Where did women's gatherings go?
WHGHB: Chapter 2 - The Disappearance of Women's Gatherings
This is Chapter 2 of We Have Gathered Here Before, a book serialised here on Substack that explores the history and future of women’s gatherings, and how female connection just might be able to change the world for the better.
If you want to catch up, you can find the following under the We Have Gathered Here Before tab on The Gathering’s homepage:
Introduction: We’ve Been Here Before, Can We Do Better This Time?
Interview: Lauren Barber - Standing Up To Hold Space
In the last chapter, we looked at the history of women’s gatherings - how they have existed for thousands of years, and how they continued even when women were threatened with punishment or death because of them.
And yet.
In recent years, they seem to have all but disappeared. I don’t remember, growing up, any mention of women’s circles or any similar gatherings. It wasn’t something I was ever introduced to as a young woman, and most people that I’ve spoken to of my generation have said the same.
So what happened? Why, after so many years of continuing through so much, did women’s gatherings fade away?
Burn the witch
The easy conclusion to jump to is that the witch trials of Europe and North America stopped women from wanting to gather in any way that might bring suspicion upon them. After all, as we saw in Chapter 1, more than 50,000 women were murdered.
Witch trials began in the 15th century, but the hysteria fuelling these murders ramped up in the 17th century, before subsiding in the 18th. Given what was said about witches belonging to covens, practising dark arts using plants, and performing rituals under the full moon, it wouldn’t be surprising if women felt that the kinds of circles that had once been commonplace where groups came together to celebrate feminine and lunar cycles, share knowledge of plant medicine and commune with nature were no longer worth the risk.
The problem is that women rarely got to write records of their experiences, so their stories are largely omitted from history. What we know about women’s gatherings is usually presented through the lenses of men. And that’s not much. How many circles continued, and how many came to an end, during the 300 years that women were being persecuted under the cover of religious devotion is unknown. As is how much ancient knowledge was lost during this period when women didn’t dare gather to share it with one another.
Older women, those that lived alone and had become the keepers of this knowledge, were often more vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. They fell into that perilous space where the patriarchy both deemed them unattractive and useless but also recognised that they had knowledge and freedom that made them dangerous. Without family to protect them, they were easy prey.
However, we also saw in Chapter 1 that some of these women’s gatherings had been mandated by the patriarchy in the first place. In some cultures, menstrual huts were introduced because women were to be seen as “unclean” during their monthly bleed. They wanted the messiness of menstruation and childbirth away from them. So why (in some places, at least) did they stop insisting on these practices?
Is it possible that, in the panic they created around witches, they started to believe their own hype? Did they come to fear gatherings of women?
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