March is Women’s History Month, or as President Cheeto calls it, “The who what now? Really? A whole month, huh?”
Women’s contributions to cannabis—past and present—have been (brace yourself) overlooked, ignored, and forgotten. This is a plant that 99.5 percent of us actively seek out in its female form, so that really needs to change.
In her book Tokin’ Women: A 4,000 Year Herstory, author Nola Evangelista (AKA California NORML’s Deputy Director Ellen Komp) looks at 50 women connected in some form to cannabis, from ancient to modern. She starts with the Sumerian Goddess Ishtar, who was associated with cannabis in the third millennium BC, which, as Komp said in a 2016 interview with Vice, was “a time when both goddesses and plants were revered as healers… and up until the Semitic invasion in 2600 BC, women practiced the healing arts without restriction.”
Women in ancient Egypt were also hip to the herb, with the Ebers Papyrus telling of an age-old medicine made of a mixture of ground cannabis and honey that, according to translations, was introduced into a woman’s vagina during childbirth to cool down the uterus. (History’s great and all, but if you’re looking for someone to recommend actually trying this, look elsewhere.)
