Weise Frauen

Cultural journalist and SPIEGEL bestselling author Miriam Stein embarks on a quest in her new book for an applied, feminine wisdom for the 21st century. She researches the forgotten heroines of our past, whose influence continues to shape our lives and thoughts today. Since prehistoric times, healers, shamans, priestesses, midwives, and women's communities have exchanged valuable knowledge about care and healing, spirituality, and sexuality. In our patriarchal societies and in the shadow of a male-dominated scientific discourse, female knowledge has often been dismissed as irrelevant or relegated to the realm of unworthy esotericism.

Miriam Stein aims to rehabilitate this feminine knowledge and undertakes a very personal journalistic journey to the contemporary descendants of our wise foremothers. She interviews women she considers wise, visits shamans in South Korea and healers of the Mapuche in Chile, and speaks with wisdom and aging researchers from San Francisco to Klagenfurt. She concludes: there is immense potential in a cross-generational feminism to integrate more wisdom into life. It is hard to imagine what our society could look like if women became aware of this.