History Helps Women Be Wiser Today

Herbs are gifts that teach and heal. I found myself planting gardens with these shapes before I understood the underlying meaning of these images so deeply encoded in my psyche. Now I know that my passion for gardening, working with seeds, moist soil, and living plants, has helped me reclaim my woman’s body and has guided me as I have made my way back to myself and to Earth. Together we can mold strong vessels filled with women’s wisdom that cannot be destroyed by fear, hatred, ignorance, or distrust. Our vessels can cross the racial, ethnic, and class boundaries that have kept us separated from each other. We are all of this Earth so enjoy it! And we share being women as the common vessel. The thoughtful words and actions and creative work of women are deeply needed in these times of suffering. One in eight women in the United States is challenged with breast cancer. Our willingness to continuously reevaluate our own lifestyles and prejudices and join with others to find creative, sustainable, and compassionate solutions is necessary for the survival of all life. This is a time that calls for a peaceful yet powerful commitment to healing. Through them we can learn to hear the whisperings of Earth herself. Sit quietly with them in the wild or in a garden.

Don't Force That Smile

Listen for their songs. Watch them grow and change throughout the seasons. Feel, smell, and touch them gently. Lie with your belly to the earth and observe the herbs at their own level instead of always hovering above them. Move a little slower. Laugh a little louder. Let yourself remember the wise woman who lives within you. Knowledge of this history helps women be wiser today about who we allow to be our health care providers and what healing methods we choose. The final years of the Middle Ages were a time of incredible strife, sickness, war, and ecological destruction throughout Europe. Overcrowded villages and cities, severe crop failures, and generally unsanitary conditions led to increases in disease and death. The plague, also known as the Black Death, raged across Europe. Women healers worked hard to comfort the sick and dying despite warnings from various church fathers and government officials that only licensed professionals could minister to the sick.

A Personal Failure

It was during the 1300s that organized efforts by priests and male doctors to destroy women healers began. Great upheaval continued in Europe even after the plague subsided in the late 1400s. The feudal system was being challenged by large peasant uprisings, many said to have been led by women. Protestant churches were gaining popularity, as were the ideas of capitalism. Women healers posed a serious threat to the economic security and patriarchal beliefs of the male medical professionals. Using women as scapegoats for natural disasters, for a man’s impotency, for the sudden sickness or death of her neighbor’s animals or family members, and for diseases that male doctors could not heal, were some of the ways priests and male doctors targeted women as the cause of all the suffering. Older women who were widowed and more dependent on their neighbors for support were accused of being witches, as were women who had never married. Women with little or no money were accused. Over 85 percent of the people accused of being witches were women.3 Many of them were the unlicensed healers who were the primary health care providers for peasant people in villages across Europe. Women of all ages, from various religious and class backgrounds, married and unmarried, were killed along with other targeted groups, such as lesbians, gay men, and Jews. The gruesome executions were public events.

Save Some Time to Dream

Burning witches alive at the stake and hanging them in the public square was the common practice. Before being killed they were often forced to endure violent torture such as having unbearable pressure applied to their thumbnails and having their limbs stretched until they confessed something or named another witch. Thea Jensen, a feminist writer and broadcaster, calls the witch burnings the women’s holocaust. They were a way to terrorize other women and children so that they would not deviate from the norm or show support to the already condemned. In England, the prevailing belief about witches was that they could do supernatural harm to others by using destructive spells, medicines, curses, and charms. Three different Witchcraft Acts were passed by Parliament. The first, in 1542, made the practice of witchcraft a statutory offense. The second act, passed in 1563, made evoking evil spirits illegal. The third act, passed in 1604, made any covenants with evil spirits a capital offense and also made it a felony to kill anyone by means of witchcraft. And witchcraft accusations did not end in 1736 when the Witchcraft Act of 1604 was repealed. Village people continued to believe in evil spirits and to blame witches for what they saw as supernatural occurrences. He came up with the idea of a weighing station as a way for women to prove that they were not witches. If a woman weighed more than a feather, which of course she did, then she could not fly and therefore was not a witch. She would receive a piece of paper that said how much she weighed and that Charles V had declared she was not a witch. The witch craze gradually ended in Europe as the industrial revolution took hold, along with the spread of scientific ideas, which did not validate supernatural powers and magic. Witchcraft accusations also occurred throughout the New England colonies during the seventeenth century and continued even into the eighteenth century. In 1692, fourteen women and six men were executed in Salem, Massachusetts, for witchcraft. Over 140 people were tried during the late summer of 1692 and several were jailed in some of the villages neighboring Salem. Knowing the work of the women healers who went before us and the history of allopathic medicine, which excludes us, helps us unite to obtain quality health care today. Yet the Eclectic doctors were also mostly men.