In yoga, we often express gratitude for what others have given us. It’s easy enough to recall how friends, family, colleagues, teachers, and students lend us a hand every now and then. For we know and have daily contact with these people. What about those we don’t know? What about the people who came before us and worked hard in the hope that they’d be providing us with a better future? They, too, deserve gratitude.
I’m grateful for the bold women—known and unknown, long gone and still living—who made (and make) all kinds of fuss and sacrifices. Without them, I’d either be farther up Shit’s Creek than I am now or in jail for opening my big mouth from time to time.
Take, for instance, Victoria Woodhull. I’ve mentioned her before, but I’d like to give her more than just a brief kudos. She took charge at a time when women in the U.S. were told to keep their mouths shut, that they had no place in the public sphere. Public affairs, you see, were for white men—after all, white men said time and again, it was their world. Woodhull defied that notion.
Sometimes, spotting and then nurturing the opportunity matters above all else.
Woodhull pushed for freedoms (note the plural) in the fullest sense: she called for liberation from gender, sexual, and racial roles; she and her sister ran a successful Wall Street firm ages before women were accepted as brokers; she ran for president in 1872, choosing the former slave Frederick Douglass as a VP running mate. Woodhull hit the scene long before the word “diversity” became a buzz word on college campuses, and more than a century before Geraldine Ferrara, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama ran for positions in the Executive Office.
Woodhull had to have known the deck was stacked against her at a time when all women and black men couldn’t vote; at a time when it was still very much legal to lynch any black person for any reason whatsoever; at a time when any woman could be labeled crazy and thrown into jail or tortured in asylums for dissenting against unfairness. She smartly noted that no laws prohibited women from running for office, and she jumped into the opportunity with all her gusto.
Like many other bold defenders of true liberty and true justice, Woodhull suffered great consequences—jail terms, harassment, and reputation-wrecking slander. She was forced to sit in jail on election day. It’s not like she missed out on voting for herself for president—as a woman she wouldn’t have been able to vote, anyway.
Despite her bold attempts at making history, she’s largely unremembered in American history. Many history-making women have been swept under the rug; their voices have been buried. It’s up to us—men and women alike—to unearth them, learn from, and honor them.
To all the women reading this: Can you imagine not being able to vote or choose a job outside the home or define your own sexuality or freely express your opinions? To all the men reading this: Do you think public affairs benefit by the participation of the women you know?
Even if we don’t see changes happening, they’re happening.
Change is always occurring, even if invisibly so. It’s a matter of reaching for and rolling over the crest. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was a 400-year process, so moving into a sweeter humanity is possible, even if painfully slow. The fight for what is deservedly ours by birthright is not finished—ask teenaged girls forced into prostitution, ask brown-skinned and poor people sitting in jail for nothing, ask anyone who has lost a job or a home, ask those who have been beaten because of sexual preference or race.
Now is not the time to sit back and be all glorious with the concept of Self when so many human beings are destroying one another and the planet. Now is not the time to use yogic detachment as an excuse to tune out the world we live in—the world we live in is by no means an illusion. That world exists, and pretending it doesn’t amounts to rubber stamping a Yes! to the craziness.
If we don’t roll up our sleeves and strive for something else, we’ll end up with a real sorry nothing. That means learning from history and taking a stand today. With all our hearts, we gotta start going balls out.
