Women's History Month 2025: Women Educating & Inspiring Generations

The theme for Women's History Month 2025 is “Moving Forward Together! Women Educating & Inspiring Generations.” In honor of women educators, here are some from this blog who deserve mention this month. 

The first woman educator I thought of is Ina Coolbrith, who I imagine had no time to enjoy hashish or anything like it in her day, so busy was she taking care of her family and other's children while working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week at the Oakland Free Library in California, where she was librarian. 

The hardest part of her arduous life was not finding the time to write, and watching her compatriots like Very Important Pothead Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller (whom she named) have successful writing careers. She even cared for Miller's daughter while he went off and laid a wreath of California laurel she had made at Lord Byron's grave, something she longed to do. 

In 1886, she befriended and mentored the 10-year-old Jack London, guiding his reading in her librarian role. London called her his "literary mother." Coolbrith also mentored the young dancer Isadora Duncan who later described Coolbrith as "a very wonderful" woman, with "very beautiful eyes that glowed with burning fire and passion."

Another educator was French existentialist author Simone de Beauvoir. While on a literary lecture tour of top women's colleges in the US in 1947, Beauvoir tried marijuana in New York City, after which she had the revelation that lead to writing the blockbuster feminist treatise The Second Sex, an eight-hundred-page encyclopedia of "the folklore, customs, laws, history, religion, philosophy, anthropology, literature, economic systems, and received ideas." Among those influenced by the book was Marianne Faithfull, who went on to influence the Rolling Stones.

In a rare television appearance from 1975, Beauvoir states (in translation): "In the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance, the female physician had much power. They knew about remedies and herbs, the 'old wives' remedies which were sometimes of great value. Then medicine was taken away from them by men. All of the witch hunts were basically a way for men to keep women away from medicine and the power it conferred." In her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, she argued that our greatest ethical imperative is to create our own life's meaning, while protecting the freedom of others to do the same. She wrote, "A freedom which is interested only in denying others freedom must be denied."

Modern academics include Professor Sherry L. Ackerman, who pioneered women’s education in the Classics, earning her doctorate in Ancient Greek Philosophy back when it was still a field populated largely by men. She went on to become a recognized author, speaker and professor, and a strong advocate of Classical Education. She was Professor of Philosophy at College of the Siskiyous in Weed, California for 20 years.

An internationally recognized scholar of Lewis Carroll, she wrote in Alice and the Hero’s Journey, “Alice's being repeatedly instructed to eat or drink various intoxicating substances, after having descended into the underworld, was reminiscent of the function of kykeon in the Eleusian mystery schools. The Wonderland mushroom, suggestive of the Amanita muscaria, takes a central position in this context, as the caterpillar instructs Alice to eat it in order to change sizes. Interestingly, the caterpillar is a principal symbol for transformation…the foreshadow of the chrysalis. Thus, the symbol for transformation sits atop the transformational agent, the psychoactive mushroom.”

Ackerman also distinguished herself as a notable Classical Dressage instructor, teaching riders from all over the world and writing Dressage in the Fourth Dimension (New World Library), which became a classic among the equestrian press. Her book The Good Life, based on her own homesteading experience in Mt. Shasta, CA, points the reader toward a simpler lifestyle “that values freedom, interdependence, caring, community and our connectedness with nature.”

In her book The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, Stanford Classics Professor Adrienne Mayor presents new archeological and DNA evidence for the existence of the once-mythical Scythian Amazon Women. She puts them at the funeral fires, inhaling hemp smoke and also availing themselves of other intoxicants like fermented milk or honey and haoma/soma, which may have been mead, cannabis, Amanita muscaria, other mushrooms, ephedra or opium (or a combination).

As Mayor tells in her Google Talk on the subject: whereas Ancient Greek women were confined indoors to sew and weave, Scythian girls learned to ride horses, hunt and fight with bows and arrows, and their women fought with swords and battle-axes alongside their brothers. Like men they could revel in their physicality, with freedoms including wearing trousers and choosing their own sexual partners. Mayor points out that burial mounds found in the Altai region housed both male and female warriors, along with weapons, hemp clothing, and "personal kits for smoking hemp."

The Amazons was awarded the Sarasvati Prize for Women in Mythology 2016. Mayor's work has been featured on NPR and BBC, the History Channel, and other popular media; her books are translated into Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hungarian, Polish, German, Italian, Turkish, Russian, and Greek. Mayor's research is featured in the National Geographic children's book The Griffin and the Dinosaur. 

Professor and "meme queen" Dr. Susan Blackmore is the author of the bestselling book The Meme Machine. Her TedTalk on "Memes and Temes" has nearly a million views.

Blackmore appeared at the 2005 Cheltenham Science Festival to discuss whether drugs can teach us anything about ourselves. A version of her talk was published in the Daily Telegraph on May 21 of that year. In it, she says, "Some people may smoke dope just to relax or have fun, but for me the reason goes deeper. In fact, I can honestly say that without cannabis, most of my scientific research would never have been done and most of my books on psychology and evolution would not have been written. . . . In just about every human society there has ever been, people have used dangerous drugs – but most have developed rituals that bring an element of control or safety to the experience." 

Asked by Scientific American in 2020, "Have psychedelics given you any enduring insights into the nature of existence?" Blackmore replied, "Yes. The emptiness of self, the underlying nonduality or nonseparation, the wild and endless realms discoverable in a single mind, the ready availability of mystical experience through chemistry, and the vacuity of the 'consciousness beyond death' theories when psychedelics can provide all this through effects on a living brain."

Someone who educated all of us about the racial injustices of the drug war is Professor Michelle Alexander, author of the 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

"More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote," writes Alexander. "Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born."

The Chronicle of Higher Education called The New Jim Crow, “One of the most influential books of the last 20 years.” It spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won numerous awards, including the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best nonfiction. The book has been cited in judicial decisions and adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads, and has inspired a generation of racial justice activists. The 10th Anniversary edition contains a new preface by the author and an organizing guide inspired by the book is also available.

Professor Dorothy Roberts in her book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. covers the ways in which Black parents who use marijuana are more likely to be judged unfairly by child welfare systems than are white parents.

She writes, "Even as some states are liberalizing their drug laws, including legalizing marijuana use and allowing its sale, child protective authorities continue to treat drugs as a reason to tear families apart. It is widely acknowledged today that the war on drugs has been a war on Black people, helping to drive the explosion of the prison population over the last forty years. The discriminatory impact of the child welfare system's drug policy is similar. Although drug use has become a ubiquitous excuse for investigating families, CPS directs its drug surveillance disproportionately at Black communities."

Prof. Roberts continues,"State-level child protective services agencies investigate the families of 3.5 million children every year, with one in three children nationwide subject to investigation by the time they reach 18. Most Black children (54%) experience an investigation from child protective services (CPS) at some point while growing up. [For white children, it's 28.2%.]"

Finally, a nod to the Women's Visionary Council (WVC), which was formed after founder Annie Oak attended a GAIA conference in Switzerland where 80 of the speakers were male and only 4 were female. Following the logic, "If you want to change the world, make a better party," she started inviting women to speak at events and now has seen women's voices amplified at other conferences as well.

The WVC presents conferences and workshops throughout the US and Canada which are open to people of all genders, including the Women’s Visionary Congress, a gathering of women researchers, healers, artists, and activists who explore different forms of expanded consciousness. WVC workshops also provide information on risk reduction and about the benefits and challenges of altered states. 

WVC also raises funds to provide grants to women whose work engages these topics and encourage their inclusion in scholarly discourse. It seeks to amplify the voices of people of color and support the transfer of knowledge among generations and cultural traditions. The group is building an archive of presentations by women in our community which includes more than a decade of research, activism, and personal stories of cognitive liberty – a body of knowledge that will benefit future generations of investigators. 

Other women who have educated and inspired us: 

In music: Blanche Calloway and Mary Lou Williams

In literature: Diane De Prima and Anne Waldman

In science: Valentina Wasson and Jocelyn Elders

In art and action: Judy Chicago, Tere Arcq and Aleksandra “Sasha” Phillips

And for those interested in doing a little educating yourselves, join the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Enhancing the Discoverability of Women’s History on Tuesday, March 25, 2025, 11 am – 2 pm EDT.