for nearly a decade, photographed repeatedly, and confirmed by reviewers from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Whether the figure of 165 lb is exact for Heymann's bodyweight at any given performance is harder to fix; he was a small man and reasonable estimates put him at 145–175 lb across his career.

Method

No training book. Such accounts as survive — recollections from Heymann, articles in the German-language strength press of the 1910s, occasional mentions in Bob Hoffman's Strength & Health — describe daily rehearsal of the act itself. She did not, by the standards of the period, train as a competitive lifter; her strength was developed and maintained on the routines she was paid for. She bore two children during her circus years and continued to perform within weeks of each.

Legacy

Sandwina is the figure who established that the female strongwoman was not a sideshow novelty but a genuine performer at the centre of a major touring circus. Her presence in Barnum & Bailey's billing — as a headline act, paid as such — opened the way for a generation of strongwomen who followed: Joan Rhodes, Pudgy Stockton, Ivy Russell. Jan Todd's writing on the history of women's strength training, particularly in Iron Game History, places Sandwina at the centre of the pre-war tradition.

Disputed and unresolved

Several claims attached to Sandwina are folklore. The most persistent is that she once lifted an automobile off a child trapped beneath it; the story circulates in twentieth-century strength magazines but does not appear in contemporary press. The contest with Sandow, traditionally placed in New York around 1902, is not in Sandow's own records and is at best partially documented. The figure of 300 lb pressed overhead, sometimes cited, is not consistent with the act she actually performed; her pressing weight was Max Heymann, and that was the demonstrable figure.

Her birth name is variously given as Katharina, Catherine, and Kati; her stage name as Sandwina, Sandwinna, and the Great Sandwina. The Library of Congress holdings of Barnum & Bailey programmes use "Sandwina" consistently from 1911 onwards.