Celebrating Women's Herstory Month

March was declared Women's History Month in 1987 by the United States Congress, after being petitioned by the National Women's History Alliance. The these for 2019 was "Visionary Women: Champions of Peace & Nonviolence."  The for theme 2020 is “Valiant Women of the Vote.”

We've got some Visionary Tokin' Women to celebrate!

Let's start with actress/poet Dora Shaw, who was apparently inspired by FitzHugh Ludlow’s writings to try hashish on July 4, 1859 with novelist Marie Stevens Case, who recorded the event in The New York Saturday Press (7/16/59). After a fascinating experience where Case reports, "I was fast becoming a sphinx—my head expanded to the size of the room, and I thought I was an oracle doomed to respond through all Eternity...'Do you not see,' I cried, 'that I am stone....and if you make me laugh, I shall be scattered to the four winds.'" After seemingly having a vision of the Egyptian Goddess Seshat, the women watched a fireworks display. "The effect of the hascheesh was still upon us a little and the rockets seemed the most astonishing and gorgeous things in the universe." So the first recorded use of American women taking cannabis happened with a fireworks show.

In 1869, writer Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, published "Perilous Play," a short story in which a group of young socialites enjoys hashish bon-bons. It ends with the declaration, "Heaven bless hashish if its dreams end like this!" A Modern Mephistopheles, the novel Alcott published anonymously in 1877, contains a much fuller description of hashish's effects on a heroine named Gladys. "I feel as if I could do anything to-night," Gladys announces, and she came to them "with a swift step, an eager air, as if longing to find some outlet for the strange energy which seemed to thrill every nerve and set her heart beating audibly."



Our former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, the daughter of a Kentucky hemp farmer, was confined for four months in 1875 at a sanitarium where patients "were routinely given popular drugs of the era." Typical treatments for her mental symptoms included chloral hydrate, bromide of potassium, opium, and cannabis, or various combinations of these. Thus as with her contemporary Queen Victoria, we know that doctors who treated her prescribed cannabis, but don't have specific proof that she was given the treatment.

In the 1920s and beyond, singers Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday used marijuana, as did dancer Josephine Baker and actress Tallulah Bankhead. Jazz singer Anita O'Day and actress Lila Leeds were targeted for arrest for their marijuana use in the 1940s.

Author Maya Angelou wrote vividly about her experiences with cannabis circa 1946 in Gather Together in My Name, the sequel to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. "The food was the best I'd ever tasted. Every morsel was an experience of sheer delight. I lost myself in a haze of sensual pleasure, enjoying not only the tastes but the feel of the food in my mouth, the smells, and the sound of my jaws chewing......I decided to dance for my hostesses. The music dipped and swayed, pulling and pushing. I let my body rest on the sound and turned and bowed in the tiny room. The shapes and forms melted until I felt I was in a charcoal sketch, or a sepia watercolor."

The hashish fudge recipe published in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954) has made Toklas a beloved figure to Tokin' Women everywhere (although she disavowed knowledge of it). Her lover Gertrude Stein published a play in 1947 with a character named Jenny Reefer. An episode called "Tabitha's Weekend" that aired on TV's Bewitched on March 6, 1969 has this interesting exchange: Endora (the grandmother witch played by Agnes Moorehead) is offered cookies by Darrin's (straight) mother. "They're not by chance from an Alice B. Toklas recipe?" Endora asks. When told they were not, "Then I think I'll pass," is her answer.

In the 1960s, musicians Grace Slick, Janis Joplin and "Mama" Cass Elliot enjoyed marijuana and sang about it, and about social justice. Anthropologist Margaret Mead testified before Congress in 1969 in favor of marijuana legalization, and said that she had tried it herself.

And for a visionary activist, Karen Silkwood was carrying a manilla envelope carrying documents about corruption at the Kerr-McGee plutonium processing plant where she worked when her car suspiciously ran off the road in 1974. The documents were never found afterwards, but investigators did find marijuana cigarettes in the pocket of her coat.

Read about more Tokin' Women at VeryImportantPotheads.com/women, and in the book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.