Women's History Month: Celebrating Tokin' Women Who Tell Our Stories

The theme of this year's Women's History Month is "Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories" and the photocollage of such women on the National Women's History Alliance website depicts at least two, and possibly three, Tokin' Women: Maya Angelou, Lillian Hellman, and Gertrude Stein. 

Maya Angelou, the first poet since Robert Frost to read a poem at a Presidential inauguration, wrote about her experiences with marijuana in Gather Together in My Name, the second installment of her autobiography after the acclaimed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She recounted that after smoking grifa, "I lost myself in a haze of sensual pleasure....The shapes and forms melted until I felt I was in a charcoal sketch, or a sepia watercolor." 

Playwright and author Lillian Hellman was reportedly a bit of a cougar in her later years, enjoying the company of young single men in New York in the mid-1970s "with a leaning towards the sort of outrageousness that produced the hearty Hellman belly laugh," sometimes induced by smoking marijuana. "Lil said she used mj when she was around people who used it. As in 'Whenever I'd be at a dinner with Gene Krupa...'" said journalist/activist Fred Gardner, who used to supply her in the 60s. 

Gertrude Stein co-hostessed a salon in Paris that fostered artists like Picasso. She also was a stream-of-consciousness writer who wrote "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" about her longtime lover, whose cookbook features a recipe for hashish fudge, "which anyone could whip up on a rainy day." An interesting character by the name of Jenny Reefer appears in "The Mother of Us All," a 1947 opera about the life and career of suffragette Susan B. Anthony for which Stein wrote the libretto. 

A disc depicting Enheduanna (second
from left) overseeing a ceremony.

Cannabis and storytelling have long been interwoven. Terence McKenna connects the expression "spinning a yarn" to hemp's dual purpose as a fiber and an intoxicant leading to flights of fancy in his book Food of the Gods. In Fitz Hugh Ludlow's influential 1857 book The Hasheesh Eater, he describes a hashish-induced vision of a crone knit of purple yarn. 

It's now come out that the first known storyteller was a priestess named Enheduanna, who was the subject of a "She Who Wrote" exhibition at the Morgan Library last year. Her poem, "The Exaltation of Inanna" was written around 2300 BCE to the goddess and "Queen of Heaven" known later as Ishtar.  

Below are more storytelling Tokin' Women we celebrate this month, by their era. Read more about these remarkable women by clicking on their names.  

VICTORIANS

George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans, penned epic books like Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss. In her 1859 novel The Lifted Veil, she wrote, "A half-repressed word, a moment’s unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will serve us as hashish for a long while," to describe a relationship between a character having "moments of happy hallucination" from a newfound "abnormal sensibility" following an illness, and a young woman who is always described as dressed in green leaves or jewels.

Marie Stevens Case, a novelist, tried hashish with her friend, actress/poet Dora Shaw, on July 4, 1859 and recorded the event for The New York Saturday Press. Feeling as though years had passed, the women are surprised to discover that their adventures lasted only two hours, so they dress and go to watch the fireworks. "The effect of the hascheesh was still upon us a little and the rockets seemed the most astonishing and gorgeous things in the universe," she wrote. 

Louisa May Alcott, the author of "Little Women," also wrote two tales in which young women and men take hashish. Perilous Play (1869) a short story wherein a group of young socialites enjoys hashish bon-bons, ending with one of them declaring, "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. When the young wife of a character named Felix Canaris (note the similarity to "Cannabis"), tastes it, she displays “shining eyes, cheeks that glowed with a deeper rose each hour, and an indescribably blest expression in a face which now was both brilliant and dreamy.”

Harriet Martineau is often called the first female sociologist; she was a prolific and influential writer whose admirers included a young Queen Victoria. While traveling in the East, she enjoyed the chibouque (a pipe used to smoke hashish) and found it, "eminently good for health," writing, "I saw no more reason why I should not take it than why English ladies should not take their daily glass of sherry at home." UK's Princess Kate Middleton is a direct descendant. 

MODERNS

Isak Dinesen, portrayed by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa—based on her 1937 book of the same title—was a Danish storyteller who "liked to experiment with the sensations hashish, opium, or miraa [kava] could give" while sitting "cross-legged like Scheherazade herself" and telling stories.   

Iris Tree wrote poetry about with the horrors of WWI juxtaposed against the wild and free artistic life she was living, while railing against the bourgeoisie. Fellow bohemian Augustus John wrote of taking hashish jam supplied by Princess Violette Murat at a dinner party, and upon "catching the eye of Iris Tree across the dinner table, we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all."

Isabelle Eberhart left France at the age of 20 for Algeria, where she took up a sword to join a revolt and sent back dispatches in the form of crystalline short stories and novels. Reportedly she "drank more than a Legionnaire, smoked more kif than a hashish addict, and made love for the love of making love."

Simone de Beauvoir, existentialist philosopher and author, tried marijuana in New York City in 1947 and wrote about it in her book, America: Day by Day. It's possible the experience influenced her to write her influential feminist treatise The Second Sex.

Kate Chopin wrote two published novels and about a hundred published short stories in the 1890s. Her story, "An Egyptian Cigarette," which was first published in Vogue in 1902.

Beatrice Hastings lived with the painter Modigliani as his mistress, and reportedly shared his indulgence in hashish. Hastings was a journalist, a poetess, a circus artist, and a follower of Helena Blavatsky.

THE BEATS

Diane di Prima was the mother of five children who became a Lioness of Letters at a time when poets mostly belonged to boys' clubs. In her 2001 memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, she recalls being at a "boozy, marijuana-filled party one night in New York" with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. She envisioned a world "where everyone is taught how to use psychedelics. Even how to use pot. Just as one is taught both safety and pleasure in sex education." 

Anne Waldman wrote 13 Tankas In Praise of Smoking Dope in 1969, one of which says, "Of the ways to play / In this world of ours / The one that cheers the heart / Is laughing dope tears." 

Joanne Kyger was was "a trailblazer, fearless and full of insight" who published nearly 30 collections of her poetry in her lifetime, some of which imply she was a Tokin' Woman. 

Joyce Johnson is known for the book Minor Characters written about her time playing one to her boyfriend Kerouac."We were women who were attracted to men who exemplified freedom, but who would put women into more traditional roles; we weren't their comrades," she told Terri Gross in a 1983 interview.  

Carolyn Cassady in her book Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg, recounts how Neal turned her onto marijuana, and put her on a program of smoking "Tea" every night for a week. Her writing is an interesting perspective told from the woman left behind to take care of the kids while the boys went On the Road.  

THE SIXTIES

Patti Smith the artist, stylemaker and musician, won the National Book Award for her 2011 book Just Kids. In it, she wrote of trying marijuana: "I had seen The Harder They Come, and was stirred by the music...I found irresistible the Rastafarian connection to Solomon and Sheba, and the Abyssinia of Rimbaud, and somewhere along the line I decided to try their sacred herb...I never thought of pot as a social drug. I liked to use it to work, to think, and eventually for improvising." 

Pattie Boyd, the model, photographer and rock muse  for whom George Harrison wrote "Something" and Eric Clapton wrote "Layla" and Wonderful Tonight," took that song as the the title of her memoir, in which she writes about her drug experiences and finally finding peace during an Ayahuasca journey after Harrison died and Clapton remarried.

Grace Slick must be mentioned. Her anthem "White Rabbit," based on Alice in Wonderland, says it all about going down the rabbit hole. 

Of course, many females have sung the praises of pot, and other women tell our stories in film. We salute them all!