Pudgy Stockton

7 August 1917 – 26 June 2006 · Santa Monica, California

Abbye "Pudgy" Stockton was the central figure in the Muscle Beach scene that ran in Santa Monica from the late 1930s into the 1950s, and the most widely photographed and read female lifter of mid-century American physical culture. Her column in Strength & Health, "Barbelles," was the first regular national women's strength training feature.

Origins

Eville was born in Santa Monica in August 1917. She took up weight training in her late teens with her future husband Les Stockton, weighed under 100 lb when she started, and through systematic barbell training added muscle and bodyweight to a degree that was unusual for an American woman of the period. She and Les Stockton became fixtures of the Muscle Beach scene in Santa Monica, where outdoor lifting and gymnastic exhibitions had taken hold by the late 1930s.

The work

Pudgy Stockton became, through Muscle Beach exhibitions, magazine photography, and her own writing, the most visible American woman lifter of the 1940s and 1950s. She wrote the "Barbelles" column in Strength & Health from 1944 to 1953, ran the Salon of Figure Development in Los Angeles, and organised the first women's weightlifting contest sanctioned by the AAU in 1947. Her photographs in Strength & Health and on magazine covers of the period reached an audience that had no other regular access to images of trained female lifters.

Notable feats

• Editor, "Barbelles" column, Strength & Health, 1944–1953.
• Organiser, first AAU-sanctioned women's weightlifting contest, 1947.
• Operator of the Salon of Figure Development gymnasium, Los Angeles.
• Documented overhead lifts at her own bodyweight (around 115 lb) and partner-lifting routines on Muscle Beach.

Method

Stockton trained with conventional barbell and dumbbell programmes, drawing on the published material in Strength & Health and on the Muscle Beach lifting community. Her own writing emphasised that women could and should train with weights at substantial loads — a position that was contested in the popular press of the period and that her photographs and column substantially refuted.

Legacy

Stockton is the proximate ancestor of the late-twentieth-century women's lifting and bodybuilding traditions. The 1947 AAU contest is the founding moment of organised women's competitive weightlifting in the United States. She lived to eighty-eight and died in California in June 2006. Jan Todd's research in Iron Game History is the authoritative source on her career.

Disputed and unresolved

Stockton's specific lifting figures are less well-documented than her career visibility, partly because women's lifting in the 1940s did not have a federation framework to record them in. The figures she gave in print are her own and are reasonably consistent across sources.