Women in Yoga: A Historical Perspective

In many yoga teacher trainings and popular histories, one often hears a simple story: for thousands of years, only men did yoga, and women weren’t allowed to practice until the 20th century. The story usually goes like this: yoga was a sacred, secretive male tradition passed from guru to male disciple until a woman named Indra Devi broke through in the 1930s.

It’s a tidy narrative. But it isn’t true.

When I did my first yoga teacher training, I heard this story, too. And I repeated it. Not because I wanted to erase women’s contributions, but because it was all I had been taught.

Only later did I learn that women have been part of yoga’s story from the very beginning—as practitioners, teachers, sages, and devotees.

Let's go back.

Women in Ancient Yogic Traditions

In ancient India, women participated in spiritual life far more than most modern yoga histories suggest. In the early Vedic period, women like Gargi and Lopamudra were known as rishikas—female seers who composed hymns and debated philosophy. They were not fringe figures. Their names appear in sacred texts. They taught, questioned, and practiced alongside men.

Later, in the medieval era, tantric traditions elevated the feminine even further. In Tantra, the feminine force—Shakti—is essential to spiritual awakening. Tantric practices often required partnership, and some texts explicitly encouraged female initiates and gurus. Women known as yoginis were central to these traditions. Some were revered as goddesses. Others practiced in forest communities or led small circles of students.

And in the Bhakti movement, which emphasized personal devotion over ritual hierarchy, women flourished. Female saints sang poetry, renounced status and marriage, and worshipped the divine in ways that defied the caste and gender boundaries of their time.

Their lives may not fit the mold of “yoga” as it’s packaged today, but their devotion, discipline, and transcendence were deeply yogic.

So how did we lose sight of all this?

Patriarchal Shifts and the Decline of Women’s Visibility

Patriarchy played a part. As Brahminical culture became more rigid, women were increasingly excluded from spiritual education and public ritual. Then came colonization.

Under British rule, yoga was redefined through a Western lens—cleaned up, systematized, and masculinized to match the colonial tastes for order and reason. In this climate, only the most palatable (and male-dominated) forms of yoga survived and were exported.

And yet, even during this time, women continued to practice. In the early 1900s, Indian women like Reba Rakshit and Labanya Sarabhai adapted yoga for women in their homes, using chairs, walls, and whatever was available. They made it accessible. But they weren’t celebrated in the same way as their male counterparts. History didn’t record them loudly.

Meanwhile, Indra Devi, a European woman, convinced Krishnamacharya to teach her. She went on to open a yoga school in Hollywood and helped make yoga mainstream in the West.

Her story is important—but it shouldn’t be mistaken as the beginning.

When we say women only started practicing yoga in the 20th century, we erase the Vedic sages, the tantric yoginis, the Bhakti saints, the Indian housewives doing asana in their living rooms, and the untold others whose names we may never know.

The story is not that women were absent. The story is that they were forgotten.

As a Caribbean yoga studio owner, I see women coming to the mat every day seeking something beyond physical movement. They’re remembering. Reclaiming. Rooting into something older than modern yoga brands and social media poses. And I believe that matters.

Because when we restore women to the yoga story, we don’t just correct history—we expand what yoga can mean. It becomes not just a practice of strength and flexibility, but one of devotion, community, intuition, and deep inner power.

This isn’t about replacing the old story with a new one. It’s about telling the whole truth—and making space for everyone in it.

Yoga has always been broader, deeper, and more inclusive than we’ve been led to believe.

And it’s time our histories reflected that.