Rooted in Feminism: What Weeds Taught Me About Women’s History

From roadside weeds to the rise of universities — tracing the tangled roots of women’s wisdom and resilience.

Most people seem to find their way into gardening through growing vegetables - courgettes, tomatoes, runner beans. Mine, however, was weeds. During Covid, when the council stopped spraying roadsides and verges, I noticed how beautiful some of the weeds starting to reclaim their terrain were. The structures of some of these plants were especially cool...I mean, have you seen Shepherd’s purse?! It is beautiful. The name, not so much, but the structure…exquisite!

The more I noticed, the more curious I got. I bought myself one of those Collins Guides, but honestly, I mostly relied on a plant identifying app and Google Lens. Some of the common names of these plant caught my attention. Things like, Self Heal, Waybread, Traveller’s Companion, led me down a rabbit hole into the history of how these plants were once used. And, like so many things I end up learning about, it brought me back to Feminism and yet another way women have been oppressed and erased from history. And how all of society has suffered as a consequence. Dramatic, maybe, but true.

Up until the 12th to 13th century, the Church had suppressed the development of medicine as a respectable profession and in some ways this benefited women. Although women were viewed as both the “weaker” sex and a “dangerous vessel” for the devil’s work, they were permitted to act as healers because medicine had yet to be formalised. Within local communities it was often a woman, not a man, who was called upon to treat everyday ailments with locally gathered plants. Prunella vulgaris (Self Heal) soothed sore throats, while Plantago lanceolata (Ribwort Plantain, or Waybread/Traveller’s Companion) eased stings and wounds.

There was no single moment when this changed, more a slow convergence of forces. The Church had always hated women, but because it focused on spiritual rather than physical healing, seeing the body as earthly and sinful, women were permitted to specialise in remedies so long as they were useful. It was a win–win for the Church: heal someone, fine. Stray too close to pagan ritual or be blamed for a death, and you could be accused of witchcraft and killed.

From the 12th century onward, however, the rediscovery of Aristotle and Galen helped inspire the rise of universities and the professionalisation of learning. Medicine became an academic pursuit, taught in Latin and reserved for men. As women were barred from these institutions, there was no way for their knowledge to be recognised or carried into this new idea of “science.”

By the 15th century these trends, combined with growing religious anxiety and superstition, turned suspicion into full persecution. Healing women were no longer seen as neighbours with useful knowledge but as threats, accused of witchcraft, discredited, and in many cases killed. Earlier witchcraft accusations had targeted both sexes, but by this point women were firmly cast as the devil’s agents.

The last bastion of women’s authority in medicine was midwifery. For centuries, childbirth was women’s work, but by the seventeenth century, armed with instruments, licences and a new sense of scientific superiority, men had staked their claim. By the 18th and 19th centuries, midwifery and gynaecology were almost entirely under male control. The irony, of course, is that men never really wanted to deal with women’s bodies, they simply wanted to control them.

There was never a consistent reason for excluding women from medicine. At first, their focus on the body and their practical, hands-on approach made them seem too earthy and impure to be taken seriously beside the Church-educated men of theory. Yet by the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th centuries, when medicine was recast as a rational, scientific discipline, women were excluded again, this time for being deemed too unscientific and irrational to take part.

The knowledge and expertise lost through this twisting history of oppression and subordination have had lasting repercussions and consequences we may not even fully recognise. Mugwort, known for centuries as the “mother of herbs,” was used to bring on menstruation, to help in labour and to support recovery afterwards. Once men took over, its uses were either dismissed as folklore or condemned as witchcraft. And although modern science now knows its compounds affect the muscles of the uterus and digestive tract, it remains largely unstudied. There’s no profit in a plant that grows on roadsides, and little institutional curiosity about knowledge that came from women. Yet those same properties could have broader benefits for everyone, from pain relief and muscle relaxation to digestive support.

Mugwort is just one example. The pattern repeats again and again: women’s knowledge devalued until men rediscover it under another name. Take willow bark, once used by women healers for pain and fever, later “discovered” by male chemists and turned into aspirin. Or foxglove, used in folk medicine to steady the heart long before it was refined into digitalis. Every time, the story is the same: the wisdom is ancient, the credit is new, and the profit flows one way.