Yoga Comes to American Physical Education: Josephine Rathbone and Corrective Physical Education
P a t r ic ia V e r t in s k y 1 School of Kinesiology University o f British Columbia
Around the turn-of-the-twentieth-century yoga took on an American mantle, developing into India’s first “global brand" of physical culture. Physical educa tors became implicated in this transnational exchange adopting aspects of yoga into their programs and activities, though there has been an insufficient attempt to piece together the sum and pattern of their intersecting influences. This paper explores how adopted Eastern cultural practices such as yoga gained traction on American shores and entered the fabric of everyday and institutional life, in cluding the curricula of higher education in the late nineteenth and early de cades of the twentieth century. It then describes how American physical educa tor Josephine L Rathbone came to draw inspiration and knowledge from Indian gurus about the yoga postures she would incorporate in the first and rather significant program o f corrective physical education at Teachers College, Colum bia University during the 1930s and 1940s. As an early pioneer of the evolu tion o f Ling's medical gymnastics into a therapeutic stream o f physical activity which formed an important branch o f physical education, Rathbone was in strumental in maintaining a critical link with physical therapy and medicine,
'Correspondence to [email protected]. facilitating transnational connections and networks while pushing open a ¿loor to mind-body practices from the east. Her project was a small but illuminating aspect o fthe shifting spaces o f "bodies in contact” in cross-cultural encounters and complex imperial networks emerging from "modernities" in both East and West.
W h e n J o s e p h in e R a t h b o n e , A s s is t a n t P r o fe ss o r in the Department of Health and Physical Education at Teachers College, Columbia University set up her course in “Methods of Relaxation” in 1939, her stated aim was to assist her pupils to restore their lost vitality and play a larger role in the future of Western culture. Americans, she under stood, were plagued by chronic fatigue in an over-stimulating, rapidly industrializing world and hence unable to relax and regenerate their energy. To counteract this damage her plan was to instruct her pupils in methods of conscious relaxation. “No educational program to offset tension is complete,” she said, “without training in how to consciously relax. Energy does not beget energy.”1 What seemed a little unusual for the times, however, since it alerted both the local and national media to comment upon it, was that Rathbone brought an Indian yogi into her classroom to demonstrate yoga poses as effective methods of relax ation. This example of “export brand” yoga supported by a discourse of “spiritualized” relaxation, according to Mark Singleton, owed its origin to “an amalgam of proprioceptive therapies, early humanistic psychology and a variety of Western esoteric speculations.”2 More immediately, in the case of Josephine Rathbone, her approach to the therapeutic and educational aspects of yoga was supported by her familiarity with physiologist and physician Edmund Jacobson’s well-known views on progressive and differential relaxation about which she had learned at Columbia University’s Teachers College and during her recent travels to India to study yoga with Swami Kuvalayananda.3 One can see how relax ation therapy and modern yoga emerged in the West at roughly the same moment in history as modern psychology and its popularizers “in an age of both unprecedented tech nological advancement and growing nervous disease.”4 Annie Payson Call termed this perceived subjectivity to nervous exhaustion "AmericanitisP Relaxation through activities such as yoga, she believed, might ease the strain of such a condition; it could simulta neously restore the productive labor and efficiency of the American worker. Interest in activities such as yoga, however, extended well beyond worries about relax ation and “Americanitis.” It was part of a burgeoning interest in a broadening archeology of physical culture practices that were circulating globally during the early decades of the twentieth century, animated by colonial struggles against imperial administrators and na tionalist discourses as well as through the rise and expansion of new technologies, indus try, and commodity culture.6 Both the study and the practices of movement and form were being extended as never before by a diverse range of practitioners, and the cutting edge of modernity embraced both a growing interest and enthusiasm for aesthetic and expressive movement styles as well a search for ways to address the kinesthetic and reha bilitation demands of industrial efficiency, mechanization and the military. The result was a cat’s cradle of sports, gymnastics, dance and drill, an amalgam of cultural borrowing and cultural imperialism where physical educators, body builders, boy scouts, military offi cials, health reformers and many others adopted specific features of physical culture to achieve their own ends.7 Modern postural yoga was one component of these transnational physical cultures, becoming adopted by the West in its search for physical and spiritual renewal while simultaneously serving to reignite nationalist struggles in colonial India by blending with a Muscular Christianity-inspired Indian physical education.8 Among the complex discussions around the intricacies and reinterpretations of differ ent approaches to yoga teachings and practices, (for it is a story which can be read many different ways),5 are a number of popular culture stories and lively histories about how yoga took on an American mande at the turn of the twentieth century and grew in influ ence as “it intersected with Freemasons, hypnotists, vaudeville actors, modern dancers and Gilded Age families.”10 Not surprisingly, given their special interest in healthy bodies and movement, physical educators were also implicated in this transnational exchange of physical activity practices though there has been insufficient attempt to trace their intersecting influences. David Brown and Aspasia Leledaki point out that unlike information regard ing the spectacular diffusion of modern Western sporting forms, there remains a paucity of research literature studying physical culture and the particular ways in which move ment forms such as yoga came to occupy legitimate socio-cultural spaces in Western insti tutions, especially in the curricula of schools and universities.11 Adopted Eastern cultural practices such as yoga, they point out, entered the fabric of everyday and institutional life while attracting relatively litde socio-political recognition or resistance. They take the view that the Western adoption of such movement approaches might usefully be described as cultural forms of invented tradition, forms that Eric Hobsbawm maintains emerge notice ably during periods o f social change but which can be examined as both macro and micro level phenomena.12 Furthermore, they (and others) advise against an overzealous use of Orientalism as an explanatory device: “Sufficient numbers of cultural exchanges have taken place both formally and informally for us to suspect that cultural blending of thought and practice is embedded (to various degrees) in the invented traditions emerging from ‘mo dernities’ in both East and West.”13 In this paper I explore how yoga gained traction on American shores in the late nine teenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries and was adopted by physical educators in order to illuminate shifting spaces of “bodies in contact” in cross-cultural encounters and complex imperial networks.14 I discuss the ways in which American physical educator Josephine Rathbone came to draw inspiration and knowledge from Indian gurus about the yoga postures she would incorporate in her program of corrective physical education at Teachers College, Columbia University during the 1930s and 1940s. In particular I exam ine how, as an early pioneer of the evolution of Ling’s medical gymnastics into a therapeu tic stream of physical activity which formed an important branch of physical education, Rathbone was instrumental in maintaining a critical link with physical therapy and medi cine while pushing open a door to mind-body practices from the East.15 Yoga Comes to America—“From the East, the Light” Popular literature would have it that yoga was thrust upon America by a series of gurus and yogi adventurers who preyed upon wealthy and influential people seeking vital ity in relaxation, relief from melancholia and a path to a better life. Robert Love, for example, shows how Iowa-born Pierre Bernard, “the Great Oom,” packaged a brand of yoga for Americans at the turn of the twentieth century that was adopted by Wall Street barons and Gilded Age heiresses, some of whom would bankroll his expansive and luxuri ous Ashram in upper New York State—the first in the nation.16 As the New York Herald punned at the time: There are scores of men and women, perhaps hundreds, well known in New Yorks fashionable circles, who have taken up Yoga in their ceaseless efforts to do something—well something different!. .. [Y]ou might see “My Lady” clad in the loosest of flowing robes, sitting on the floor for hours at a time in some ridiculous posture, gazing intently at the tip of her nose.17 Bernard had learned the postural moves of hatha yoga from an Indian Tantric yogi in Nebraska and would later describe it as a form of advanced physical culture with a particu lar focus on strengthening the body. Practice yoga, he said, and we can enjoy life and not pay the price that the ignoramus pays for enjoyment.18 His brand of hatha, or postural yoga thrived, continues Love, on the changing tides of a nation constantly reinventing its pursuit of well-being and tapped into a metaphysical Zeitgeist which kept seekers coming to learn the secrets of the cobra pose.19 James Whorton and others have shown, more broadly that expressions of interest in hygienic righteousness and healthy mindedness as well as Eastern philosophies had al ready gained substantial traction in America by the mid nineteenth century, with utopias and the search for perfection “blooming and fading in astonishing variety.”20 In 1857, Ralph Waldo Emerson—sometimes called “the mind of America”— penned his lyric poem Brahma for the Atlantic Monthly—a poem that displayed his transcendental fascination with the mystical East and illuminated the yogic idea of non-dualism.21 Brahma was clearly influenced by Emersons earlier reading of Charles Wilkins’ translation of the Bhagavad Gita—considered the first full-fledged yoga scripture where the Gita is an elaboration of various yogic practices as a route to divine knowledge. While he made explicit his debt to Vedic philosophy, notes Philip Goldberg, he also blended those ideas with many other ingredients in his transcendentalist stew.22 Another transcendentalist, Emersons friend Henry David Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond and attempted to live according to yogic philosophy. “Rude and careless as I am,” wrote Thoreau in his journal, “I would fain practice yoga faithfully.” Every morning it was reported, he would go down to the pond, “for all the world like a Hindu in Benares for his morning ablutions.”23 Walt Whitman would further celebrate such ideas in Leaves o fGrass while the Russian founder of theoso phy, Helena Petrovna Blavotsky (later naturalized as an American) popularized the doc trine that the literature of the East possessed stories of ancient wisdom long forgotten (and perhaps much needed) by the West. Theosophist scholars devoted special attention to Patanjali s Yoga Sutras and its focus on body and mind in disciplined meditation.23 It was Western-educated Indian Swami Vivekananda, however, who most clearly per sonified the arrival of yogic ideas to America in 1893 in the form of anti-missionary work; his stated attempt to counteract the popular demonization of Hindus by the West while raising funds for the miserably poor in India burdened by the oppression of their colonial masters. He set his aim on the World Parliament of Religions, convened as part of the multifaceted World s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Dressed ostentatiously as a Hindu monk his talks were a huge draw to the largely female audiences, and it was his female devotees who extended them to the Green Acre and Cambridge conferences where he outlined his views on the yoga system of Patanjali in Raja Yoga (1896).25 No doubt the vast majority of those present hardly knew why they had been so powerfully moved, Christo pher Isherwood wrote decades later about the Vivekananda’s lectures at the World Parlia ment. He could only surmise that a strange kind of subconscious telepathy had infected the hall.26 These turn-of-the-century yogic enthusiasms, wrote William James in Varieties o f Re ligious Experience (1902), suggested that yoga was a valid form of moral, physical, and mystical training, useful for conquering doubt, fear, worry—and perhaps oppression— though internecine struggles over the legitimacy and effects of various forms of yoga were ever present.27 Swami Vivekananda’s view was a rather nonphysical notion of yoga, and James spent a good deal of time talking to him about his views on Raja Yoga and medita tion, though Love suggests that such views focused less on the body than on an ascetic Christianized yoga influenced by British Victorian morals and the ideas of the Theosophi- cal Society.28 Indeed the nascent network of Vedanta schools he built as he traveled around the country all subscribed to a view of yoga with the main focus on the metaphysical and devotional. For Vivekananda, the conversion of Westerners to his neo-Hindu movement represented a means to revalorize Indian pride and identity, and the Vedanta societies (with outposts on both coasts) provided a practical and important tool to generate re sources and spread his views.29 As Sarah Strauss points out, he produced a modern inter pretation of the Hindu yoga tradition (in English) for consumption by middle-class Ameri can and European audiences: the focus was self-improvement and the service of others.30 In this sense he began the trend of using science to validate yoga philosophy and practice at the same time as “representing a revived Hinduism that met the challenges of Western critics (and succeeded against them in their own home territory).”31
Swami Vivekananda in Chicago, September ofl893. C o u r _ _ _ _ _ C IN I to l MUSIC HM.l <■•»*> STATf RANntn PH ST51 t e s y o f t h e V e d a n t a S o c i e t y o f C a l if o r n ia A r c h iv e s . Western Physical Culture Travels to India Vivekananda was not, o f course, the only male celebrity to draw attention to forms of physical culture at the 1893 Worlds Columbian exhibition. Strongman Eugen Sandow held sway too in the Trocadero theatre pavilion, lifting massive dumbbells and bending iron bars which launched him as a famous strongman with the most perfect male physique of his time and presaged his claim to inhabit (and model) the ideal body of the Empire.32 Nor was it an empty claim, for Sandow, strongman, performer and businessman, was to visit India for eight months during 1904-1905 at a time of rising anti-colonial nationalist movement and show the Bengalis (deeply angered at the disastrous partition of Bengal) how the cultivation of physical strength might offer the attractive promise of beating the British at their own game. Reflecting upon his own delicacy as a child he pointed out that it was not necessary to be born strong to become strong: “Unlike the poet, who, we are told, has to be born a poet, the strong man can make himself.”33 “The native Indians have a fine foundation for the building of large physical men,” he wrote for the Indian Sporting Times. It was only because they lacked proper food and exercise that they were thin and haggard.34 Sandow was, of course, responding to popular images perpetuated especially by British colonialists (and Bengalis themselves concerned about their own crisis of culture and the ambiguous relationship between the local elite and the British), of the effeteness of Bengali men. “A low-lying people in a low lying land,” ran the popular sneer, “with the intellect of a Greek and the grit of a rabbit.”35 At the same time he was not unaware of a number of strongmen circus performers in Bengal, especially Prof. Ramamurthi Naidu, widely known as India’s strongest man, who gave many popular talks on the importance of physical culture.36 Sandow’s message sat astride Vivekananda’s who argued (in very Western terms and in seeming contradiction to his nonphysical view of yoga) that the key for success in Bengal’s independence from British rule lay in the 3B’s: Beef, Biceps and the Bhagavad Gita?7 In deed, Alter claims that Sandow may well have had greater influence on the form and practice of modern yoga than Vivekananda even though yoga became an important plat form of the Hindu Reform campaign.38 There is no doubt that he listened carefidly to his Indian followers during many consultations and broadcast widely his ideas on bodily development through a burgeoning system of communications. In particular, his physical culture publications brought together “an exhilarating convergence of cultural trends, so cial aspirations and fairly overt commercial hype.”39 Sandow’s Indian visit to showcase physical culture and the building of muscle was followed soon after by emissaries from the Young Men’s Christian Association, or YMCA, training school at Springfield College bent on establishing sport and physical education activities as part of their missionary function. The ideology of Muscular Christianity and broader philosophy of health reform brought by the “Y,” and through the introduction of English games and physical education, influenced the shaping of education at Indian institutions and played a significant role in the emergence of regional nationalism—com plicating any simplistic binary of colonizer and colonized.40 Henry Gray arrived to direct the Calcutta YMCA in 1908, and Harry Crowe Buck, trained at Springfield College, came to set up the YMCA College of Physical Education in Madras in 1920. Gray’s chief job was to advise the government on the promotion of physical development; “Y” organiz ers called it the physical awakening of India, part of a worldwide phenomenon inspired by the modern Olympic games of 1896.41 When Buck arrived from Springfield he envi sioned Madras as the “Boston of India” by setting up a training school for Indian physical education directors supported partly by the Massey Foundation.42 “If India is to be sound,” he said, “she must save herself. Our programs of physical education should be carried on by the sons of India.”43 Promising to offer the best physical exercise of West and East, Buck made yoga an integral part of the “Y” s physical education program in the YMCA College at Saidapet and launched the first sports and health education journal in India known as Vyayam!^ His wife, Marie Buck, not only helped her husband in the whole venture but was a teacher of physical education in her own right, training a group of women physical education teachers in India and writing articles on the subject.45 Ideals of Muscular Christianity worked out in physical education and yoga also played a significant role in the emergence of regional nationalisms that were anti-colonial. The “Y1s” explicit promotion of a man who would have the muscles of an athlete and the heart of a Christian did not sit well with the Indian nationalist movement led by the Mahatma Gandhi with his views on patriotic asceticism, or Hindu revivalists such as Nobel Prize winner for literature Rabindranath Tagore. Both wrote lengthy rebuttals in American pe riodicals to Katherine Mayo’s 1927 bestseller, Mother India, in which she asserted that India’s problems stemmed from degeneracy brought on by a male preoccupation with sex that drained the country of energy and made it unfit to rule itself.46 Tagore—international traveler, British-educated and independently wealthy—reacted by promoting his own “uni versal” views on physical education that, in many respects, reflected Deweyan approaches about expressing thoughts and feelings through physical movement rather than the mind- body-spirit philosophy of the Y.47 Meanwhile another ardent nationalist, Jagannath Ganesh Gune, to be renamed Swami Kuvalayananda, was playing an important role in establishing an Indian system of physi cal education (and activism) which incorporated both the ideology of Muscular Christian ity along with local sport and exercises such as wrestling and lathi. And while yoga fit somewhat ambiguously into the discourse and practice of Muscular Christianity (given its focus on self and asceticism, on physical regimen rather than sport, and its effete reputa tion), Kuvalayananda’s experimental work in the scientific study of yoga, his landmark publication Popular Yoga: Asanas (1931 )48 with its many visual images and his journal Yoga M im ansa helped to rationalize its procedures and integrate it into what would become the Indian System of Physical Education. Likely drawing inspiration from Richard Schmidt’s comprehensive account of yoga philosophy and copious hatha yoga drawings,49 Kuvalayananda identified yoga as an Indian form of Swedish drill that had specific physi ological effects that could (and should) be studied scientifically at his Ashrams’ laborato ries from where he published his books and journals. His plan was to identify the effect of yoga postures on the different physiological systems of the body; the optimal time to hold each posture; and the best ways to build a system of progressive advancement to higher levels of accomplishment. In addition, he wanted to identify those yoga postures appro priate for healing as opposed to those needed to achieve physiological benefits and those to gain spiritual advantages. The net effect was to accommodate traditions of physical fitness in India and indigenize Muscular Christianity, replacing faith in God with faith in the nation. Alter points out that “the incipiendy gendered discourse of muscular Christianity and the explicitly masculine features of nationalism made it very difficult for a form of training that was truly concerned with the holistic development of body, mind and spirit to be regarded as physical education in modern India.”50 Nevertheless, Kuvalayananda’s scientifically tested series of yoga postures could be found in the Bombay Physical Educa tion Committee Syllabus which became compulsory in all the provinces schools by 1937: “As physical education came to be defined more and more in terms of the physiology and the science of kinesthetics, asana and pranayama came to fill a specific niche within, rather than be seen as an alternative to, the western system of physical education.”51 Shri Yogendra, like Kuvalayananda was also focused upon providing scientific sup port for the health benefits of yoga and after a youthful fixation on gymnastics and muscle building—á Ia strong man Bernarr Macfadden (whom he knew personally)—he set up a Yoga Institute at Santa Cruz before traveling in 1919 to the United States and establishing the Yoga Institute of America on Bear Mountain near New York. He stayed there for four years working with naturopaths such as John Harvey Kellogg from Battle Creek and would have remained had he not been barred by the U.S.’s implementation of the Asian Exclu sion Act in 1924.52 Instead he turned his attention to his institute in India, publishing popular manuals, Yoga Asanas Sim plified (1928) and Yoga Personal Hygiene (1931) in which he advertised the face of modern physical yoga as benevolent, accessible, scientific, and safe.53 As he pointed out, “Hatha yoga or the physiological yoga is in its entirety and essence the subliminal process of physical culture of which physical education is one as p ea.”54 Thus when the physical postures of yoga were presented to the West in the mode of the health and fitness regimes provided by Kuvalayananda, Yogendra and others, they moved beyond descriptions of the meditation and breathing exercises of earlier New Thought manuals and provided potentially attractive material for physical educators in the West.55 As we have seen, American physical educator, Josephine Rathbone was an early advocate of the practical benefits of yoga in corrective physical education and her memoirs, lodged in the archives of Springfield College, provide interesting details and insights about her travels to India, her yogic education and how her research and teaching at Teachers College and during the rest of her career were influenced by these ideas.56 Josephine Rathbone and the Importance of Therapeutic Exercise Rathbones interest in therapeutic exercise57 began during adolescence when her fa ther suffered an injury and influenced his children to pursue careers in medicine and physical therapy. She subsequendy enrolled in physical education training at Wellesley College where she rowed on the Wellesley crew while earning her Bachelor of Arts in 1917. Her teacher of medical gymnastics at Wellesley was William Skarstrom, influential proponent of Swedish gymnastic concepts who had previously taught at the Boston Nor mal School of Gymnastics followed by more than a decade at Teachers College between 1903 and 1912. She claimed in her memoirs that the physical education curriculum was so theoretically and practically rigorous that it verged on the study of medicine, and she was not deterred from studying the metabolic cost of various types of exercise in the physiology lab of Eugene Howe to obtain an M.A.58 After teaching corrective physical education for five years at Wellesley between 1925 and 1930, Rathbone moved to Teach ers College as a faculty member. She also began doctoral work, supervised in part by eminent psychologist Leta Stetter Hollingworth who had herself received her doctorate from Edward Thorndike at Teachers College and was on the faculty there.59 Hollingworth’s study of “functional periodicity” focused on combating prevailing assumptions that women were psychologically and physically impaired during menstruation, and she worked hard to fight against what she called armchair dogma which sustained such assumptions.60 Rathbone barely mentions the influence of Hollingworth in her memoirs, who in any case died at an early age in 1939, nor is there evidence that she was influenced by her feminist views. In her own doctoral study, however, completed in 1937 entitled “Residual Neuro muscular Hypertension: Implications for Education” she did demonstrate the strong in fluence of Thorndike and other psychologists on the topic of mental fatigue. “Greater effort,” she wrote shortly thereafter, “requires a greater number of muscle fibers to be thrown into action and greater fatigue. The more exacting the effort is, the greater the tension.. . . It may be said,” she continued, “that all performers who force themselves to do a job rapidly and well do so at great nervous and muscular expense.”61 Following Edmund Jacobsons well-known work she viewed diversion and conscious relaxation as the most important techniques for rest and relief from hypertension, and it was around his techniques of progressive relaxation that she focused most interest.
Josephine Rathbone. C o u r t e s y o f t h i
A m e r ic a n C o l l e g e o f S p o r t s M e d ic in e . Shortly after completing her doctoral study, Rathbone embarked upon a series of international travels, including several months’ stay in India. Among her invitations was one from the Bucks whom she had met at Teachers College, and she also spent time with others who had been connected to the YMCA School at Saidapet. She visited Santiniketan, the home and school of Rabindranath Tagore whom she had met at Wellesley College when he was touring the U.S. and— as she wrote— enjoyed listening to him “looking into her eyes and telling her about his dreams for the young boys and girls who were attending his school.”62 Her travels then took her to Bombay to study for several weeks at the Kaivalyadhama Health and Yoga Research Center of Swami Kuvalayananda, which seems to have become the de facto jumping off point for Westerners in India. Writing about these experiences, she said: My days studying Hatha Yoga were very meaningful. My guru was Swami Kuvalayananda, the leading exponent o f Yoga. He was the Director o f physical training for the Bombay presidency and . . . had been trained in medicine in England.63 She adds,“He had become interested in Yoga only when he decided to help Gandhi in his program,”64 then continues: The large entrance room o f his institution was lined on three sides with books and magazines . . . that came from all over the world.. . . They represented the world s offering of knowledge about exercise and practices o f healthful living. He revealed that he was well informed about physical education in the United States. . . . [H]e received each month the magazine of the American Physical Education Association and studied it carefully. Dr. Kuvalyananda was glad to have me learn the series of asanas or posi tions because 1 could relax. He knew o f my dissertation on residual neuromus cular hypertension and of my study o f relaxation techniques. Before I completed the course I could perform all the asanas, or held posi tions and the pranayamas, or breathing techniques, to the satisfaction of Dr Kuvalayananda and myself. 1 was sent off with four books which I understood perfectly and advice as to how I might teach yoga in this country.... I have not taught the subject as such but have incorporated it with my own exercises, and I really think that I have used it more wisely than any enthusiast in this country w ho has posed as a yogin.45 Indeed diagrams of yoga asanas form a substantive section of Rathbones later editions of Corrective Physical Education (first published in 1934) and lasting through seven edi tions over some thirty years. In the 1954 edition she points out that “it does not seem amiss to mention a few devices which some of the wiser and most scientifically educated of the Yogic leaders of modern India are suggesting in Hatha Yoga.”66 She then suggests that Kuvalayanandas pose of complete relaxation “Savásana” or the Dead Pose not only re quires an effort of will and concentration as suggested by Jacobson but builds upon the bodily relaxation already secured by paying attention to the regulation of breath: “Perhaps the device of attending to rhe rhythm of breathing, borrowed from Hatha Yoga will help the individual with little ability to concentrate.”67 Chapter seven, focused on physical education in rehabilitation, has a full discussion of the system of yoga with reference to the works of Kuvalayananda and Prakesh Dev. Addressing potential criticism from American physical educators or Indian yoga experts about her selection of poses she points out that whenever one discovers techniques that advance a broad body building program one should weave them into the fabric of a corrective physical education program divorced from any particular system. Rathbone also cautions that [a] [though we recognize in these Yogic practices certain techniques which may be used with benefit in a program of corrective physical education in the United States we are fully aware of the fact that nowhere in America is there a physical, psychological and cultural environment where Hatha Yoga as a system of exer cise can be used to full advantage.68 Nonetheless, Rathbone was anxious to showcase her yoga knowledge in her classes at Teachers College, and in 1940, for her PE 168D class she brought in Bishnu Charan Ghosh, Paramahansa Yoganandas younger brother to execute a series of poses to her impressed pupils.69 “It isn’t a snap course or a joke” said the Kingston Daily Freeman. “It is offered by the Physical Education department to teach people to learn how to ease ten sions.”70 Ghosh, who had opened his own College of Physical Education in Calcutta in 1923, combined asanas, physical culture, and muscle manipulation techniques in his teach ing. An ardent nationalist and eugenicist, he advocated a weights free method of physical training with a particular focus on auto-suggestion and will-power that reflected the popular ideas of Émile Coué and others with whom Rathbone was undoubtedly familiar.71 Her pragmatic approach to the uses of yoga in aiding relaxation had already been the subject of a Tim e magazine article entided “Education: How to Relax.” “Dr Josephine L. Rathbone, a stocky, cheerful little woman worries about people who worry,” ran the text. “She puts her pupils through a course in learning how to control their muscles, cultivating the will to relax.”72 Indeed, Time had also picked up on another of Swami Kuvalayananda’s American pupils, Dr. Kovoor Thomas Behanan of Yale’s Institute of Human Relations who had spent a year with him in India concentrating on yoga’s principal calisthenics and their hygienic benefits before returning to write a book called Yoga: A Scientific Evaluation (1937).73 In it he discussed the various postures and breathing exercises that toned frayed nerves and induced relaxation. “Standing topsy-turvy on one’s head for 20 minutes clari fies the mind, cures dyspepsia, and constipation. Standing similarly on the shoulders has a beneficial effect on weak sex glands. All these exercises should be taken at dawn and sun set, on an empty stomach, on a firm but soft seat, in a quiet neighborhood, naked except for a loin cloth.”74 “Take away chanting and mantras, take away its cosmology, take away its philosophical underpinnings— from Samkhya to neo-Vedanta,” says Syman frostily, and you’d have a yoga “as Rathbone found, that garnered university support and sage nods from busy and likely tense reporters.” But it’s a yoga devoid of transcendence.75 In Singleton’s recent examination of the early twentieth century decades of relaxation therapy (pre 1960s) he underscores how modern yoga’s assimilation of the techniques of relaxation therapy had an important influence on conceptualizations of yoga in the West. Relaxation therapy, he argues, grew up alongside modern yoga in the cultural context of consumer capitalism offering a chance to recharge one’s batteries for the work ahead.76 Indeed, in her memoirs Rathbone talks about how she constantly practiced tensing and relaxing various parts of her body as an aid to relaxation and how her postural work of stretching and balancing was linked to notions of relaxation learned from yogic leaders. Understood from this perspective, the damages that modernity and industrial efficiency had wrought upon bodies in the west might then be assuaged by wisdom from the east.77 At the same time, it must be pointed out that Rathbone clearly believed she had brought as much wisdom to India in the form of American physical education and health practices as she had borrowed from them in the form of yoga postures and breathing exercises. In a letter penned to her Head of Department at Teachers College sent en route to visit the Buck’s at Saidapet on November 19, 1937, she stated: I’ve been wandering around India for six weeks already and wherever I go there is a growing interest in physical education and health education. . . . I know that some people in each of my audiences have awakened to a larger concept of our field [I]f I tell you about the things I did you will understand how wide the interest there is in our health and physical education.. .. I’m sure the time is ripe for more emphasis upon our health values of exercise and rest as well as diet and cleanliness for physical reasons, and an emphasis upon the kind of activity programs we are all “sold” on for psychological benefits.78 She continued to discuss the colleges she visited and professional contacts made on her travels, including those with other American colleagues from the University of Southern California and Indiana University and “two English women instructors in physical train ing who aren’t on the right track. . . . I hope this letter doesn’t sound conceited,” she concluded, “I’m really very humble before the extent of the need for health and physical education.”79 Natalie Heiberg, Cressida Heyes and Jaclyn Rohel have pointed out that “for a phi losopher the casual Western erasure of the long and complex textual and scholarly tradi tions ofyoga can be legitimately troubling, and one might easily see a kind of ethnocentric arrogance in the appropriation of the ‘mindlessly physical from a very rich Eastern wis dom tradition that has an oral and written lineage.”80 One could argue, along with An drew Dawson, that Rathbone’s tailoring of appropriated Eastern concepts and practices to the contours of the Western habitus produced more of a Westernization of Eastern themes than an Easternization of her physical education paradigm: “The Eastern guru is trans muted to a purveyor of method whose authority rests more upon an instrumental mastery of procedural technicalities than metaphysical associations.”81 Yet I read Rathbone’s so matic project more kindly, for although she was clearly a woman of her times, it required an adventurous spirit and a determined and pragmatic kind of cultivation that was not unusual for female physical educators with her kind of training. On the other hand, the patronizing quasi-comical attitude of Tim es report of her relaxation hypotheses and ap proach to exercise were fairly typical of the attitudes toward women scientists she would endure during her academic career at Wellesley, Columbia, and later at Springfield Col lege. The positive support Rathbone received for her yogic studies in India from colleagues at Wellesley and especially Columbia’s Teachers College was hardly surprising given the extensive history of scholars and teachers at Columbia University who had shown intellec tual interest in Eastern philosophies, the International School of Vedic and Allied Re search (ISVAR), Vedic scriptures, and Indian independence politics.82 Teachers College was an important center of experimentation and innovative change in education with a powerful faculty, including John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, George Counts, Ed ward L. Thorndike and John Childs who supported a very varied and creative curricu lum.83 Both Kilpatrick and Childs, for example, served as consultants to the YMCA, with a strong commitment to the Social Gospel and social betterment through Progressive forms of education, and Rathbone noted that she told them both about her visits to schools and colleges in India. Furthermore, public interest in her work on relaxation and stress reduction was widespread and in some respects she was in the vanguard of new directions in the frontiers of thought around mind-body matters and a burgeoning of interest in Eastern-oriented self-exploration which would flourish even more rapidly fol lowing WWII..4 Newspapers, both local and national, carried numerous articles about her work on tension and relaxation, providing detailed advice on how to erase bad habits and overzealous activity and find an optimum balance between work and rest in modern society. Suburbia Today introduced her as an international consultant examining the prob lem of how to relax and make one’s energies soar.85 The Naples Record of New York said she was trying to help women “whose obvious lack of poise is the result of trying to do too much.”86 Most affected by tension, she claimed, were patriots, close students of world affairs, Sunday drivers, business men and energetic and ambitious people generally. Mod erately religious people (like herself perhaps) tended to be more relaxed.87 Rathbone her self seemed to be indefatigable as she aired her views in an editorial of the Journal o f the American MedicalAssociation in 1942: “If we could learn how to balance rest against effort, calmness against strain, quiet against turmoil we could assure ourselves of joy in living, and mental and physical health for life.”88 Yet in many respects Rathbone was very much a woman of her time, and her mem oirs, deliberately entided “My Twentieth Century” consolidate the view of a sober, hardworking, white middle-class American physical educator with rather traditional views about gender roles and sexuality. “Fortunately we were not cursed with the awful problem of womens rights yet,” she reflected. “I was employed (at Teachers College) till 1960 but could never get excited about my rights.”89 Indeed, she continued, “I am not a feminist and have no desire to be a he/she.” Consistent with her training at Wellesley where the female staff regulated personal relationships and worried especially about lesbianism (usu ally coded as the “crush situation”),90 she pointed out repeatedly that close female friend ships were especially abhorrent to her. Nor was she shy about mentioning more than once her anxieties about “what homosexual girlfriends find to do at night or in the dark.”91 Rathbone was also firmly anchored in the liberal Protestant tradition and emphasized her Christian devotion and desire for community service many times.92 She served the YMCA as one of two female health education consultants, supported the Girl Scouts’ Organiza tion, and was an active member of the United Board for Christian Education in China. While Henry Luce, son of missionaries in China, was the president of the United Board, his sister Emmavail Luce had been a student at Wellesley with Rathbone, and they and others worked to support Yenching College, Wellesleys sister college in China as well as America’s War Program for China Relief.93 Yenching Christian College was closed down following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and some of its activi ties folded into Peking University. Rathbone also informed herself about life in India and Indian politics and claimed to represent Columbia University on the executive board of the India League of America— an organization founded in 1937 for the stated purpose of furthering mutual understanding between India and the United States. More specifically, the ILA described itself as an organization composed largely of Americans long devoted to the cause of Indian independence. It also claimed to seek the ultimate freedom of all colonial peoples within a demo cratic world order and the development of closer cultural relationships between the two countries. In particular it worked to abrogate the Indian exclusion act that had been en acted in 1924. Rathbone provides little information about what she thought the ILA should be doing, though reported speeches and documents suggest a dominant theme that American values were similar to Indian values in relation to a liberal anti-Communist perspective,94 Her talks about what India meant to her were advertised in the Teachers College Record, “but I can tell you,” she said, “that it was not easy to inform the United States public about our cause.”95 W hat she could do effectively, however, was to pass on professional advice about relaxation, and in 1942 she published an article on aids for relaxation in the Oriental Watchman and Herald o f Health, likely aimed at Indian Ameri cans, where she discussed her “ten tricks” to realize the important aspects of relaxation.96 My Twentieth Century also paints a vivid picture of a womans dedication to the pro fession of physical education and reflections upon her professional training and career- long efforts to maintain a critical link with physical therapy and medicine. Having taken a specialty course in electrophysics, Rathbone became a member of the American Physio therapy (later physical therapy) Association in 1935 and served as chair of the Therapeu tics section of the American Physical Education Association.97 This allowed her to direct a program to train physical therapists at the medical school of Columbia University and at the Payne-Whitney Clinic in New York, but it also anticipated the professional split be tween physical education and physical therapy that would characterize the rise of allied health professions during this era. W hat the combination of physical education and phys iotherapy had accomplished since World War I, as Beth Linker so ably describes, was to encourage female physical educators trained to work largely with girls and women in schools and colleges to treat and exercise male soldiers and become experts on the physical health and fitness of the male body—or at the very least the disabled male body. Physio therapists, notes Linker, represented a different kind of female professionals who legiti mized their profession almost solely by association with the medical profession, and in deed in 1935 the American Physiotherapy Association relinquished its last vestiges of self-regulatory control to the medical profession.98 In straddling the divide between physi cal education and physical therapy, corrective physical educators such as Rathbone gained a broader clientele of male and female students, clients and patients and established work ing relationships with physicians as well as physiologists, psychologists and physical edu cators.99 Believing a strong emphasis on medical aspects was essential to learning the com bined roles of therapist/educator, Rathbone was able to extend correctives to include relaxation, stress reduction and mental health strategies. Indeed she defined correctives as a field “as wide as anyone cares to make it.”100 And although she does not discuss the influence of the foundational work of R. Tait McKenzie in combining physical education with rehabilitative medicine, to a large extent it would seem his views reflected her ap proach to “correctives” and embodied the principles that would lead to the foundation of the American College of Sports Medicine several years after his death—“something of the hospital clinic, a great deal of the classroom and laboratory, and a little of the arena.”101 McKenzie had argued especially for the development of Physical Medicine as an area of expertise which brought physical, occupational and corrective therapists together in their focus on the patient, and Rathbone was in attendance at the 6* International Congress of Physical Medicine in London when she was en route to India in 1936.102 In 1944, wartime needs brought Rathbone to the Air Surgeons Office in Washing ton, D.C. to serve as a civilian consultant for therapeutic relaxation techniques for pi lots.103 At around the same time she began a courtship with Russian-born exercise physi ologist Peter Karpovich, visiting him at Randolph Field in Texas in 1945 and providing classes in relaxation techniques to a group of bombardiers at his base.104 In fact, it was a renewed courtship, for she had known Karpovich for some time having met him at a talk in Boston by Ivan Pavlov in 1929 and again at a lecture at Teachers College. He was already married, however, and their friendship, she wrote later, extended only as for as “a single dance at the annual Convention of the American Physical Education Convention each year.”105 Upon his divorce, they married in 1945. Once married it would seem that in many respects she subordinated her career to her husband whose eminent physiological work at Springfield College106 and influence in founding the American College of Sport Medicine became widely circulated.107 Together they promoted the term rehabilitation for her corrective work, though soon enough shifting professional imperatives in physical therapy and new education and sports perspectives among physical educators resulted in corrective gymnastics being re-named “adapted physical education.”108 As Harrison Clarke and other leading physical educators complained, corrective physical education had nega tive connotations, being too limited in scope and implying definitive care of patients under medical direction.109 Rathbone strongly resisted the change in service delivery ap proach. “Such a conflict between specialists in physical therapy and corrective physical education is not strange, however unfortunate it may be,” she wrote. “It awaits only the precise demarcation of these two disciplines on the rehabilitation team to clear up the conflict.”110 The conflict, of course, was not resolved in her favor, and in the years follow ing World War II the American Physical Therapy Association formally ended its thirty- year cooperation with the American Association of Physical Education and Recreations’ Therapeutic Section. Despite the extensive influence of her views on correctives, her text book was last published in 1965, and her emphasis on the role of exercise in postures and health rehabilitation gave way to new imperatives in what was named adapted and special physical education. Nevertheless, Rathbone meanwhile became the Ione female member of the group of eight professionals who came together to found the American College of Sports Medi cine—an organization designed to combine the expertise of physical education, physiol ogy, and medicine and direct it toward the more general goal of national health and fit ness.111 With her spouse Peter Karpovich, she attended the founding meeting of the Federation of Sports Medicine in New York in 1954 during the annual convention of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation followed by the inaugural meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) a year later. It became a flagship organization for sports medicine with a rapidly growing membership, and Rathbone, on the board of trustees, continued to support the organization till her death in 1989. “O f all the changes which have developed in this century,” she reflected, “probably none is more important than the growth of interest in and curiosity about what accounts for the amazing improvement in the performance of the human body.”112 Yet Rathbone would likely not have maintained the profile that she did in the ACSM were it not for her marriage to Peter Karpovich. Alison Wrynn points out that she almost certainly joined the organization at the instigation of her husband and not as the result of her research accomplishments. She did not train a cadre of graduate students to follow in her footsteps, nor did she publish in major scientific journals. Despite substantial praise for her pioneering work in corrective physical education, Rathbone was often self-depre cating and was never promoted to full professor or accorded the academic honors she likely deserved from her scientific and professional work on corrective therapy.113 And once married to Karpovich, head of the physiology lab at Springfield, she became a mem ber of the Springfield College family in one of the only ways a woman could enter the all male institution: by marriage.114 Her experiences there show vividly how private life has intersected with knowledge making in the history of modern science; indeed how knowl edge making practices are entangled with gendered norms.115 There is no doubt that Rathbone’s collaboration with Karpovich offered some “action spaces” for her to advance her career or at least maintain a space in the professional sphere. She was rather proud to go to Annual Physical Education Conventions and “lecture for both Peter and me. 1 couldn’t really take his place because I had never thoroughly qualified in Physiology of Muscular Activity and had not developed his sense of humor and camaraderie. But I could appear on the program when he was due, bring his greetings and tell a little bit about what he had been doing and thinking. And I could also speak about relaxation techniques.”116 She was listed in the Springfield College Catalogue as a “lecturer and part-time faculty” from 1948 to 1953. Weekends through Mondays she lectured on the topic of relaxation to young men in the Army Medical Corps at Springfield and helped develop a graduate program of physical education and recreation in rehabilitation that was similar to the one she had worked to establish at Teachers College.117 Tuesdays through Fridays, however, she returned to Teachers College to maintain her teaching responsibilities there until she decided to retire at the end of the 1958-1959 year and live full time at Springfield.118 It is possible her presence at Springfield may have smoothed the path for women to be admit ted as students to the all-male college in 1951 and for Margaret A. Thorsen to be hired as the first female Assistant Professor of Physical Education the same year. Married life there was to be cut short, however, for in 1975, Karpovich committed suicide. “He had gone,” she said, “because his life work was finished, in a fashion that has been very common in Russia.”119 Rathbone moved to New Jersey with her sister, return ing for short periods to Springfield to teach her course in relaxation and becoming in volved in exercise for the aging at the Brookdale Institute on Aging and Adult Human Development. Somewhat wistfully she reflected in the final pages of her memoirs that “I have not paid enough attention to myself as life has slipped by.”120 Others had noticed though, for her work on relaxation was an important part of the patchwork of approaches and understandings to mind-body medicine that was developing during her “Twentieth Century.” Her work built firmly upon emerging studies on stress reduction for Americans “exhausted by modern life,” and in her search for practical ideas to teach relaxation she had no difficulty in turning “eastward” to charismatic Asian teachers who could offer effective practices for relaxation through yoga. Only through such conscious training in relaxation could a program of physical education be complete. Brown and Leledaki re mind us that the Eastern notion of self-cultivation was not originally designed as a therapy. ACSM Past President’s Breakfast at the 29,h annual meeting, Minneapolis, 1982. Front row, left to right: Elsworth Buskirk, Henry Montoye, Josephine Rathbone, David Lamb, Charles Tipton, and Jack Wilmore. Standing, left to right: Roy Shepard, John Boyer, Allan Ryan, Henry Miller, Howard Knuttgen, David Cc still, Michael Pollock, Bruno Balke, William Haskell, Albert Craig, James Skinner, and Thomas Miller. CCURTESY OF AMERICAN COLLEGE OF SPORTS MEDICINE.
In their Eastern interpretation, movement forms such as yoga typically focus on self- cultivation and improvement rather than the correction of illness, disease or disorder per se.121 Rathbone’s focus in corrective physical education was upon restoring normative stcces in individuals and though she saw the beneficial effects of adopting aspects of Eastern cultural traditions in her classes, her purpose was to view the body as an entity to be altered, corrected, and controlled. Nevertheless, her emphasis on the relaxation thread of hatha yoga was foundational in the field of physical education and became directly relevant to the fluid and elastic concerns of psychosomatic medicine “which have been constantly on the move between one social context and another, and always available for appropriation and re-appropriation by different social groups.”122 Like yoga, one can view m ind-bocy medicine as a deeply storied world, and Josephine Rathbone examined aspects o f both worlds in a remarkable career that spanned six decades and a lifetime that spanned nine.123
K e y w o r d s : y o g a , J o s e p h i n e R a t h b o n e , c o l o n i a l p h y s ic a l c u l t u r e , c o r r e c t i v e PHYSICAL EDUCATION, REHABILITATION
'Josephine L. Rathbone, “Methods in Relaxation,” Teachers College Record 41 (1940): 511. 2Mark Singleton, “Salvation through Relaxation: Proprioceptive Therapy and its Relationship to You," Journal o f Contemporary Religion 20 (2005): 289. 3Jacobson devised a popular system of relaxation where the patient was instructed to tense various parts of the body and then learn to relax them in turn— it was a useful precursor to “stretch and relax” approaches to yoga. Edmund Jacobson, Progressive Relaxation (Urbana: University o f Illinois Press, 1929); idem, You Must Relax! A Practical Method o fReducing the Strains o f Modem Living (New York: McGraw Hill, 1934). Jacobson also founded the International Stress Management Association, which continues his work today. ^Singleton, “Salvation through Relaxation,” 300. 5Annie Payson Call, Power through Repose (1891; London: Selwyn and Blount, 1934). 6StevenJ. Diner, A Very Different Age. Americans o f the Progressive Era (New York: Macmillan, 1998). 7Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age o f Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 83; Mischa Honeck, “An Empire o f Youth: American Boy Scouts in the World, 1910-1960,” Bulletin o f the German Historical Institute 52 (2013): 95-112; J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). "Thus one can see that the association o f yoga with discourses o f the body, health, medicine, and science as well as its practice as a secularized activity was taking place in India both prior to, and along side, its global diffusion. Elizabeth De Michelis, A H istory o f Modem Yoga: P atan jali andW estem Esotericism (London: Continuum, 2004); Sarah Strauss, Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts across Cultures (New York: Berg, 2005). ’Indeed, according to Indian scholar I. K. Taimni, “there is no subject which is so much wrapped up in mystery and on which one can write whatever one likes without any risk o f being proved wrong.” See William J. Broad, The Science o f Yoga: The Risks and Rewards (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), frontispiece. '“Robert Love, The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth ofYoga in America (New Yorlc Viking Penguin, 2010), 5. "David Brown and Aspasia Leledaki, “Eastern Movement Forms As Body SelfTransforming Cul tural Practices in the West: Towards a Sociological Perspective,” Cultural Sociology 123 (2010): 123-154. "Hobsbawm defines cultural forms o f invented tradition as “a set of practices normally governed by overly or tacitly accepted rules and o f a ritual or symbolic nature which seek to inculcate certain values and norms o f behavior by repetition which automatically implies continuity with [a suitable historic) past." Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention o f Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1. "Brown and Leledaki, “Eastern Movement Forms, 131. See also Joseph S. Alter, Yoga in M odem India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. The diffusion o f neo-Hindu movements underlines the complexity o f the encounter between India and the West, made up o f trends and countertrends, simultaneous and reciprocal influences that cannot be limited to a simple process o f Westernization. See also Veronique Altglas, “The Global Diffusion and Westernization o f Neo-Hindu Movements," Religions o f South Asia 1 (2007): 217-237; David Gordon White, “The End o f Yogis,” in Perfect Bodies. Sports Medicine and Immortality, ed. Vivienne Lo (London: British Museum Press, 2012), 129-133; and Strauss, Positioning Yoga, 7. "Tony Ballanryne and Antoinette Burton highlight the centrality o f bodies in understanding the many unchartered terrains in the colonial encounter; they suggest such an approach enables us to appre ciate histories we might not otherwise have seen: “We need a more nuanced understanding o f how imperial mentalities, policies and regimes have contributed to discourses o f globalization.” Tony Ballanryne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact. Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 417. ,5I am extremely grateful to Alison Wrynn for sharing her earlier work on “Josephine Langworthy Rathbone Karpovich: Physical Educator, ACSM founder and In-Law o f the Springfield College Family,” Proceeding o f the North American Society For Sport History, 1997, p. 73; and her copy o f Rathbone’s M y Twentieth Century, 1982, unpublished memoirs, found in Babson Library, Springfield College, Spring field, Massachusetts. I6Love, The Great Oom. 17 New York H erald, 27 March 1898, quoted in Stefanie Syman, The Subtle Body: The Story ofYoga in Am erica (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 71. "Ibid., 110. l9Love, The Great Oom. Many o f these seekers were wealthy women who gave up their fortunes to their yogis, or were stars o f the stage such as Sarah Bernhardt, known as “the divine Sarah.” See, for example, A.L. Bardach, “What Did J. D. Salinger, Leo Tolstoy and Sarah Bernhardt Have in Common? The Surprising and Continuing Influence o f Swami Vivekananda, the Pied Piper o f the Global Yoga Movement,” Wall Street Journal, 30 March 2012,