Episode 6, Part 1
trading fertility for fantasy part 1: history of female physiology and forging a new path for our daughters
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Transcript
So I have been absolutely loving getting all of your messages this week telling me what your new Thursday routine is, as you listen to the podcast. I've been getting some beautiful visuals of you guys just eating breakfast and soaking up the sun, walking on the beach, going on road trips. Keep the messages coming, I love to hear what you're doing while you're listening. And I know last week's episode, as we covered, you know, masculinity versus femininity and the different rhythms of our cycle. It was quite the doozy. It was an intense episode, which was super fun for me to put together and super fun for me to talk about these things. You know, they kind of penetrate differently. No pun intended. I know that's a weird word. When you're teaching them, you know, putting them together and having the thoughts and doing the research and kind of collecting the information is one thing, but actually teaching them and then seeing them really change lives and change my life, while I teach them is the most powerful part of all of it. And I loved hearing that you ladies loved it so much. You listened to it for a second or a third time, you listened to it with your husbands or your partners, it was really cool to hear. I'm so glad you liked it because it was really fun to do.
In season one fashion, as we continue through what I consider to be foundations, to build a really strong belief system around our body and our femininity and our hormones, we're going to take some of the concepts that I mentioned very briefly in the last episode and expand upon them. You might have remembered me mentioning that in order to really make change, we have to forge a new path for our daughters. I touched briefly on what I think about how a lot of women right now do not like the direction that women as a collective are headed. I think I can speak on behalf of a lot of you, maybe not all of you. But I know for me personally, and a lot of other women feel that they don't love the direction that women are headed.
Some of us feel really, really stuck with where we're at. We're having a really hard time living within our biological rhythms with the pressure of the economy, having to have a two-income household, and having all of the tasks and things that need to get done if we have kids - balancing that within our busy and stressful and pressure filled lives. And so many of us feel that soul-deep burnout or that cell-deep burnout, we realize and recognize that we're made for something way different. And way more. A lot of us are still living in fear of where the future is headed. And so this really leads us to tap into the, I guess I'll use the word “flawed” part of our feminine nature because human nature in and of itself is flawed, right? We have flaws. That's what makes humans humans. That's what makes humanity as a whole, this kind of conundrum of being super powerful, but also being their greatest enemy. It's almost kind of ironic or comedic in a way.
But I think at this point in the podcast, if you listen to all the episodes up until this point, there's no denying how powerful femininity is and how powerful we are as women. I have a hard time denying it. And I would guess that you do too. However, our power, this kind of co-creative power, this constant channeling of creative energy can lead us to the dark side of our nature, the protective side of our nature, the survival part of our nature, which is to always choose safety and stability, even if it means running backwards and hiding in fear, doing what's maybe not in our best interest, to stay where it's not only comfortable but safe because our body does crave safety, it does crave stability.
But what I'm seeing is that this desire to stay safe or run backwards or run in fear is keeping women from stepping forward boldly with vision and understanding that forging a new path can be scary and change can be frightening because there is a kind of unknown there. But to be able to do that, when you are in your feminine energy it requires an immense amount of trust and surrender and trusting in the provision that something greater than ourselves, that something is working together for our absolute good. And this is part of what living in alignment means - doing what you feel called to do, even when it feels very scary or tough or unknown, or you have to take some kind of shaky steps forward. So that's kind of going to be what the theme of today is. When I wrote down the original note for this episode, I wrote down a quick phrase, “trading our fertility for a fantasy.” But as I sat down and really decided what I wanted to talk about in this episode, it kind of became a little bit of a hodgepodge of things. I know it's gonna feel kind of random, but I promise you, they will wrap all together at the end. It has turned into an episode that's really about forging a new path for our daughters.
We're going to talk about estrogen and progesterone. People have been begging for me to bring hormone education back, and I promise it's coming. It's just coming in a new and unique way. I think we really have to understand some of these concepts to really be able to grasp the power of hormones, and really grasp what it means to balance our hormones. But as we dive into the estrogen and progesterone conversation, I also want to talk a lot about some of our history and some of the history of hormones and what has really happened over the past century to women. I think a lot of us don't really know, but I love history. I've always been kind of a self-proclaimed history buff, I'm always hungry to learn about different things in history that kind of shaped where we're at today. And as I dove into this, and I did research on this topic, I am shocked at how much I did not know has happened to women over even just the past century, even just the past 100 years.
I think this is a very important conversation, because some of what I'm seeing and what I'm talking about when I say women running backwards and fear, is I'm kind of starting to see that because women don't like the way that we're kind of operating as a whole today, they're kind of running back. And I don't know, maybe people would consider it the trad-wife movement or this kind of rise in traditional gender roles, this idea that women kind of want to stay in a certain specific role. And quote, unquote, go back, I put quotations around that to “traditional values.” But I'll be honest, I see the draw of wanting to slow down to spend more time at home to spend more time with our families. Of course, we as women are craving more, we're craving different, we're craving a complete change of pace. And that is absolutely true. However, is the answer really kind of trying to go back in time and rewrite, rewind to the past? Is that what we really want? Or are we just being influenced to think that's what we want. Because I am here to say that going back 100 years, which I think is really important for us to do today, is really heavy and really dark. And there are some very gruesome things, especially around our bodies, and health and hormones specifically, that have been going on for the past 100 years that most of us are not even aware of.
I think this is a really important thing for us as women who want something different for our daughters and want something different for the future to discuss, so that we can take all the facts. I worked really hard in this episode to kind of just present the facts. And then I hope that you can take it and decide for yourself and make your own conclusions on what it means for you and our future as a whole. Because sometimes you really do have to go back to the beginning in order to be able to move forward. And it's really important for us to be able to evaluate our past mistakes, so we don't keep making the same mistakes in the future.
I don't know about you, but I'm really sick of this fear mongering. I'm really sick of this kind of ignorant groupthink where everyone's afraid of something. And so then all of the other people that have similar belief systems just kind of hop on that train and they're all afraid of the same thing. I'm sick of constantly playing defense. I really want to start to understand and have intelligent conversations and intelligent debates, I can really understand the nuance within things and really allow truth to penetrate. And then to decide for myself really what it means for my belief system. Because this is true empowerment. I think most of us as women, right now, we're kind of sick of playing that defense, we're sick of being in that place of fear and constantly being afraid of everything little thing in our house and our environment and what's going on around us. A lot of us want to step into that place of power, want to have that wild woman or that warrior part of us rise to have that wise woman or matriarchal part of us rise. We've been stuck in this kind of hustle and bustle and masculine energy for so long as a defense mechanism, that we haven't stopped to think, Where did our intuition go? Where did our power go? Where did our wisdom go? And we were subduing our power unconsciously, by suppressing those parts of ourselves.
It really is time for us to allow those wilder, more unpredictable parts of ourselves to rise up. And to take accountability for the things of the past, and how we've been maybe a part of our own captivity and our own domestication for so long. Then we can move forward with newfound clarity and make different decisions going forward. That's really what being in our feminine is about, it's about rising up, taking accountability, feeling the things that we need to feel, and then guiding or correcting ourselves in our communities in that special way that we do. And part of this is really understanding ourselves, understanding our physiology, understanding our nature, owning it completely, and confidently, and being fully in our own body at all times.
Human Nature Is Flawed
Going back to the idea that, you know, human nature is flawed, we have these desires for survival. And just when we're stepping into our power, and we are showing up, something will get our fear going or something will get our guilt or shame those imperfect parts of ourselves going, and we will respond in a survival mode at the expense of our own good, right, like we some type of behavior comes out and boom, we just sabotage the whole situation. And we see our physiology doing this too, right? You know how too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing? You know, we want cortisol, for example, in balance, it regulates our circadian rhythm. But the minute that we start to become afraid and start to have an imbalanced environment, all of the sudden, too much cortisol ends up really wreaking havoc on our system. So our nature and our physiology can really work against us when it's not in harmony, and our power, our God given powers can immediately become our downfall very, very quickly. It's kind of that idea of the double edged sword where it is my greatest strength, but it's also my greatest weakness.
In the last episode, we really went into all of the feminine strength, what femininity looks like when it's in its complete power, when it's in harmony, when it's in balance, when it's in the place it's meant to be. And as women, one of the most powerful things we possess is a sensitivity, a deep sensitivity and a really, really sensitive intuition. We feel everything so deeply. We are designed to feel and feel it all. And this is a huge responsibility, right? This is a power that comes with great responsibility if we want to be cliche about it. Because when you sense everything so deeply and you feel everything so deeply, it's very easy to get out of a place of peace. And so if you want to be in your feminine energy and feel okay and feel at peace, kind of keep that place of just peace within.
It really requires us to do a few things as women, it really requires us to practice immense amounts of surrender. We have to be in a constant state of surrender and trust. We have to trust in something greater than us whether that is our higher power or something. In our mind's eye, there has to be something out there for us to trust and surrender to, or we will drive ourselves crazy. It will feel like way too much is on our shoulders. And so not only does it really require us to trust in a higher power's benevolence, if we want to say it that way, but also requires us on the flip side to have a personal responsibility of a constant mindfulness and consciousness of our emotional state. We we need to be aware and connected to our emotions at all times, allowing them to flow through us in a healthy and safe way, and not be constantly suppressed. And then until the volcano erupts, and the emotions come out, which is where most of us are operating, being in our power of sensitivity and intuition, to be able to stay at peace. It also really requires a fierce holding of boundaries, it requires us to really understand where our limits are, and to hold those boundaries so fiercely, that we are constantly protecting our peace, constantly protecting our inner well being. These are the things that are required to protect us from wasting our energy.
So not only have we talked about the past couple of years in the Jessica Ash Wellness community, how much energy and nourishment this requires. But what I'm trying to remind you is that it also requires a deep and fierce mindfulness, we have to be here, we have to be in our bodies, we have to be present with our experience all of the time. This is the double edged sword of the feminine power - the sensitivity and the intuition comes at a cost as all great things do. It's that cliche phrase with great power comes great responsibility. And when we're not aware of our power, which is what's going on in today's modern society, we waste energy. We become these energy black holes, or we have energy leaks throughout our system constantly, right? Because we can't hold our boundaries. We can't say no. We lay down and submit. We don't speak the truth. We don't stay in alignment. We do things that feel completely out of alignment with every cell of our being.
And, we've bought into the lie that emotions are weakness, and so we suppress our emotions and act as if they're an inconvenience. This really puts the feminine psyche in a state of absolute misery, right? Absolute misery, just absolute, discombobulation, disembodiment. We’re disconnected from everything about us that makes us feel like ourselves. And within this disconnect, we often find ourselves resorting to survival based behaviors constantly, which we'll talk about in a second. But our responsibility as women is great, it is heavy in a way, there's something really powerful to it. It comes with great sacrifice. And I think because a lot of us as women have not recognized and realize that our existence and our emotions are our responsibility to cultivate and nurture. It's our job to get back into our bodies and to take ownership of our shit and work through it and face it and feel it. And to recognize that we are capable of going through extremely hard things and feeling hard things, and coming out triumphant on the other side. Instead of storing that junk in our bodies forever and blaming trauma, and letting that constantly keep us on this roller coaster of jumping into our survival based systems out of staying in a state of reaction instead of responding.
Taking Responsibility for Ourselves
We can see how women could easily come to resent our nature, because there is a great responsibility in being a woman. There is a great weight that comes with the sensitivity and intuition. And if we're not in a place of continuous surrender and trust and staying within the present moment, it is all consuming. All you want to do is turn it off, numb it down, not feel any more. I think this is why so many women right now are suffering from so much overwhelm, worry, feeling like everything's on their shoulders like everything's just such a burden.
I don't think this is the first time this has happened in history, right? I think this has been going on for a really long time. I think what it has led to is an almost resentment of our own nature. We become prone to believing that whatever's over there, the fantasy of what's over there, is so much better than what I feel right here.
As women, we are so prone to fantasy. Now this is for a few reasons. There's actually hormonal reasons behind it. But we see women kind of buying into this in smaller ways, right? I'm sure you can think of acquaintances or women that you know, that are prone to the fantasy of believing that whatever is going on over there, that over there, that's what I want, instead of whatever I have right here, that thing over there is better. And I resent my current experience. I want that experience over there. And we kind of started to fantasize about all of the things we could have if we just had that.
The interesting thing about fantasy is that it's born from a place of feminine power, which is actually, we have an incredible ability to imagine and create vision, right? Our imaginations are so powerful, I'm sure you can think back to even as a little girl how powerful your imagination was, and the type of worlds and stories you could create in your head. And when we are little girls, we don't have the kind of hardness of the world, we haven't been trained to see the world in a specific way yet. The imaginative world and intricate stories that we build in our heads are beautiful and powerful, and often very positive. And we see ourselves from the true perspective, which is just with absolute clarity. And believe it or not, this ability does not leave you, this ability does not go away for women. When you have feminine energy flowing through you, your gift of imagination and vision is powerful. You are capable of building worlds and intricate stories within your mind's eye. But what happens is, as we get older, these stories become more and more negative, they become more and more survival based, right? Everything that could possibly happen, that hasn't actually happened yet, we sometimes create whole stories of something that's going to happen, that doesn't even happen or it has never happened yet. And we pretend as if it's reality, and our vision is so powerful that sometimes we cannot see the difference between the fantasy that we've created or the story we've created in our mind, and reality.
So, part of the flaw of our nature can sometimes be misplaced compassion, or misplaced emotion, because it's very easy for us to start to live in these non realities, if we want to call them that. And how many of us are suffering from anxiety, overwhelm, and fear because of these imagined stories, or futures, or worlds that have not even happened yet are not even reality, yet they are reality within our brains? You take this resentment of our responsibility, right, our power of sensitivity and intuition, and you mash it with our ability to imagine and have complete and wonderful vision for the future. We take those two powers. And now when we flip them and we look at the dark side of them, it can lead to a resentment of the responsibility of resentment of the need to constantly feel and an inability or I wouldn't even say that a denial All of what is reality. And what is a fantasy that we've built in our own head. seeing only the pros of what's going on over there and not actually weighing the reality of the situation, how every pro comes with a con, everything comes with a cost, right? I see the Adam and Eve story - whether you believe that it's real or just a metaphorical story - as kind of a great example of this. It teaches us such a valuable lesson of both feminine energy or essence and masculine energy or essence, at its very, very worst. You see how Eve and Adam are living in this beautiful abundant garden where they are able to eat from anything within the garden, all their needs are taken care of, they don't have to worry about anything, they have no worries in the world, and they can eat from the tree of life, the only thing that they can't eat from is the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And so of course, you know the story, the serpent comes and tempts Eve, and gives her promises of having the knowledge of good and evil being like God, being able to see the bigger picture, in a way, it's almost a representation of our innocence being taken away. It's almost a representation of us trading our innocence for the ability to take on all of all of the worries of the world. And so you see Eve, who is in her feminine energy, she's designed to surrender and trust and have everything provided for her. And she's like, “Oh, but I want what he's promising me, I want that over there. That sounds good to me, I want to be like God.” And instead of recognizing, “No, this is where I thrive, this is where I want to stay, I want to stay in this place of constant connection, and surrender and trust. Actually, I want that instead.”
She doesn't weigh the cost. She only sees the pro, but she doesn't see the con. And then of course, you see Adam, whose job is to provide and protect, even to take care of her. And instead of doing that, instead of saying, like, “hey, Eve, I think you might be getting into your emotions a little bit too much like we, we have something really, really good here.” Instead, you see him step into the feminine role, and say, “Oh, I'm gonna do that, too. I'm gonna do it too.” And then, of course, they both eat of it, right? They, they get the knowledge of good and evil. They now kind of understand the weight of the world and the weight of things. And the first thing that they recognize is that they're naked. And so because they've lost their innocence, they go and hide. And of course, God comes looking for them. And it's like, Adam, where are you at. And the first thing that Adam does is like, “she did it.” So instead of again, protecting her and taking.
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And how sometimes we make a choice, that is not in the best interests of everyone around us. Because of something we're feeling, instead of really sitting back in our wisdom, and creating a vision and working towards that in a very slow and controlled and mindful way. Our power really lies in stillness and timing. And if we want something different for the future of our daughters, which is what this episode is about, it really is our responsibility to take accountability for our mothers choices and our grandmothers choices and our great grandmother's choices and say this, “these are maybe not choices that I would have made. But don't worry, I got you and we're going to start healing these generational curses in this generation, you know, it starts now.”
This is why I've personally dedicated my career to really helping women understand not only their own physiology, but our very nature because once we really understand the core of who we are and our nature, both the power of it but also the shadowside and feel the pain and discomfort that comes from taking accountability, that’s really when we can step into that wild woman or that warrior part of ourselves. We can feel the pain and face it and then transform it, and become that wise woman or that matriarch that's able to guide the vision forward.
But first, we have to create a vision together. And then we have to all work together in guiding the vision forward. I think sometimes as women, we feel kind of stuck, or we feel frozen, and we're not really sure what, what steps to take. And so we just don't do anything. We kind of figure or assume that somebody else will do that for us. We take kind of a passive role in our life almost because of our own pain and what we're going through. But part of the awakening of women that's going on right now really does require us to finally face the truth, that it is our responsibility and our responsibility alone, to start to dive into these things, to understand them, to teach them to pass them down. To embrace them to live them, it's our responsibility, not someone else's. And this is why I love talking about the feminine archetypes.
Last episode we talked about the maiden/virgin, the playful and open part of ourselves, and then the mother archetype. And then of course, the wild woman or warrior archetype and then the wise woman or matriarch archetype. I like breaking down things into archetypes mostly because archetypes can help us break certain very difficult to digest ideas and very difficult to digest thoughts and break them down into more digestible pieces to start really understanding that in nature and in the body, and in life itself, ands and ors can exist. I think a lot of us have been trained or I guess brainwashed in a way to think in terms of black and white. We have a really hard time seeing nuance, we have a really hard time seeing the depth to turn to certain things. I think this has a lot to do with some of what we talked about in the earlier episodes - authoritarianism and also just mental inflexibility, the inability to really see that things don't have to operate in black or white or this or that, they can operate in “ands.” A lot of “ands” exist in nature, you can be nurturing and soft, while also being wild and powerful. You can be playful and spirited, but you can also be wise and intuitive. It takes us out of that place of trying to define things in a box and think outside of the box constantly and be in a place of constant expansion, which is what we as women are meant to be. And so I love talking about archetypes. I think archetypes are really helpful teaching tools.
I originally was introduced to archetypes by one of my mentors and dear friends Heather, who's listening probably right now - Hi, Heather! But, she originally taught me the four archetypes of survival or protection, the protective parts of ourselves that we have. And as we've kind of talked about, as women, our feminine nature is so powerful, but on the flip side, biologically, we are driven by the desire to be safe and have stability and be in an abundant state so that we can reproduce. Sometimes our survival behaviors will lead us to a place of behaving in a way that the higher part of ourselves would not necessarily behave like. But the part of us that wants survival and the part of us that wants to be comfortable and safe, absolutely wants to make those decisions. And so these four overarching archetypes are part of ourselves or the, you know, inner child or the child part of ourselves that never really grew up and kind of operates from the behaviors of our childhood and what we learned to do to survive during our childhood.
We also have the victim. The victim never takes responsibility for anything. The victim and always has to blame everyone and everything else and is always putting the pressure and the blame on something other than yourself out of protection. Then of course, we have the saboteur, where often times we're afraid or we are facing really hard emotions. And so there's that self sabotage part of ourselves that will just self sabotage the whole situation. So we don't have to face the thing that we're afraid of.
There's also that prostitute part of ourselves that's willing to trade something that we hold dear, something that's important to ourselves for something else, to stay safe or secure, in some way at the expense of ourselves, to abandon ourselves in some way. And so as we dive into the history of women, and specifically birth control, because we're really going to be talking a lot about the birth control movement and industry, which I think is a really important discussion to have, when you're understanding your estrogen to progesterone balance, and your understanding hormones, it has really shaped how women view their bodies and hormones. What has gone on over the past 100 years has absolutely shaped everything that we think about ourselves and our bodies. And I will warn you, I'm not going to, you know, give a trigger warning. We as women are really responsible for holding our own emotions. But if you're not at a place to hear some of this stuff since it is really heavy, just know it's going to be hopeful at the end. And it all comes together in a really powerful and hopeful way. But some of the stuff is really heavy, and really kind of gruesome to hear. So I tried to just kind of touch on the key points that I wanted to bring up to paint the picture. But some of it is still really, really horrible.
As I was researching this episode, I felt so sick to my stomach for so many days having to read through some of this information. I'm just summarizing some of it, but I linked all of my sources in the show notes if you want to go and review it yourself. But talking about what women have been through, about what our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers and great great grandmother's have gone through in the past 100 years or so, is really difficult. And it also hits me that most of us are still healing from this generational trauma, if you want to call it that. These are these generational spells that have been put on us. I think most of us in this generation are ready to wake up, we're ready to change, we're ready to change the next generation and operate in a different way. We don't want to pass this stuff on anymore. But as we go through this history, I do wonder about the residual effects of the things that women have been through and how they've impacted ourselves. You’ll also see these archetypes pop up throughout these stories. You see aspects of women's history where we've been just completely suppressed and kind of acted like victims. And we've gotten to places where we just kind of abandon ourselves. Or we get ourselves to such a place that we just start behaving horribly and just having tantrums and letting that inner child just run the show and behave like children. And for some of the women listening, you know, no matter what you feel about the feminist movement, I think there's some mixed feelings there for sure. I know I have mixed feelings regarding the way that feminism has has gone. I'm very disappointed in it. I will say and I didn't really recognize this before. I am a big believer that the feminist movement was born out of a true desire for change and a true desire for empowerment. Like all things, most things start from a place of absolute leave feeling like there's no other option like there's nothing left and the only option is to bite back.
But then you see just as quickly as the women rose up and started biting back and barking. What happened was it was quickly hijacked. And then all the women that were crying out for help didn't get the help that they wanted. So now we find ourselves in this kind of era where women don't they don't like the direction that it's gone. And so we have the trad wife movement or this kind of movement to want to go back rising up. We have women fantasizing about handing over their power yet again because they think that that will resort in a society that they want to be a part of that will feel good to them. And it goes back to the idea that we resent our power, we do not step into our power, we reject, in a way, our power. We have this fantasy as if if only we can live over there, we can be XYZ thing, and then our lives will be perfect.
But the biggest lie of all, the original lie, was that we can have power by handing over our power, that we want to give up and step out of that place of surrender and trust, and take steps towards who we were made to be in our purpose, and instead trading it for something different. And that is, you know, that that is the original “sin,” right? Playing a role in our own imprisonment. And I, you know, I think I have a hard time swallowing that sometimes, my pride definitely has a hard time thinking through that. But I can think of so many situations, most of the problems and stressors that have happened in my life, really do come from me doing that and handing over my power and trying to take on everything onto my shoulders on my own, and then taking no accountability for that after the fact as if that wasn't my problem.
I just want to be clear, I am not denying that women have been victims because we have been absolute victims in a lot of ways. However, that's why I brought up the archetypes. You can be a victim. But you can also be a prostitute or a saboteur, meaning that in being a victim, we're also sabotaging ourselves or in being a victim we are also prostituting ourselves in some way. That's where archetypes can be really helpful and understanding that you can be a victim, and also be something else. As I really have dived into the history of women's health and birth control, I just see this where there's victimhood, but there's also this self sabotage or this prostituting of ourselves or self abandonment over and over and over again. But I'll be interested to hear your thoughts.
The Past Century
Switching gears a little bit, I've tried to summarize some of the crazy things that have happened to women over the past century. We're really talking only about the past century, but I couldn't help but dig a little bit deeper. I just love history. And once you see one thing, you're like, oh my gosh, I gotta go the next thing. And really, what I came to the conclusion of is that something in the past 500 years has shifted to really lead to imprisonment and captivity of women in some way or form. We look at the 1600s and 1700s, the mass executions of women for being “witches,” really, any woman who practiced anything that was not a part of the accepted Puritan institution, any woman that they feared or any woman that they thought was promiscuous, or any woman that was kind of outside of the box of what women should be, they deserved to die and be put to death because they were evil, right? And all the way up until from that time, up until even the early 1900s, there was this kind of false imprisonment happening amongst women where any woman who was deemed to be a promiscuous woman was put into jail and then subjected to really invasive testing, really invasive vaginal exams, really invasive injections, under the guise that they were spreading diseases to the American army. That was the American Plan, I believe it was called.
I can't quite pinpoint when it happened, but you really start to see this shift from women going from being really free and being healers due to not being allowed in medicine at all. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was very rare for a woman to go to medical school and become a doctor. Organized medicine kind of became the thing, whereas before it was all about the medicine women, the local healer. It was a more of a community thing.
As medicine became more institutional and became more organized, you see this kind of crowding out of women to the point where there were no women in the medical field, or very little, only a few, in the early 1900s. And even the ones that became doctors had to fight tooth and nail to become them. Over history, you see this constant fight of women having to almost earn their place, or earn their right to be anything other than just this kind of leech that lives off of her husband or her father's wealth, who is this woman, this very emotional woman who's prone to fits and hysteria. You know, women in the past 500 years have really been deemed as kind of these evil misunderstood creatures that sort of have the devil in them. But as you look at history, this really only happens in more organized civilizations, I guess, if you would want to call them that. I'm not just talking about the Western world, but I'm talking about, you know, like Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. And, and some of the earlier civilizations as well, you know, during like the Medieval Times or the Renaissance era. There's always been this kind of crowding out of women, getting them out of places of power.
I find this observation interesting in and of itself, because when I look at women in traditional tribes throughout the world, even currently, even in modern times. There's not a lot of nomadic and traditional tribes left, but there's a few. And when you look at them, or the very rare pictures of them, these women look so incredibly happy, they are so incredibly content and satisfied in who they are. They're powerful and confident in their own bodies, you know, sometimes you'll see these pictures and they're just like, topless, their boobs are hanging down to their waist, they're holding babies, babies are hanging off of them. And they just have the most happy smile on their face. It fills the whole picture with joy and contentment. And then I look around in the modern world, and I see that women's beliefs about themselves and perceptions of themselves are so different. They really have no purpose or they're not aware of their purpose. So many of us are struggling with feeling dissatisfied and out of alignment. And we think the purpose of life is to look hot all the time and be fit and age well, to be everything to everyone all the time. And that's what makes a happy life. Are any of us happy? No, the answer is no.
You see this start to really happen in the early 1900s, where women are kind of starting to step “out of line” a little bit more, they're starting to kind of challenge institutions that don't allow women anymore. And you also start to see marketing shift, right? The 1910s - 1920s is when American marketing and the media really began to be able to just change people's viewpoints of themselves to really use emotional -based marketing, lifestyle-based marketing. Like if you've ever watched the show Mad Men, you know, the whole Don Draper and how they would play on people's emotions. They could take people's deepest, darkest emotional secrets about themselves and twist them and play them like fiddles and make them buy into anything and believe it wholeheartedly as if it was the Bible itself. And so you really start to see this happen.
A great example of this is in the 1920s when they started to push cigarettes for women. You know, previously smoking was a very male thing to do. Men would smoke cigarettes. And then they started to realize like, oh, we could double our customer base by getting women to smoke as well. And so what do women care about? You see a lot of messaging like, it'll help your figure or it will keep your fingers slim. It's soft going down the throat. But another one is the empowerment aspect of it. This is really one of the first times you see the advertising industry go after women's desire to be independent and powerful. And this is how they market cigarettes. It becomes almost a status symbol of being elegant and being feminine and in control of oneself. You know, a woman smoking a cigarette almost becomes this ideal. And obviously, something in women, something struck women, this want to be independent struck women so hard that so many women during that era started to smoke. How many of our grandmothers and great grandmothers were smoking cigarettes, packs a day, while they were pregnant, while they were breastfeeding? The advertising industry convinced women that cigarettes were completely safe, completely good for you, and will only do the body good.
The 1920s and the 1930s were a really interesting time for women. This is when women start to wear pants a little bit more, they start to transition from the perfect feminine silhouette to a little bit more edgy styles. There were the flappers in the 20s, and the shorter hair cuts, and the more boyish figure was in style to the point where women would, you know, use fabric to kind of flatten their boobs or their breasts. And there's really this kind of air of, this edge of, wanting more in the air.
Now, what a lot of women don't know is that what was going on to women at the time was absolutely gruesome. Women had very few rights. They had just been granted the right to vote. And they still were having to fight for financial freedom. They had no financial freedom. You know, they were either living under the finances of their father or their husband. And although they were starting to work a little bit more, and they were starting to be more careers that were accepting of women, it was very limited at the time. But one of the things that a lot of women don't know is that your health and your rights to make any decisions about your body or your health were not your own, they had to usually be run through either your husband or your father. And keep in mind, most medical doctors of the time were men. It was very rare for women to be doctors. So you were subjected to men that were very much under the belief systems at the time. And remember, this was a time also when women were thought to be very hysterical, very emotional, and our ailments or “ailments,” things that we complained about like PMS and headaches and migraines and women's troubles. If you want to put the quotes around there were really deemed all under the umbrella of “hysteria,” women were deemed to be hysterical.
This unfortunately, was a dark time. This was a time of lobotomies and insane asylums. Women could be admitted to an insane asylum for any reason - for being emotional, for being moody. Any reason her husband or her doctor deemed her having feminine problems or women problems or hysteria, she could be admitted to an insane asylum. There's this extremely sick documentary called “Lobotomy” that I linked in the show notes where I learned about how these two doctors, Jim Watts and Walter Freeman, they were the ones that really came up with the idea of the lobotomy after… I can't remember if it was Hungarian research or something along those lines… where they noticed that if they stabbed an icepick through a guinea pig's brain that it would become docile. Like yeah, of course. So these absolutely sick dudes figure out that maybe we can do this on human beings, and they come up with what's called the transorbital lobotomy. If you don't want to hear this, if you don't wanna hear the gory details, skip this, I'll give you a chance.
If you want to face what women were going through, a lobotomy is when a physician guides along what's called a cannula - they actually started using ice picks, but then they they graduated to a real tool for this - and they would guide it through the patient's eye socket, into the brain, and then move it left to right, left to right. In the documentary, it says a motion that some have compared to that of a windshield wiper, so move it left to right, just shove that thing into the brain, move it left to right to sever the patient's lower frontal lobes. And these men have the audacity to credit this “surgery” as they called it for alleviating patient's symptoms of insomnia, nervous tension, apprehension and anxiety. Then they go on to say that, you know, there are some drawbacks to it, “patients are definitely more comfortable” - that is a direct quote - but markedly more docile. Another direct quote, “Every patient loses something by this operation.” Another quote, “they lose some spontaneity, some sparkle.”
The sickest part of this whole thing is that about 50,000 lobotomies were performed between the 1930s and the 1950s. And even though most institutionalized patients were men, most lobotomies were performed on women. They sought women out to perform this “surgery.” This is less than 100 years ago within medicine. And so at this time, the medical field was mostly men. Of course, as time went on, more and more women started wanting to become doctors. It was still pretty rare, and they had to do a lot of push back. But one of the women that became a physician at the time was Dr. Katherina Dalton. And if you don't know who she is, she is the “mother of PMS.” She was the first one to really start talking about how PMS, or now what we consider premenstrual syndrome and the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome, are not just all in a woman's head or not just hysteria. They are real physical imbalances, they are these are real physical symptoms that women are experiencing, this is not just all in their head. This is not them being hysterical or anxious or prone to apprehension or depression or whatever they wanted to say about women. I bring her up because I want to make a point that she started doing her research in the 1940s. And she specifically talked a lot about progesterone. She made a ton of discoveries about progesterone and how our progesterone is not just a pro-gestation or a hormone that is just needed for reproduction. She was able to discover that we have progesterone receptors in many areas in our body, not just our breasts, but our uterus or ovaries or fallopian tubes, and even not just our reproductive organs, but our lungs, our liver, our eyes. And then, what do you know, our brain, specifically, our frontal lobe, which is responsible for our emotions, our personality and our self control. The same part of the brain that these frickin’ sickos were stabbing ice picks through because we were too emotional and hysterical and anxious and lack self control, and we needed to be a little bit more docile. So she was making discoveries about progesterone very early on.
She was treating her patients very differently than than a lot of others, which she came out with the “three hour starch diet” where she encouraged women to be eating every couple of hours, because she noticed that the women that were in her practice, which was primarily like the 1960s, or 50s 60s 70s, she was noticing that these housewives, instead of feeding themselves. were kind of running on these stimulants and these tranquilizers. That was the time of really taking uppers and downers a lot. That was the kind of the first generation of what we now think as antidepressants but originally were tranquilizers. Women would, you know, sip Coca Cola all day, they would use these stimulants, they would drink caffeine, coffee. Not much has changed, right? And they would be taking care of their kids. Then they would just be drugged out of their minds.
Of course, they had these horrible hormonal symptoms. They were having horrible cycles, horrible periods. And what Dr. Dalton started to notice was that the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome (she coined that term) where the blood pressure would raise the fluid would retain what was almost identical to the state of preeclampsia during pregnancy. And so she started to make some parallels between the two. She actually concluded that PMS and preeclampsia are no different from one another, they're almost the same. It's just in one, a woman is not pregnant, and another woman is pregnant. But they're caused by the same factors: a lack of progesterone, too much adrenaline not allowing us to receive our progesterone properly, (because adrenaline blocks our ability to receive progesterone) and also not having enough blood glucose. When you don't have high enough blood sugar, your body cannot respond to progesterone appropriately, because you are pumping adrenaline through your brain, through your veins. And so her treatment, she talks about this in her book, which I'll link in the show notes, but her treatment was to have women start eating every three hours, to include, a wide variety of foods, proteins, carbs, but she specifically wanted women to eat a little bit of starch every couple of hours to maintain their blood glucose levels. And then she also was very familiar with the treatment treatments using bioidentical progesterone.
What she observed was that a lot of women, when she would send them home, they would follow the three hour starch diet, and they would be focused on eating every couple of hours. They would come back three months later and not even need the progesterone at all. Their symptoms would go away. Her research is incredibly powerful. She was a very, very tenacious woman to go to medical school at that time when it was largely men. And there were still so many professors and men that said they weren't even comfortable having women in medical school, they didn't want to talk about bodily things around women because it would be too uncomfortable for them. You had to really hold your own. So I give her props for that for sure.
She passed away in 2004, but her research lives on. And her research is really incredible because it's very functional and down to earth, and very focused on the solution. She also has incredible compassion for women, because I think I can look back and see, maybe it was what was going on at the time. You know, women were seen as these hysterical beings and instead of being given what they needed, they were being completely maimed. They were being injured forever.
I remember a story in her book she talks about, I can't remember, I think it was a woman on trial for like murder, or something - doing something very violent. And she talks about how rage and feeling rage that just overcome your body can be a progesterone deficiency, and how some of these women had such bad hormonal imbalances that it was impossible for them to be able to control their rage. But as my mentor often tells me, emotions are messengers and anger and rage is really a message from our subconscious telling us that our boundaries are being violated, whether it's by ourselves or by someone else. And I can't imagine how much rage women were feeling at the time. So of course, it was an emotionally charged time for women. We were craving the ability to have power and understanding of our own bodies. But then it just got so derailed, and it went so far in the wrong direction.
Episode Links
In this episode, I mentioned:
· Documentary About Female Psychiatry “The Lobotomist” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/lobotomist/
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