Modern Yoginis: How Western Women Have Fundamentally Changed the Practice of Yoga
Graduation Date
Spring 2010
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Program Name
Humanities
First Reader
Philp Novak, PhD
Second Reader
Leslie Ross, PhD
Abstract
Western women yoga practitioners, yoginis, have played an essential role in the evolution, teaching, and propagation of modem yoga and are deserving of recognition previously overlooked in academic and popular literature. For millennia, yoga was an esoteric practice taught by and for select Indian men and was little known outside India. In the late nineteenth century, interest in Eastern religions and practices grew in the West and a modern form of yoga began to be brought out of India. Nine specific Western yoginis and spiritual teachers are largely responsible for this phenomenon and the resulting worldwide popularity of yoga today. This study examines these iconic women: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Genevieve Stebbins, Ruth St. Denis, Molly Bagot Stack, Indra Devi, Vanda Scaravelli, Dona Holleman, Judith Lasater, and Angela Fanner and their yoga legacies. These women, some posthumously, continue to inform and encourage ongoing re-imagining of today's yoga which, for the first time in its 5000 year history, is primarily practiced and taught by women.