‘Building the Body Beautiful’ inThe Women's League of Health and Beauty: yoga and female agency in 1930s Britain

Abstract Techniques of the body, claimed Marcel Mauss in 1935, were the vehicle societies employed to express their values. Arguing that politics goes nowhere without movement, this paper explores the visibility of movement aesthetics in Britain during the 1930s through the activities of the League of Health and Beauty and its mother–daughter leaders, Mary Bagot Stack and Prunella Stack. It argues that Mary Bagot Stack's introduction of yoga to the League's keep fit activities encouraged an element of female agency and embodied freedom that was diminished as Prunella's concerns were drawn increasingly toward national imperatives of fitness regimentation modeled upon fascist physical training schemes in Europe. Keywords: embodied techniquesphysical cultureyogamaterial practices Notes 1. Following Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), there has also been growing interest in studying gender images and gendered bodily practices that emerged out of colonialism, both during and following the era of colonialism. 2. In the eighteenth century David Hume pointed out that 'the human body is as much a historical document as a charter, or diary or a parish register and it deserves to be studied accordingly' (Bremmer and Roodenburg 1991, 2). As a material object the body thus offers special insights into beliefs, values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions of particular societies at specific moments in time. See Plown 1995. 3. Foster defines choreography as 'a referent for the structuring of movement. Any notion of choreography contains within it a kinesthesis, a designated way of experiencing physicality and empowerment. Put simply this means a kind of theorizing about what a body can do, and what a body can be' (Foster 2011). 4. One needs to be wary of the publication dates of League literature. There are numerous histories of the Women's League of Health and Beauty told by Mary and Prunella Stack as well as Mary's sister, A.J.Cruikshank, who co-edited one in 1937,which were reprinted several times and are essentially repetitive, some of them simply reprinting large sections of the other. Prunella often repeats her mother's words in her own writing. 5. Biographies of Stack are mute on the precise reasons for her son's death. Prunella was born in India on 28 July 1914, the same day Austria declared war on Serbia, setting in motion the Great War. Less than a month later, Hugh Stack, an Officer in the 2nd Battalion, 8th Gurkha Rifles, left with his regiment to fight in France and Mollie sailed for England with her daughter. Stack died on the battlefield in France with most of his regiment. 6. No one made the case for race fit mothers more persuasively than British feminist and social activist Frances Swinney, who was coincidentally also a Theosophist. As a daughter of a Colonial Officer under the British Raj, she was born and brought up in India (Robb 1998). Her notion of women as leaders of the race was picked up by Marie Stopes in her 1920 tract, Radiant Motherhood. 7. Wilkins' 1959 treatise was funded by the British East India Company. Edwin Arnold's inspirational and influential poem, The Light of Asia (1879), was a biographical account of the Buddha that brought Indian religious ideas to the attention of intellectuals including T. S. Elliot. Max Müller became Oxford's first Professor of Comparative Theology and began popularizing the study of Indian religions in Britain. 8. William James summed up New Thought as 'an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes and a contempt for doubt, fear, worry and all previously precautionary states of mind' (1985 [1902], 90). 9. Nor did the Ling Association show any concern about aggressive nationalism. The Ling Association Leaflet in 1935 quoted approvingly of a report in The Times, which stated that 'the purpose of the amazingly systematic and intensive training which is being given under the National Socialist Government to the young men and young women of Germany is directed primarily to national and social reconstruction and not to the creation of an aggressive military power' (Bailey and Vamplew 1999, 51). 10. Numerous books have been written about the affair, including one by James Douglas- Hamilton (1993), which seems to have been an attempt to clear his father, the Duke of Hamilton, of the charges that he was a pro-Nazi. He does not mention, for example, the released MI5 files that show that the Duke was involved with Neo-Nazi organizations such as the Nordic League and the highly secret Right Club in the 1930s. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERhaushoferA.htm. The documents in the National Archives relating to the Duke, Hess and his purported peace mission, which were formerly closed until 2017, were released in 2007. The National Register of Archives for Scotland holds the correspondence and papers of the Duke of Hamilton in reference to Hess' landing in Scotland (NRA 10979).