08/20/2025
📷 Abbye "Pudgy" Stockton (right), the first woman to own a gym, (surrounded by her friends, including stunt double and gymnast Relna Brewer (left), on the sunny beaches of Santa Monica in 1946.
She was called “Abbye,” but most people knew her as Pudgy Stockton, the strong, vibrant woman who changed the way the world looked at women’s bodies. In the 1930s and 40s, when most women were expected to stay delicate and small, she was out on Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, lifting weights, balancing men on her shoulders, and showing that strength could be beautiful. She wasn’t just a performer; she became a pioneer.
Abbye opened the very first women’s gym, a radical idea at a time when the fitness world belonged almost entirely to men. Women weren’t supposed to touch barbells, let alone run a place filled with them. But she built a space where women could claim their own power—where muscles weren’t a source of shame but of pride. She understood that strength wasn’t about losing femininity. It was about expanding what it meant to be a woman.
Abbye stood as proof that being strong could be glamorous, that a woman could own her power without asking permission.
There was pushback, of course. Critics called it scandalous, unnecessary, even harmful. But the women who walked through her doors knew better. They felt the shift—not just in their muscles, but in their confidence.
