Healers, shamans, midwives – all these wise women have passed on their valuable knowledge for thousands of years. They taught younger generations everything they needed to know about nursing and healing, spirituality and sexuality. And yet it is men who are in the textbooks today. Because the ancient knowledge of women was devalued and ignored by men in the patriarchy, dismissed as superstition and destroyed.
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Miriam Stein wants to bring back female wisdom because she is firmly convinced that more knowledge from wise women would be good for the world. That's why she wrote a book called “Wise Women. “Why our society needs more female knowledge – a search for clues”. To do this, the best-selling author and cultural journalist spoke to wisdom and age researchers and traveled to Chile and Mexico. TheShe calls the resulting piece an “ode to lost, devalued 'women's knowledge' and its guardians.”
The search for feminine wisdom
Wisdom has an image problem, explains Miriam Stein. “Wisdom cannot per se be assigned to a specific gender or stage of life, but in the Western world it is generally attributed to bearded, wrinkled men.” There have always been wise women throughout human history. “In general, however, there is an academically recognized superstition that women cannot think rationally and are therefore unqualified for true expertise,” Miriam Stein states in her book.
This is partly because women have been denied access to sources of wisdom for a long time. Girls were not allowed to go to school; women in Germany have only been allowed to study at universities for about a hundred years. Some wise women still managed to convey their knowledge despite all the obstacles of the male world, for example the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen or the English philosopher Anne Conway. But most were ignored and suppressed. Miriam Stein asks herself: Where would we be today if this women's knowledge had not been devalued for centuries?
But even today our interaction with wise women is not much better. In Miriam Stein's opinion, an older woman's wrinkles on her face and the curves on her hips get more attention than the knowledge and experience she has gained in her life. Too often, older women are pushed out of the workforce instead of using their wisdom. The sad result: “Women accumulate wisdom in their lives, but their wisdom remains hidden, only a few are listened to.”
How to Become a Wise Woman?
The author wants feminist wisdom that accompanies us in everyday life, that explains the physical suffering of women for whom current medicine reaches its limits. A wisdom that lights our way through life like street lamps. The book contains a large selection of wise women from the past, but also wise heroines of the present such as the Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer. Miriam Stein weaves a tapestry of female wisdom from her stories.
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But how does one become a “wise woman”? And what characterizes a “wise woman”? The good news is: “The wise women I met on my search for clues taught me that each of us has the potential to become wise.” So wise women can have very different facets and influences: “Activism , cross-generational exchange, but also mothering and grandmothering, also and especially in the biological sense, is part of it." No matter how exactly this wisdom is expressed in the end, Miriam Stein is sure: "The time is ripe for wise women. Everywhere.” And because she wants to be a wise woman herself, she has developed a strategy that we can all copy: a very personal wisdom scale. Before every decision, every Instagram comment, every piece of advice to a friend, she asks herself: How wise is this on a scale of 0 to 5?
