Resist! How Women Have Used Plants to Fight Oppression for Centuries

It's easy to think of plants in their very simplest terms – as food or ornamentation. For centuries, though, they have also been tools of survival, healing, and quiet resistance, particularly in the hands of women.

Yes, long before scientific institutions claimed authority over medicine and agriculture, women cultivated deep relationships with the plants around them, using this knowledge to care for their families and communities. This botanical wisdom was passed down through oral tradition, practice, and observation – and yet, as control over medicine, land, and labor tightened, this shared knowledge was increasingly marginalized, dismissed, or deliberately suppressed.

Rather than submitting in the face of this pressure, many women continued their work anyway. They healed quietly, taught selectively, and adapted their practices to survive under scrutiny. In doing so, they transformed care itself into an act of defiance, using plants to maintain autonomy, wellbeing, and cultural continuity when other forms of power were denied.

Botanical Resistance Across History

Even in formal movements for rights and representation, plants have long played symbolic and practical roles. Flowers and gardens became part of suffrage iconography and collective protest, while women-led environmental movements affirmed land stewardship as a form of resistance.

Seen through this lens, seemingly everyday acts – tending gardens, gathering familiar plants, sharing remedies – were actually strategic forms of preservation and resilience. What follows are just a few of the ways women have used plants not only to endure (and grow healing plants), but to resist.

1. Keepers of Plant Knowledge

Before colonial conquest, Indigenous women throughout the Americas were respected for their deep understanding of native plants and their uses as food and medicine. European colonists quickly relied on this expertise to cultivate unfamiliar crops such as peanuts and cassava.

As colonization intensified, however, Indigenous women’s contributions were erased from written histories – even as many continued to protect, adapt, and pass on plant knowledge within their communities, ensuring cultural survival despite displacement and violence.

2. Medieval Herbalists

In Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, many women served their communities as healers, using local plants to help with childbirth, treat wounds, and ease illness. As medical authority became more concentrated in male-dominated institutions, women’s hands-on knowledge was increasingly treated with suspicion... and sometimes fear.

Accusations of witchcraft, and the violence that often came with them, were part of a broader effort to suppress independent, non-institutional knowledge. But many women didn’t stop. They continued to heal quietly, practicing at the margins and passing on plant-based traditions, turning everyday care into a subtle but powerful act of resistance against a system that tried to control their work and their bodies.

3. Gardens of Resistance

In the Americas, enslaved women and their communities often tended small garden plots or “provision grounds” near their living quarters. They grew vegetables, medicinal herbs, and familiar crops that helped supplement meager rations and kept their communities healthy.

These gardens were some of the few spaces that Black women felt as if they had some aspect of autonomy. Caring for them became a way to maintain family bonds, pass down familiar food traditions, and keep healing practices alive, all under a system designed to strip people of autonomy.

The knowledge of medicinal plants was passed quietly from one generation to the next, often blending African and Indigenous traditions. These everyday acts weren’t just practical; they were a powerful form of resilience, helping communities preserve their culture even in the face of brutal oppression.

4. Reproductive Empowerment

Throughout history, women have used plants for more than just healing. They also used them to take some control over their reproductive lives, especially when formal medical care was unsafe, inaccessible, or controlled by others.

In these situations, knowledge about fertility and pregnancy became part of a larger body of women’s health wisdom, passed quietly from person to person, generation to generation. These practices weren’t without risk, and they were often shaped by necessity rather than choice – but they gave women a way to keep some control over their own bodies.

In this sense, reproductive plant knowledge wasn’t “medicine” in the modern sense. It was something else: a quiet form of resilience, a tool for survival and self-determination when safer options were simply not available.

5. The Language of Flowers

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women’s suffrage movements in the United States, the United Kingdom, and beyond used flowers and gardening imagery as symbols of unity, determination, and political identity.

Through floriography (the symbolic language of flowers), many activists wore specific blooms and colours at rallies, in petitions, and in public actions to convey messages of loyalty, purity, and resilience.

What might have been dismissed as mere decoration became a visual strategy of resistance, turning the language of nature into a tool for demanding political rights.

6. Plant Stewardship

Women have often been at the forefront of environmental activism, especially where plants and land intersect with social justice. In India’s Chipko Movement of the 1970s, women literally embraced trees to stop commercial logging, protecting forests and the resources their communities relied on. This simple, non-violent act reshaped forestry policy and inspired conservation movements around the world.

Later, leaders like Dr Vandana Shiva resisted corporate control over seeds and biodiversity, defending traditional plant knowledge and community rights. These efforts show how caring for plants and ecosystems became more than conservation: they were collective acts of resistance, and a way for women to protect both nature and the communities that depend on it.

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7. Ethnobotanists

In the 18th and 19th centuries, women naturalists and botanists played vital roles in documenting plants and traditional knowledge, even while being excluded from formal scientific recognition.

By collecting specimens, recording Indigenous plant uses, and exploring the natural world, they kept local and traditional knowledge alive despite male-dominated institutions trying to erase their contributions.

Their work helped preserve centuries of botanical wisdom and laid the foundation for future generations of ethnobotanists and conservationists, quietly but powerfully ensuring that this knowledge survived.

Across history, women’s relationships with plants have been acts of care and resilience. Those same threads continue today, as women around the world lead efforts that connect ecological knowledge, cultural survival, and collective wellbeing.

In the Amazon, Indigenous Xikrin women are protecting forests not just as ecosystems but as sources of life and knowledge. In India’s Odisha region, Indigenous women are creating “dream maps” that document, protect, and restore dwindling natural resources. And women like Kararaina Te Puni, who work at the intersection of Indigenous forest carbon sequestration, cultural restoration, and intergenerational action, highlight how plant‑ and land‑based stewardship can be a source of empowerment and global climate leadership.

It's little wonder then, that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other global bodies increasingly recognise that women are essential to climate solutions – not because they are passive victims of change, but because their knowledge, leadership, and care are indispensable.

Long may women’s care for plants, land, and knowledge continue to shape a more resilient and sustainable world.