Women healers: from ancient female shamans to 21st-century doulas

The theme for Women’s history month this March from the National Women’s History Alliance (US) is: “Providing Healing, Promoting Hope”.

They explain on their site that: “Women as healers harken back to ancient times…women… have historically brought these priceless gifts (of healing and hope) to their families, workplaces, and neighborhoods, sometimes at great sacrifice. These are the women who, as counselors and clerics, artists and teachers, doctors, nurses, mothers, and grandmothers listen, ease suffering, restore dignity, and make decisions for our general as well as our personal welfare.”

To honor women in their many functions as alleviators of pain, curers of the sick, menders of minds, and rejuvenators of souls, this month, we dove into this fascinating topic, “Women Healers”, with a survey of the latest research published by Taylor & Francis.

All the work, little of the credit

Ofonmbuk Esther Ekong tells us that “three-quarters of the world’s population depends upon traditional remedies for their health (according to the World Health Organization (WHO).”

I will add to the findings from the United Nations report “The World’s Women 2020: Trends and Statistics”: “On an average day, women globally spend about three times as many hours on unpaid domestic and care work as men (4.2 hours compared to 1.7).

In Northern Africa and Western Asia that gender gap is even higher, with women spending more than seven times as much as men on these activities”.

This tells a story, that globally, it is women that are doing the healing, with, in most cases, traditional remedies. And when it comes to what we commonly refer to as “healthcare” - or non-traditional, non-indigenous, medicine -  women make up over 70% of the workers, too. What is key here is that while women are doing most of the health-related work, they are not getting the status, although that is slowly changing.

This OECD report tells the story of women doctors: worldwide the share of female doctors was 29% in 1990, growing to 38% in 2000 and 46% by 2015. However, data suggests that "even when female workers pursue higher skilled professions in the medical profession, they tend to be underrepresented in the jobs with the highest earnings." 

During the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, Women’s Studies was born, to study topics such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, in departments as varied as history, sociology, literature, politics, and psychology, with the goal of changing the position of women in the world. Taylor & Francis imprints Routledge and (prior to 2005) Carfax were some of the founding forces in gender studies and helped to bring together communities through their books and journals program.

It is in this multidisciplinary field that we find scholars surfacing the stories behind the numbers, the herstory of women as healers, as well as women’s role as healers today.

The Age of Reason wasn’t a very reasonable time for a woman healer

In Witches, Charlatans, and Old Wives: Critical Perspectives on History of Women’s Indigenous Knowledge from the journal Women & Therapy, Oksana Yakushko asserts: “over vast spans of Western history, women healers were branded as witches and punished for practicing witchcraft as well as denied influential healing roles because of the political and economic monopolization of knowledge in academic, religious, and cultural institutions and practices through enforcement of regulations and access to care. Moreover, centuries of European colonization of other cultures around the globe resulted in re-shaping these cultures away from traditions of women healers, women-shamans, and women-leaders toward male dominance of these fields.”

Yakushko provides a brief chronicle of events, citing several instances in her timeline where history has been erased, those in power have committed “intentional denial of women’s access to healing knowledge or positions”, or women were outright murdered for crossing the patriarchal lines. Some instances, in particular, stand out, such as “the earliest known evidence of shamanic practice found by archeologists, dating from more than 30,000 years ago, indicated that the shaman was a woman” and the dictum “who knows how to heal knows how to destroy”, from The Malleus Maleficarum, used as a macabre manual, during the infamous witch hunts.

The irony is palpable as Yakushko continues her history lesson: “The witch-hunts of Europe were so severe that historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of women were tortured, drowned, hung, or burned at the stake in a span of three centuries (XV to XVII centuries)… In contrast, history books written by males claimed this period to be the end of the Dark Ages, described as the Renaissance, and claimed to mark the rise of the Age of Reason.”

The demonization of women healers certainly didn’t stop when the witch trials did. In her look at 19th-century American popular fiction, in"Cutting Up Dead Babies”: The Literary Legacy of the Woman Physician as Abortionist from the journal Women’s Studies, Margaret Jay Jesse finds a great deal of it.

Jesse writes: “’Murderess,’ ‘hag,’ ‘she-devil,’ ‘the instrument of the very vilest crime known in the annals of hell’ – these are just a few descriptions of women abortionists in popular nineteenth-century American fiction… nineteenth-century sensational dime novels are flush with the character of the evil woman doctor: the greedy, swarthy, foreign-born doctress, performing abortions under the cover of night, harming and killing desperate Anglo-American women and their unborn babies all in the name of profit”.

Through a Western lens

Yakushko explains why there is so little historical information about women as healers outside of Europe: “Documented historical accounts of non-Western pre-colonization cultures show that women healers were present and honored, but that European invasions over the past seven centuries were especially marked by transmission of patriarchal religious and social norms. Moreover, available recorded precolonization history with regard to other cultures is presented through a Western lens, especially a Western male lens. However, contemporary critical historians have developed alternative accounts of this history and show that European colonizers not only shaped social gender relations in every culture they invaded, but distorted accounts of cultures prior to their arrival. Specifically, upon their arrival, European imperial explorers not only refused to speak to any women who held power in indigenous native communities, literally granting power exclusively to males, but they also interpreted cultural practices, symbols, and stories through their patriarchal Western perspectives. For example, religious importance of female deities, women-focused rituals, and women’s roles as healers were often interpreted as demonic... indigenous forms of healing, specifically by women, were perceived as a threat to new colonial powers and were especially targeted.”

“Despite the historical persecution and extermination of indigenous healers, indigenous healing practices have persisted around the globe and appear to have survived the onslaught of Western ‘scientific’ knowledge and practice”, writes Yakusho. Indeed, they are thriving.

“Women's physical, mental, and emotional natures made them unfit for work as doctors”

Laura Kelly recounts that the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland “was the first institution in the United Kingdom to take advantage of the Enabling Act of 1876 and admit women to take its medical licences.”

Prior to that, Kelly tells us that “women had practiced informally as doctors in the early modern period”, but the powers that be had successfully used bureaucratic loopholes to make practicing medicine inaccessible for them.

Kelly writes in ‘The turning point in the whole struggle’: the admission of women to the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland in the journal Women’s History Review:  “the increasing formalization of medical education led to their increasing exclusion and the Medical Act of 1858 gave the force of statutory law to the increasing exclusion of those who had not undergone approved courses of training and obtained qualifications entitling them to practice. This act essentially resulted in the re-organization of the medical profession and enforced the exclusion of outsiders. The act did not specifically exclude women but with the emphasis now placed on standardization of medical qualifications from universities, to which women had no access, it effectively prevented women from making it onto the Medical Register.”