Women Have Always Been Healers

It’s 2023 and women are reclaiming their rightful place in wellness and birth. There’s a surge in curiosity for natural healing methods, birth empowerment, and becoming more self-sustainable and retaining ownership of their bodies and the wellness of their families.

So if women were the OG healers-what happened? Well, I’m sad to tell you a mixture of cultural racism, lies, slander, and yes, executions…we saw the women of the community, the healers, the pharmacists, the midwives, the care givers, get pretty much wiped out. But why!? What’s the threat of women being in charge of their own care? Oh do you have to ask? Money. Surprise Surprise.

Let me be clear, our history is a dark one. America’s for sure, but widen the lenses and you will find that every country has had its fair share of disappointments. Let’s review how women in the past harnessed the power of nothing but God given plants and their feminine hands to leverage the wellness of their community.

Pharmacists

Using herbs for healing was not the witchy woo woo that people now find quakery. Nope. It was the foundation of wellness. Herbs were foraged and harvested for health maintenance, immune support, sick children, childbirth, wounds, illnesses, and many other implications. They were the original pharmacists that passed down their wisdom and uses to their children.

Midwives-The Experts in Birth

Midwives in the community learned under apprenticeships gathering the wisdom that I would attempt to say is quite lost in today’s birth culture. They would travel from home to home, village to village, support perinatal care, attending birth through labor, and assessing postpartum, but more importantly, they had a standing pulse on the needs of the community. This was the norm. And birth was honored and the physiologic process that it is. Less intervention. More support.

When we discuss medicine and women’s history:

We must remember that for centuries women were doctors without degrees, certifications had not yet been fabricated, they were barred from education in fact for a long time. Due to the restrictions, they mastered the art of passing down wisdom from neighbor to neighbor, from mother to daughter.

They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine Is part of our heritage as women, our history.