The Pattern – How Women’s Contributions Get Erased
- Brainz Magazine
- 6 days ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Written by Joanne Louise Bray, Founder of Plantlife Joy
Joanne Bray is the proud founder of Plantlife Joy. Her journey began with a deep love of nature and the belief that plants have the power to bring happiness, tranquility, and a touch of magic to our lives. Plantlife Joy specialises in plant knowledge, and our mission is to connect people back to the beauty of the natural world.
Across cultures and centuries, women's contributions have been either omitted (simply left out of the record), denied (attributed to men or institutions), or ignored (treated as unimportant, domestic or natural).
I don’t think that this is an accident, and there are a few recurring mechanisms:
The supporting role trap, where women are the driving force, they do the foundational, intellectual, emotional, logistical, and creative labour, but are often seen as helpers, the assistants, muses, wives, secretaries or just background characters.
The modesty expectation, where women are taught not to take credit, to downplay their expertise, avoid self‑promotion, soften their authority, and credit the team instead of themselves. Patriarchal systems reward visibility, and not contribution, modesty becomes a mechanism of dispossession. This conveniently allows others to take credit.
The difficult woman label, where women who assert themselves, have boundaries, expertise, or leadership, are reframed as, emotional, dramatic, ungrateful, abrasive, and uncooperative. It’s a way to delegitimise her voice without ever engaging with her ideas. A classic tactic used to silence women's voices, I might add.
The archival gap, systematic absence, erasure, or under-documentation of certain groups, especially women, people of colour, working‑class people, queer communities, and anyone outside dominant power structures. It’s not that these people weren’t doing things. It’s that their work wasn’t preserved, valued, or recorded. In many cases, it was deliberately destroyed, overwritten, or attributed to someone else.
Once you identify the pattern, the next question becomes unavoidable, “Why does this keep happening?” Why do the same mechanisms appear in ancient Greece, medieval Europe, colonial societies, modern workplaces, and even contemporary creative industries? It’s because these mechanisms aren’t random. They serve specific cultural, economic, and political functions, and here are the key forces that drive them:
Control of power and authority - Throughout history, those who control knowledge control society. Women’s expertise in healing, agriculture, midwifery, craft, spirituality, community, and organisations represented independent power, so it was and still is often squashed. Women’s knowledge is not sanctioned by institutions not controlled by men and is not easily taxed, regulated, or absorbed.
Therefore, erasing women’s contributions helped centralise authority in male‑dominated institutions, legitimise those institutions as the “true” sources of knowledge, and maintain social hierarchies. This is why women’s work was often reframed as superstition, domestic instinct, emotional labour, and “helping” rather than leading. It kept authority in the hands of those already in power.
Economic competition
Many forms of women’s labour were economically valuable, healing, midwifery, textile production, food preservation, herbal medicine, teaching, and community care. When male‑dominated professions such as physicians, clergy, guilds, and universities emerged, women became competitors. Erasure became a strategy to eliminate competition, justify excluding women from paid work, transfer economic value to male professions, and rewrite history to make male dominance appear natural. This is especially clear in the transition from community healers to licensed physicians.
Control of reproduction and the body
Women who understood contraception, fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, and postpartum care held the power over the most fundamental aspect of society, who is born, when, and under what conditions. Patriarchal systems have always sought to control reproduction. So, women who held reproductive knowledge were often demonised, criminalised, accused of witchcraft, and pushed out of authority. This and herbalism are some of the deepest roots of the “witch” label.
Social expectations and gender norms
Cultural norms taught women to be modest, be self‑effacing, avoid conflict, prioritise harmony, support others, and not claim credit. These norms weren’t harmless, they created a perfect environment for erasure. If women don’t claim their work, someone else will, and when women did assert themselves, they were punished with the “difficult woman” label, accusations of emotional instability, exclusion from leadership and reputational damage.
The structure of the archive itself
The archive is not neutral. It reflects who had literacy, who had access to institutions, who was considered worth recording and who controlled the narrative. It was men who wrote the histories, kept the records, and decided what counted as knowledge. Women’s contributions, often oral, domestic, embodied, or community‑based, didn’t fit the archival model. So, the silence in the archive is not evidence of absence, it’s clear evidence of bias.
Fear of women’s autonomy
Women who were independent, unmarried, financially self‑sufficient, outspoken, skilled, and unconventional were often perceived as threats to social order. The mechanisms of erasure, especially the “witch” label, were tools to discipline women, enforce conformity, punish autonomy, and maintain patriarchal stability. This is why the same types of women were targeted across cultures.
Narrative control
Perhaps the most subtle reason of all, if you control the story, you control what future generations believe is possible. Erasing women from history limits women’s sense of lineage, creates the illusion that men built everything, reinforces the idea that women’s contributions are new, marginal, or exceptional, and makes women feel like outsiders in fields they founded. It’s psychological architecture.
The threat of women and money
When women control money, the pattern shifts. Across history and into the present, women with financial power tend to redistribute resources to families, communities, education, healthcare, and collective well-being rather than hoard wealth for status or domination. This orientation toward circulation rather than accumulation disrupts hierarchies built on scarcity and control.
Women who funded movements were rarely remembered as architects. They sustained communities, financed revolutions, kept spiritual movements alive, and built alternatives, yet were framed as helpers, patrons, or moral supporters, while men were cast as founders, leaders, and visionaries. As with intellectual labour, financial contribution was detached from authority.
This is why women with money have so often been viewed with suspicion. Independent wealth reduced women’s dependence on marriage, the church, the state, and the employer. It enabled choice, mobility, dissent, and refusal. Systems that rely on women’s unpaid labour and economic dependence responded by moralising women’s spending, questioning their competence, demanding selflessness, or portraying financial autonomy as selfish, dangerous, or unfeminine.
The pattern is consistent across time. From widows accused of greed, to healers targeted for economic independence, to modern women criticised for how they earn, spend, or share money, the same logic persists. Women’s financial autonomy destabilises systems built on extraction. Erasure, ridicule, and moral policing become tools to neutralise that threat.
How the witch hunts reveal the logic behind women’s erasure
The popular image of the witch as a woman who practises harmful magic obscures a deeper historical reality. While beliefs about sorcery existed, accusations of witchcraft were frequently directed at women who held knowledge and authority outside male-controlled institutions. Many, though not all, accused women were midwives, healers, herbalists, or socially marginal figures with practical expertise in plants, fertility, birth, illness, and death.
These women were not dangerous because of magic, but because of competence and autonomy. Their authority did not flow through the Church, the state, or emerging professional hierarchies. The figure of the witch became a disciplinary label, applied to women who were too knowledgeable, too independent, too economically self-sufficient, or too difficult to control.
The witch hunts did not give rise to modern pharmaceuticals. Rather, they constituted a violent rupture in women’s medical authority. By criminalising and eliminating women-led healing traditions, the hunts cleared the ground for institutional, male-dominated medicine to consolidate power. Over the centuries that followed, this institutional medicine absorbed community-held plant knowledge, stripped it of lineage, and reframed it as sanctioned scientific discovery.
Many modern pharmaceuticals are therefore not inventions created in isolation, but refinements of longstanding plant knowledge. Willow bark, used for centuries to relieve pain and inflammation, became the basis for aspirin once its active compounds were isolated and patented. Foxglove, long employed in folk medicine for its effects on the heart, was transformed into digitalis through institutional study. In both cases, the plants did not change. What changed was who was recognised as the authority.
The forgotten women who sustained great movements
I could provide so many examples of women who have contributed to or sustained great movements, but are either omitted, denied, or ignored. Across history, women appear at the centre of transformation, scientific, spiritual, political, and artistic, yet their names often slip into the margins while the men around them become the story. This isn’t accidental. It’s a pattern shaped by who held the pen, who controlled the institutions, and who was allowed to be remembered.
Below are just a few examples that illustrate how consistent this pattern is across time and culture.
Rosalind Franklin
Was born in London in the 1920s. She excelled at school in science and maths, but she still had to fight to get a place at university, her own father denied her academic abilities. In 1951, she began research at King's College in London on X-ray diffraction, capturing the first picture of DNA. the now‑famous Photograph 51. Her data was shown to Watson and Crick without her knowledge or permission, and it became the foundation of their model of the double helix. While they went on to receive the Nobel Prize, Franklin’s contribution was minimised, softened, or omitted entirely for decades. She had produced the evidence, but the credit flowed elsewhere.
Lise Meitner
Was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who played a crucial role in the discovery of nuclear fission, yet her contributions were consistently minimised during her lifetime. She spent over three decades collaborating with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. Even after her exile by Nazi Germany due to her Jewish background, she helped them to develop a theoretical explanation that made sense of their experimental results. It was, however, Otto alone who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Lise was often proclaimed to be Otto’s assistant even though she was an equal in intellectual terms.
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Was a Northern Irish physicist who, while conducting research for her doctorate in 1967, discovered the first radio pulsars (pulsating stars that emit beams of electronic radiation). Not only did she analyse data from a newly commissioned radio telescope, but she also helped build the instrument. Her findings were initially dismissed as interference until another telescope picked up the same signal from a different star.
In 1974, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle. It was Jocelyn’s discovery that transformed astrophysics and opened an entirely new way of research. Decades later, she used her platform to lift others, donating 2.3 million when she received the Special Breakthrough prize in Fundamental Physics to fund scholarships for women, refugees, and underrepresented groups in physics.
Hypatia of Alexandria
Lived in 4th-5th century Alexandria. Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher at a time when women were rarely educated, let alone allowed to teach. She led the Neoplatonist school, attracting students from across the Mediterranean. Her influence extended beyond scholarship, she advised civic leaders and was respected as a public intellectual.
She was killed by a Christian mob during a power struggle between the governor Orestes and Bishop Cyril. In later retellings, her death was reframed as punishment for “paganism,” a narrative that obscured the political motives and helped justify the violence. Her story became another example of how women’s intellectual authority was erased or recast to fit institutional agendas.
Trotula of Salerno
Was an 11th‑century physician associated with the famed medical school of Salerno, one of the earliest centres of medical learning in medieval Europe, who allowed women to study. She specialised in women’s health at a time when female bodies were poorly understood and often treated with superstition or neglect. Her writings, collectively known as The Trotula, covered childbirth, menstruation, fertility, gynaecology, and herbal remedies, offering practical, compassionate guidance grounded in observation rather than fear.
Her work was so influential that it circulated across Europe for centuries, yet later scribes and scholars refused to believe a woman could have authored such authoritative medical texts. Portions of her work were attributed to male physicians, her name was Latinised or altered, and in some manuscripts, she was erased entirely. The survival of her writings is the exception that proves the rule, women’s medical knowledge was often absorbed into male‑authored texts, while the women themselves disappeared from the historical record.
Even today, women’s medical decisions are still publicly scrutinised. You see it when groups gather outside clinics to shame or pressure women at their most vulnerable, a modern reminder that the policing of women’s bodies never truly disappeared, it simply changed form.
Even the bible leaves out the key importance of women who shaped movements. Joanna, the wife of Chuza, a woman of considerable status, funded Jesus’s ministry. Joanna travelled with Jesus and the disciples, financing their work after Jesus had cured her of evil spirits, helping them sustain their ministry. She is also the woman who discovered the empty tomb of Jesus, placing her at the heart of the resurrection story. Despite her presence, her influence, and her witness, Joanna all but disappears from Christian tradition. Her Hebrew name, Yôḥānāh, originally carried the meaning of a “gracious gift,” but even this softened over time into the more generic “God is gracious,” mirroring how her role, and the roles of so many women was gradually diminished in the retelling, the retellings told by men.
None of this makes me sexist, nor does it require me to identify as a feminist. Pointing out historical patterns is not an attack on men, it is an examination of the systems that have shaped our records, institutions, and collective memory. Acknowledging women’s erasure is not about blaming individuals, it is about recognising structural forces that have shaped what we are taught to value.
I am not arguing that women are better than men, or that men have no place in these stories. I am simply refusing to pretend that women were absent when they were present, influential, and essential. Naming the pattern is not ideology. It is accuracy.
The truth is that progress has always been strongest when women and men worked together, when knowledge was shared rather than controlled, and when authority was rooted in competence rather than hierarchy.
We are living in a moment where the old narratives no longer serve us. It is time for a shift, not toward division, but toward partnership. A future where women’s contributions are named, valued, and remembered strengthens everyone. Restoring women to the story is not an act of exclusion. It is an act of completion.
Read more from Joanne Louise Bray
Joanne Louise Bray, Founder of Plantlife Joy
Joanne Bray is a leader in plant life, she has been to the darkest depths of despair with her mental health. Nurturing plants and learning all about them led to her own healing journey. She discovered the immense joy and mindfulness that nurturing plants provides, so she began to write about them within her membership site, create courses, paint parts of nature that she fell in love with, and write books in the hope of sharing her passion and helping others to connect back to the beauty and wonder that nature supplies. Joanne is very passionate about eradicating the use of chemicals in gardening, and so she offers solutions using plants that either attract beneficial insects or deter pests.
