Wise Women, Witches, and Finding My Inner Woman

This painting of three women and a dog seeming to dance or float through a landscape helps me connect with my inner woman.

Image by Birmingham Museums, courtesy of Unsplash

One of my nicknames as a child was “Lindaman”. 

When my family called me Lindaman, I felt smart and powerful, like a man.  I didn’t consciously believe that women couldn’t be smart and powerful. but the main things I associated with being a woman were to look attractive and be sexy..  I was more interested in being like a man.

Growing up, I mostly lived in my head, in a detached mental world where male and female didn’t seem to matter. I carved out a safe mental world for myself by studying science and engineering. With my white, affluent upbringing, I had the privilege to do so. I didn’t have to face the deeper implications of being female.

After a decade of working in the biotech industry, not to mention getting married, having children, and buying and remodeling houses, my safe mental life began to burst open at the seams.  I grew restless.  I began to feel alarmed about the ecological state of our world and the fact that I wasn’t doing anything to change it.  Spontaneously, I started connecting to nature in an intangible way I had never experienced before.  I quit my career, spent a few years exploring other options, and eventually, went to graduate school.

Finding my inner woman

Graduate school was the first time I studied topics other than science and engineering.  I had never educated myself in feminism, politics, ethnic and racial studies, social justice, etc.  I had never consciously considered the fact that I was living on – and ostensibly “owning” – land that had been stolen from its Indigenous inhabitants.  I had never thought of myself as white and privileged.  I had never noticed that I was female in a male-dominated world.  Even majoring in Mechanical Engineering with hardly any women in my classes, it simply never occurred to me to consider my gender, as I never felt limited or excluded in any way.  I am clearly the product of a society riddled with systemic sexism, classism, and racism.

The first hint of my inner woman emerged thanks to the book Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici.  I learned that capitalism goes hand-in-hand with sexism (and racism) because it requires women to become subservient to men as they focus on the unpaid labor of housework and reproduction.  Someone needed to create new workers for the labor force!  I was blown away to learn that the witch-hunts of 16th and 17th century Europe (and elsewhere) weren’t only a matter of the Church’s oppression of women, but they were also a political move to support the emerging capitalism system.  Men were taught to fear women’s power and anything related to “magic”, “witchcraft”, or the supernatural.

I had a visceral reaction when learning about the witch burnings and what life had been like for women before.  I had never thought about the fact that the role of women was different before they were devalued, exploited, and burned., back when women – sometimes referred to as “wise women” – were still in charge of their bodies, their reproduction, and their communal herb gardens with its plant medicines.  I had recently created a medicinal herb garden where I felt strangely in tune with the plants, and I connected deeply to this image of the wise women tending their herb gardens, respected as healers by their communities.

We used to be wise women

As I sank into the felt-sense of these beautiful wise women being persecuted as witches, my body crawled with shivers, and I had a sudden flash in which I connected intuitively to my ancestral history.  I didn’t question whether or not it was real, it was more like recognizing a part of myself I hadn’t come into contact with before.  I felt myself as one of those witches.  It was a whole group of us, living our way of life as the wise women of those times: long skirts swirling in the wind, growing and gathering herbs, preparing medicines, in tune with the earth and heavens in ways that most of us have since forgotten.  My inner woman rejoiced.

Part of the forgetting certainly has to do with the rise of science as our current dominant way of knowing. Science marginalizes any knowledge practices that seem “supernatural” or “witchy”, including the use of intuition.  But feeling my ancestral witch inside of me, I also recognized that we needed to hide or suppress our intuition in order to avoid being ostracized, or worse, exterminated.  I understand better now why my Oma, my German grandmother, called her intuitive abilities a “curse”.

Bringing back the wise woman

I’m privileged to live during a time when it feels safe for a white, non-marginalized female, historically distanced from the witch-burning times, to reveal this intuitive side of myself - my inner witch.  Others are also speaking up for the reclaiming of intuition and nature connectedness as valid and important ways of knowing.  Some interesting examples are the Reclaiming movement and the new field of Ecofeminism.

I can’t forget the feeling of being a wise woman. It feels free and flowing and interconnected. My life is interwoven with the lives of other women, with the plants, with the land.  I feel a warmth and joy deep inside. This is what it means to me now, to be female. 

I’m still Lindaman, but I'm also a fledgling wise woman, gradually making room for the intuitive parts of myself to regenerate and flourish. 

The Lindaman in me understands the drive to control and dominate the natural world according to our human goals and purpose.  And the wise woman in me knows that being in touch with our innate intuitive capacities is necessary for us to (re)discover how to be human in a world where all beings can mutually flourish.