Fifty years ago, on May 3, 1975, at the Central YMCA in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a formidable 22-year-old woman named Jan Todd broke the world record in the women’s deadlift. The prior record, set in France by Jane de Vesley in 1926, was 392 pounds. Jan Todd deadlifted 394.5 pounds.

The 2.5-pound difference may seem small, but the decades separating their records made this feat momentous. Strength training, which was surprisingly popular among Victorian women thanks to reform movements that sought to improve health in schools and society through exercise, had fallen out of favor among women in the 20th century. (A professional turf war between medical doctors and exercise teachers over what we now call “health care” resulted in doctors persuading the public that heavy resistance exercise was dangerous.) So, by the 1970s, women had few—if any—accessible role models of great physical strength. Todd changed this.

Jan Todd squatting at the U.S. Powerlifting Federation Women’s Nationals in Los Angeles, in 1980.

At the very moment when men’s bodybuilding began to shift from being a fringe pursuit to being more mainstream (Pumping Iron, the book that spawned the iconic 1977 documentary film of the same name, became a long-shot bestseller about two weeks before Todd set her deadlift record), strength training for women finally found a forceful and appealing symbol in this confident young woman studying for her master’s degree to become a schoolteacher.

But Todd’s world-record feat didn’t only set an example for women who wanted to be stronger and more muscular. Her existence helped blaze the trail for the first women’s bodybuilding and powerlifting competitions (both in 1977), the first women’s Olympic weightlifting competition (in 2000 at the Sydney summer Games), and the phenomenal muscular strength of today’s female athletes, such as Ilona Maher and Serena Williams.

jan todd powerlifting

During more than a decade of competitive lifting, Todd racked up so many more world records that the Guinness Book called her “the strongest woman in the world.” Sports Illustrated ran an eight-page profile of her, calling her “an attractive young woman with a body admirably adapted to its labor.” Johnny Carson even invited Todd to break one of her own records on The Tonight Show. When he asked her why she lifted weights, she gave a modest answer: It “keeps me in pretty good shape” and satisfies “a fascination in what is difficult,” she said. (The segment can be viewed just after the 52:00 mark of the episode, on YouTube here.)

Even when Todd retired from competitive lifting, earning a PhD and becoming an academic historian at the University of Texas at Austin, she continued to push the sport forward. Her research discoveries are the reason we now know about the all-but-forgotten history of heavy resistance training among Victorian girls and women on both sides of the Atlantic.

jan todd

In her doctoral thesis, which was later published as the book Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women 1800–1870, Todd identified among the Victorians “an ideological movement that argued women had as much right to physical strength, muscularity, and robust health as men did.” This movement honored women’s bodies as having “strength, size, and substance,” an ideal that Todd dubbed “Majestic Womanhood.” The project of building such bodies, Todd noted, carried remarkable ethical and political implications—which are still relevant to women today.

Victorian advocates for highly challenging exercise regimens, Todd wrote, “viewed women’s physical potential from a much more egalitarian perspective” than teachers of gentle calisthenics did, by and large. One early women’s strength training advocate, J.A. Beaujeu, promised that women’s gymnastics would “produce ‘souls of fire, in iron hearts’” in his 1828 book, A Treatise on Gymnastic Exercises, or Calisthenics, for the Use of Young Ladies. Beaujeu’s wife—whose first name has been lost to history—was a pioneering female fitness instructor.

woman preparing to do chin up

Through next summer, Todd will serve as chair of the department of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas. Then she will retire from teaching and devote herself to the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, which she cofounded with her late husband Terry Todd. Her impact on the world of women’s fitness and strength training will continue to reverberate. She proved that lifting heavy is not a new trend. It is part of every woman’s cultural heritage and physical potential—and it’s there for the taking.

For more on Jan Todd’s life and work, read STRONGER: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives by Michael Joseph Gross.

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