Dominican University of California
Modern Yoginis: How Western Women Have Fundamentally Changed the Practice of Yoga
Abstract
dc:description.abstract<p>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.</p>
Degree
thesis:*- Name thesis:degree_name
- Master of Arts
- Level thesis:degree_level
- Master's Thesis
- Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
- Humanities
- Year
- 2010
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- O'Brien Martinez, Anne
- Contributors dc:contributor
-
- Philp Novak, PhD
- Leslie Ross, PhD
Subjects
dc:subject × 2Identifiers
dc:identifier.*- Repository record dc:identifier
- https://scholar.dominican.edu/humanities-print-theses/281
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:scholar.dominican.edu:humanities-print-theses-1280