Transitioning from a Male to Female Dominated Practice: An Examination of Gender in Modern Postural Yoga
Introduction
Pre-modern yoga was a practice dominated by men that usually involved commitment to a monastic or ascetic lifestyle that was only open to men. Today, women are the major members of yoga studios and gyms. Many brands marketing yoga, like Lululemon, focus on women as their primary consumer. In a survey I took of my peers, only 7% of the men had taken a yoga class in the past year, whereas 63% of the women had participated in more than one class, many of them taking more than ten. This paper will investigate how the female dominated practice of harmonial gymnastics acted as a precursor for modern yoga in the West, and how the counterculture branding of yoga by gurus like Swami Vivekananda lent itself to the acceptance of women into important lineages of yoga, thereby legitimizing them as practitioners. I will also outline some of the benefits modern postural yoga has for women.
Pre-modern yoga was a practice dominated by men that usually involved commitment to a monastic or ascetic lifestyle that was only open to men. Today, women are the major members of yoga studios and gyms. Many brands marketing yoga, like Lululemon, focus on women as their primary consumer. In a survey I took of my peers, only 7% of the men had taken a yoga class in the past year, whereas 63% of the women had participated in more than one class, many of them taking more than ten. This paper will investigate how the female dominated practice of harmonial gymnastics acted as a precursor for modern yoga in the West, and how the counterculture branding of yoga by gurus like Swami Vivekananda lent itself to the acceptance of women into important lineages of yoga, thereby legitimizing them as practitioners. I will also outline some of the benefits modern postural yoga has for women.
Harmonial Gymnastics and the Female Body
In Yoga Body, Mark Singleton (2010) argues that modern postural yoga emerges, among other aspects, from a discourse between Western and Indian men sharing the neutral ground of gymnasiums. Even today, the masculinity of gyms can be alienating to females, even when they want to engage in a physical curriculum. Harmonial gymnastics was a practice that was dominated by women, both in practice and tutelage, in the early 1900s. Harmonial gymnastics’ similarities with yoga allowed female physical culture to merge with yoga and become one of its main definers. |
Being one of the few physical practices in the 1900s that had women dominant not only as practitioners, but also as teachers, harmonial gymnastics offered a chance for women to change the discourse on what was expected of them in terms of a specific body type. As I will outline in the next section, while yogis in the 1900s were incorporating women into teaching lineages, yoga was still a patriarchal system, so it did not give the platform women needed to engage in discourse on what a healthy lifestyle for women should be. Harmonial gymnastics offered a platform for this type of discourse, but also offered a chance for women to engage in practices that looked a lot like yoga, before yoga had even reached the West.
Harmonial gymnastics was a regime of stretching and dancing, incorporating mental imagery, which was primarily practiced and pioneered by women in the West (Hauser, 2013, p.50). In the early 1900s, Genevieve Stebbins brought the theatrical practices of the French singer Francois Delsarte to America and merged them with oriental movement to make a fitness regime for women. She branded these practices as being “a completely rounded system for the development of the body, brain and soul” and linked them to the attractive “higher rhythmic gymnastics of the temple and sanctuary” (Singleton, 2010, p.144). Like modern postural yoga, harmonial gymnastics used physical aspects of practices that were largely spiritual in the East to appeal to Western goals, like health and youth. Harmonial gymnastics also used many stretching exercises that appear similar to hatha yoga postures, like backbends.
Women in the West were drawn to exercise systems like these gymnastics because they appealed to the grace and composure that society valued in women. Organizations like the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, founded by Mollie Bagot Stack in the 1930s, put emphasis on aesthetic appeal, as it supported a healthy and empowering lifestyle (Singleton, 2010, p.151). Stretching postures were seen as more appropriate for women, as they were “in contrast to the acrobatic, balancing and weight resistance programs for men” (Singleton, 2010, p.159). This emphasis on female physique was reflected in the Olympic standard for the inclusion of women’s sports, which was mainly concerned with the event being “aesthetically pleasing” (Singleton, 2010, p.160). One can imagine that, for a women living in this time, there would have been immense pressure to fit into the societally accepted body image. Harmonial gymnastics offered a chance to not only achieve the ideal body, but to do it in a field where the discourse as to what made up a fulfilled lifestyle was controlled primarily by women. This also meant that opportunity for advancement to respected positions would not, directly, have included male bias or preference.
Throughout yoga history, schools of thought emerge from yogis that are able to spread their particular style of practice or enlightenment successfully. In order for females to propagate a method of attaining the healthy, ideal body, there had to be a field for them to do so where males were not the dominant voice. This field was harmonial gymnastics. For example, American female yogis, like Cajzoran Ali, sought to integrate women’s “health, aesthetic appearance, and spiritual advancement” into their exercise regimes (Singleton, 2010, p.149). So, as harmonial gymnastics became popular, it became easier for women to enter into a discussion of fitness and health and to be seen as legitimate actors. Because of harmonial gymnastics, women in the West had a predisposition to yogic practices, perhaps explaining why they were the main supporters of Indian yogis, like Vivekananda, coming to the West.
The overlap in the purposes that yoga and harmonial gymnastics served to women in the West— mainly health and spiritual enlightenment— was what made it easy for the two to merge. Yoga in the West allowed women to create their own routines to achieve the ideal body, while accessing what was beginning to be perceived by society as an enlightened way of living. This is largely because yoga focuses not only on the surface of the body, but also within (Zajac & Schier, 2011).
The spirituality and acceptance of yoga may appeal to women who may be averse to the pressure to achieve an ideal body when taking part in other, more weigh-loss oriented exercise. That the type of yoga practiced in the West largely resembles stretches and more gentle (although nonetheless intense) movements, may be because it emerges from the immediate encounter yoga had with Western women who were already practicing harmonial gymnastics.
In her book Feminism’s New Age, Karlyn Crowley (2011) discusses how the positive light New Age religions place on “feminine traits”, like purity, became a tool for women to enter the religious discourse that previously would have faulted them for being weak. Similarly, I would argue that the value placed on the female body, by society, allowed for women practicing harmonial gymnastics and yoga to become the most qualified individuals to advocate how to achieve that body. In this way, more female dominated physical regimes would have been a form of feminism for women. However, in order for women to be seen as fully legitimate members of the yoga community, they had to first be accepted into lineages of yoga tutelage, an acceptance that was initially difficult due to the West’s early impressions of yoga.
Integration of Women into Yogic Lineages
Early Western views of yoga, especially the posture-oriented hatha yoga, were negative. Hatha yogis were often associated with “perverse sexuality” and the occult (Singleton, 2010, p. 35), themes that were condemned by a West that was immersed in a puritanical religious discourse, in the late 1800s. For women, the focus on the body that hatha and tantric yoga practices emphasized was highly inappropriate.
Early Western views of yoga, especially the posture-oriented hatha yoga, were negative. Hatha yogis were often associated with “perverse sexuality” and the occult (Singleton, 2010, p. 35), themes that were condemned by a West that was immersed in a puritanical religious discourse, in the late 1800s. For women, the focus on the body that hatha and tantric yoga practices emphasized was highly inappropriate.
Because of this, early practitioners of yoga like Ida C. Craddock, in New York, were looked down on. Craddock worked as a pastor of the Church of Yoga, which she founded in 1899. Her teachings encouraged the tantric practices of ritualizing sex, a practice that resulted in her imprisonment and eventual suicide (Jain, 2014, p. 24). Not only does Craddock’s experience represent the struggle to participate in yoga, she can also be considered a martyr of a body-oriented yoga practice. If someone is willing to give up life for a cause, it often legitimizes that cause, and that a woman was participating in that legitimization is important. It is possible that Craddock’s fight showed other women who were displeased with constant belittlement from the state and Church that there was a way out—to seize of control over their own bodies. This is one way that yoga became introduced as a counterculture movement to conservative religious organizations.
As the physical culture movement spread through the West, alongside the belief that one’s religion and lifestyle could be self-selected from a variety of choices, it became difficult for the state to regulate the private, chaste body that was lauded by the increasingly unpopular puritanical religions. As yoga, and other counterculture movements, gained popularity in consumer culture, there were economic incentives for the state to loosen regulations. Tantric yoga, yoga retreats and classes had become an increasingly lucrative market. Furthermore, by the 1930s, when later schools of yoga focused more on yoga as a return to a wholesome and moral lifestyle, magazines like the British Health and Strength actually put forward that yoga could help “destroy the canker of sex” and “sweep away the sex fetishism which has… engulfed the Western hemisphere” (Singleton, 2010, p.155). Yoga became a compromise between the fear and fascination that Westerners had with sexuality. Since women had always been repressed for their bodies, the empowerment that physical yoga practice offered would have been appealing.
However, in order to truly become accepted into the yoga community, women first had to be accepted by the male yogis who were defining yoga in the West. Krishnamacharya, while never actually visiting the West, taught influential yogis, like B.K.S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois, who went on to found some of the largest schools of yoga in the West. For many years, Krishnamacharya taught young boys at a palace in Mysore. It was there, in the early 1930s, that Indra Devi approached him with the request that he take her on as a student (Abernerthy).
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Despite Krishnamacharya’s desire to bring yoga to diverse groups, which he did on frequent “propaganda trips,” he was initially opposed to taking Devi on as a student because she was a woman. The Maharaja of Mysore, a friend of Devi’s, eventually wore him down and he reluctantly agreed.
Testing his belief that Devi could not withstand the same yoga training as men, Krishnamacharya put her through rigorous practices. Her eventual success gained his respect. Devi moved to the United States in 1947 and taught yoga to many celebrities like Marilyn Monroe (Ruiz, 2007). Devi’s perseverance made a woman a prominent member of one of the most important yoga lineages in modern postural yoga.
Gurus in yogic lineages have the opportunity to define what they believe is important for the practitioners of that school to undertake, so Devi was able to incorporate inclusion of women into the Krishnamacharya lineage of yoga. Beyond the legitimacy having Krishnamacharya as a teacher afforded Devi, she was also a very popular yoga teacher in Hollywood and South America. Devi opened several yoga schools in Buenos Aires, wrote many books and created Sai yoga, a gentle yoga practice that incorporates chanting with the postures (Ruiz, 2007). Devi became a role model for women who wanted to choose yoga as a career path, important in a world where women were beginning to work and gain more financial freedom.
The yogis who first brought yoga to the West understood that in order for yoga to succeed in the West it had to be as accessible as possible. Vivekananda was a very charismatic yogi, who gained the support of many wealthy Western women when he first began to lecture. Vivekananda’s disciple Margaret Noble (later known as Sister Nivedita) became the first women to join an Indian monastic order, which was previously exclusive to men (Shaw, 2011).
Vivekananda’s relationship with Western women was complicated. His upbringing, in the decidedly patriarchal Bengali tradition, meant that women who acted in the frank way Western women did exuded sexuality and temptation. Additionally, despite the prominent role of goddesses like Kali and Parvati in Hindu traditions, women were often treated as subservient in Hindu discourse. Regardless of this, Vivekananda had great gratitude towards Western women for the respect they afforded him. Vivekananda’s mission was to make yoga accessible to non-monastics, and make it part of a lifestyle in which even the average householder could take part (Singleton & Goldberg, 2014, p.173). So, despite his conflicted feelings towards women, it became necessary for Vivekananda to accept them for his message to fully saturate American society. Women, in turn, were delighted to take part in Vivekananda’s classes and lectures.
Why these gurus chose to include women may have been a result of changes in societal norms that were occurring in the mid-1900s. As discussed, yoga offered an alternative to many puritanical religions, which excluded women. Additionally, Lamarck’s theory of inheritance, which states that traits an individual develops throughout their lifetime are passed on to their children, was still influential in India throughout the 20th century. Yogenandra’s characterization of hatha yoga as a unique way to overcome the “impermeability of the germ plams and lead to permanent and hereditary change” supported this concept (Singleton, 2010, p.121). This resulted in the inclusion of women into the national value of developing a strong body; if a woman was strong it was believed that her son would be as well (Singleton, 2010, p.98). These two factors, combined with the perseverance women like Indra Devi demonstrated to their gurus, were important factors in the inclusion of women in yogic lineages.
In summary, though males dominated pre-modern yoga, certain aspects of the reformation of yoga caused the practice to become dominated by females. First, the similarities between the female-dominated harmonial gymnastics and postural yoga allowed for the two to impose themselves on each other easily. That harmonial gymnastics and yoga both provided appropriately feminine way of achieving a healthy body and lifestyle also contributed to their main bodies of practitioners being female. Second, the acceptance of women into what later became influential Western yogic lineages, like those of Vivekananda and Krishnamacharya, legitimized females as yoga practitioners. This allowed female yogis to bring yoga to even more women, an effect that was amplified when yoga became a part of celebrity lifestyle, (which Indra Devi made it through teaching yoga to celebrities like Marilyn Monroe). Finally, with yoga successfully marketed as a countercultural movement, it was savvy for prominent gurus to accept women in a society where religion had previously excluded them.
Males and Modern Yoga
Today, the impact of females entering yoga has magnified to the point where the average male does not see yoga as a practice they can legitimately undertake. There has been little research done on why the entry of females into yoga seems to exclude males, so many of the arguments I make in this section are personal analyses of different cultural phenomena as opposed to argumentation based on research. As I will briefly discuss, males are predisposed to practice sports that require tight muscles and hamstrings, making yoga postures hard to access. This may be due to the emphasis on sports like football and baseball as an essential part of American culture throughout the 20th century. These sports characterize masculinity as being based on size and aggression, two characteristics that do not lend themselves to a successful yoga practice.
Today, the impact of females entering yoga has magnified to the point where the average male does not see yoga as a practice they can legitimately undertake. There has been little research done on why the entry of females into yoga seems to exclude males, so many of the arguments I make in this section are personal analyses of different cultural phenomena as opposed to argumentation based on research. As I will briefly discuss, males are predisposed to practice sports that require tight muscles and hamstrings, making yoga postures hard to access. This may be due to the emphasis on sports like football and baseball as an essential part of American culture throughout the 20th century. These sports characterize masculinity as being based on size and aggression, two characteristics that do not lend themselves to a successful yoga practice.
Yoga retailers are also notorious for selling body-hugging, feminine attire, which is successfully marketed alongside other athletic gear as necessary for a healthy, fit lifestyle. While this branding encourages females to engage in a healthy lifestyle, it excludes males, as they are not the targeted audience. Branding yoga as a lifestyle that an individual can choose out of many other choices has been a major part of its movement from counterculture to pop culture, which Andrea Jain outlines in her book Selling Yoga (2015). However, for any business to be successful it must actively identify and target it’s branding to it’s main consumers. Because of the predisposition women in the West had to yoga, as well as their overwhelming approval of yogis like Vivekananda, they were the key group to target.
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Society places more value on the aesthetic appeal of women then it does on men’s, so it is easy for brands like Lululemon to sell a lifestyle brand that helps women achieve and flaunt their figures. In Feminism’s New Age (2011), Crowley even suggests that for New Age spiritual systems, the word consumer is synonymous with women (p .48). In this way, the yoga business doesn’t look at men as their consumer group, despite their equal ability to access the many benefits of yoga. As a result, males are alienated from entering classes where they and their clothes are clearly the odd ones out. Some of responses from men to the survey I conducted asking what the word “yoga” meant to them reflected this shift in the meaning of yoga. One of the males answered that yoga meant “Lululemon”, an example of a clothing line that brands yoga as a female practice. Another stated that yoga had “built up a culture around it separate from exercise.” While many types of yoga are quite physically strenuous, if it is true that it has become more of a lifestyle culture then an exercise culture, one can see how it would be difficult for males to engage in a lifestyle that business has branded as female, even if it offers many physical benefits. Both of the respondents who gave these answers had never taken a yoga class.
Benefits of Modern Yoga for Women
Modern feminist movements have fought against the unrealistic standards and values that society places on the female body. Nonetheless, women in the West continue to practice yoga, suggesting that there must be benefits other then the achievement of an ideal figure. While yoga, like most forms of exercise, does promote a toned, strong body, it’s focus on meditation and spirituality brings other benefits. While there are many benefits that can be accessed by both genders, there are also biological and psychological benefits of yoga that relate specifically to women. This section will outline some of these benefits.
Modern feminist movements have fought against the unrealistic standards and values that society places on the female body. Nonetheless, women in the West continue to practice yoga, suggesting that there must be benefits other then the achievement of an ideal figure. While yoga, like most forms of exercise, does promote a toned, strong body, it’s focus on meditation and spirituality brings other benefits. While there are many benefits that can be accessed by both genders, there are also biological and psychological benefits of yoga that relate specifically to women. This section will outline some of these benefits.
Women often experience the benefits of yoga faster then males because they can enter and hold the postures used in modern yoga classes easier then males. In fact, recent studies have shown that women are more likely to benefit from exercise regimes that promote general health instead of weight loss, as intense cardio and weight routines often do. Males tend to engage, early on, in exercises that focus more specifically on cardio and strength, both of which require tighter muscles.
A recent article in the Washington Post argued that yoga classes became “boring” for men who were unable to tune into the stretch and spiritual side of yoga (Niiler, 2013). Of course, this kind of narrative is part of the reason why males do not venture into yoga at the same rate women do. Studies have shown that women who combine breathing techniques (like the pranayama practices used in many yoga classes) with stretching postures gain a higher range of motion then their male counterparts. One study also suggested that this is due to males generally having stiffer limbs then females (Hamilton et al. 2015).
Additionally, yoga gives particular benefits to females who are pregnant. Studies have shown that practicing yoga at least three times a week during the last trimester increased comfort before and after labor for the practitioners (Hawrelak & Myers, 2009). Women who practiced yoga during pregnancy also were also found to experience less hypertension (which is characterized by high levels of stress and weight gain) and less entry into preterm labor. They also had babies that were significantly higher in weight, than those that did not practice yoga (Narendran et al. 2005). Prenatal yoga centers are an increasingly popular, and therefore lucrative, part of the yoga industry. This is an example of how yoga branding and marketing has grown to target females and exclude (even if unintentionally) males. That yoga is easier for females to take up, and that it offers specific physical benefits to females is perhaps part of the reason that women continue to be the majority of yoga practitioners today.
The meditative and spiritual side of yoga also offers many psychological benefits to women. Studies have shown that female patients struggling with anxiety had lowered symptoms after only two months of practicing yoga. It was suggested that this might be because yoga promotes awareness of the body, which allows the practitioner to target and reduce tension points (Javnbakht, Kenari, and Ghasemi, 2009).
Breast cancer patients have also experienced benefits from practicing yoga. These benefits do not include direct reduction of the cancer, but patients experienced higher levels of acceptance of their conditions, which led to higher levels of relaxation, sleep and comfort due to relaxation of the nervous system (Carson et al. 2007). Overall, yoga causes decreased levels of emotionality and aggressiveness and a higher level of life satisfaction, even for those that are not struggling with specific medical issues (Schell, Allolio, and Schonecke, 1994). When one enters a yoga class, they are exiting their regular day-to-day life in order to reflect on themselves and how they can improve their life. This experience is, perhaps, why yoga gives peace to those who engage in it.
In light of the benefits yoga offers women, it is good that the movement from pre-modern yoga to modern postural yoga opened up the practice to women. Yoga’s position as a counterculture movement to religious organizations excluding women, as well as its similarities to harmonial gymnastics led to the inclusion of females in yoga. Today, women make up the main body of yoga practitioners. As females continue to voice what a beneficial yoga practice will look like, it will be interesting to see how this will affect male practitioners, as well as whether yoga will begin to emphasize more the spiritual or the physical.
Sam Hargreaves
References
Abernathy, S. Indra Devi, mother of Western yoga. Retrieved from http://www.amazingwomeninhistory.com/indra-devi-mother-of-western-yoga/
Carson, J.W., Carson, K.M., Porter, L.S., Keefe, F.J., Shaw H., and Miller, J.M. (2007). Yoga for women with metastatic breast cancer: Results from a pilot study. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 33(3), 331-341.
Crowley, K. (2011). Feminism’s new age: Gender, appropriation, and the afterlife of essentialism. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.
Hamilton, A.R., Beck, K.L., Kaulbach, J., Kenny, M., Bass, F.A., DiSanto, M.C., Behm, D.G. (2015). Breathing techniques affect female but not male hip flexion range of motion. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 29(11), 3197-3205.
Hauser, B. (2013). Yoga traveling: Bodily practice in transcultural perspective. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
Hawrelak, J., and Myers, S. (2009, April). Yoga in pregnancy. Journal of Complementary Medicine, 8(2), 59-60.
Jain, A. (2015). Selling yoga: From counterculture to pop culture. New York, New York: Oxford University Press.
Javnbakht, M., Kenari, R.H., and Ghasemi, M. (2005). Effects of yoga on depression and anxiety of women. Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 15(2), 102-104.
Narendran, S., Nagarathna, R., Narendran, V., Gunasheela, S., and Nagendra, H.R.R. (2005, May) Efficacy of yoga on pregnancy outcomes. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 11(2), 237-244.
Niiler, E. (2013, October 21) Why yoga is still dominated by women despite the medical benefits to both sexes. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/why-yoga-is-still-dominated-by-women-despite-the-medical-benefits-to-both-sexes/2013/10/21/a924bed2-34f5-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html
Ruiz, F.P. (2007). Krishnamacharya’s legacy: Modern yoga’s inventor. Yoga Journal Online. Retrieved from http://www.yogajournal.com/article/philosophy/krishnamacharya-s-legacy/
Schell, F.J., Allolio, B., and Schonecke O.W. (1994). Physiological and psychological effects of hatha-yoga exercise in healthy women. International Journal of Psychosomatics, 41(1-4), 46-52.
Shaw, E. (2011). A short history of women in yoga in the West. Yogawoman Online. Retrieved from http://www.yogawoman.tv/yoga-resource-articles/a-short-history-of-women-in-yoga-in-the-west
Sil, N.P. (1995, April). Swami Vivekananda’s concept of women. Paper presented at the Bengal Studies Conference at the University of Chicago, IL.
Singleton, M. (2010). Yoga body: The origins of modern posture practice. New York, New York: Oxford University Press.
Singleton, M., and Goldberg, E. (2014). Gurus of modern yoga. New York, New York: Oxford University Press.
Zajac, A.U., & Schier, K. (2011). Body image dysphoria and motivation to exercise: A study of Canadian and Polish women participating in yoga or aerobics. Archives of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, 4, 67-72.
References
Abernathy, S. Indra Devi, mother of Western yoga. Retrieved from http://www.amazingwomeninhistory.com/indra-devi-mother-of-western-yoga/
Carson, J.W., Carson, K.M., Porter, L.S., Keefe, F.J., Shaw H., and Miller, J.M. (2007). Yoga for women with metastatic breast cancer: Results from a pilot study. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 33(3), 331-341.
Crowley, K. (2011). Feminism’s new age: Gender, appropriation, and the afterlife of essentialism. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.
Hamilton, A.R., Beck, K.L., Kaulbach, J., Kenny, M., Bass, F.A., DiSanto, M.C., Behm, D.G. (2015). Breathing techniques affect female but not male hip flexion range of motion. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 29(11), 3197-3205.
Hauser, B. (2013). Yoga traveling: Bodily practice in transcultural perspective. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
Hawrelak, J., and Myers, S. (2009, April). Yoga in pregnancy. Journal of Complementary Medicine, 8(2), 59-60.
Jain, A. (2015). Selling yoga: From counterculture to pop culture. New York, New York: Oxford University Press.
Javnbakht, M., Kenari, R.H., and Ghasemi, M. (2005). Effects of yoga on depression and anxiety of women. Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 15(2), 102-104.
Narendran, S., Nagarathna, R., Narendran, V., Gunasheela, S., and Nagendra, H.R.R. (2005, May) Efficacy of yoga on pregnancy outcomes. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 11(2), 237-244.
Niiler, E. (2013, October 21) Why yoga is still dominated by women despite the medical benefits to both sexes. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/why-yoga-is-still-dominated-by-women-despite-the-medical-benefits-to-both-sexes/2013/10/21/a924bed2-34f5-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html
Ruiz, F.P. (2007). Krishnamacharya’s legacy: Modern yoga’s inventor. Yoga Journal Online. Retrieved from http://www.yogajournal.com/article/philosophy/krishnamacharya-s-legacy/
Schell, F.J., Allolio, B., and Schonecke O.W. (1994). Physiological and psychological effects of hatha-yoga exercise in healthy women. International Journal of Psychosomatics, 41(1-4), 46-52.
Shaw, E. (2011). A short history of women in yoga in the West. Yogawoman Online. Retrieved from http://www.yogawoman.tv/yoga-resource-articles/a-short-history-of-women-in-yoga-in-the-west
Sil, N.P. (1995, April). Swami Vivekananda’s concept of women. Paper presented at the Bengal Studies Conference at the University of Chicago, IL.
Singleton, M. (2010). Yoga body: The origins of modern posture practice. New York, New York: Oxford University Press.
Singleton, M., and Goldberg, E. (2014). Gurus of modern yoga. New York, New York: Oxford University Press.
Zajac, A.U., & Schier, K. (2011). Body image dysphoria and motivation to exercise: A study of Canadian and Polish women participating in yoga or aerobics. Archives of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, 4, 67-72.