The Woman Activist as Author
An Interview with Jacqueline Widmar Stewart
Sarah Taylor
Excerpted from The Stanford Practicing Feminist, as it appears in
The Stanford Practicing Feminist© 2026 by the Stanford Alumni
Women’s Impact Network (WIN) Stanford, California,
Editor: Barbara L. Prescott
In December 2023, I flipped through my alumni magazine and went straight
to the “Stanford Authors’ Showcase,” where I serendipitously came across a
small blurb about Jacqueline Widmar Stewart’s fifth book in her Hidden
Women series, Hidden Women: Legacies from a Free Celtic Europe (2023).1
Having just done some research on Celts and slavery for my own book, I was
piqued by the phrases “when women were honored as equals, scientists,
warriors” and “lost freedom and equality can be regained” in the short
summary.
I went straight to Stewart’s website to learn more about her, where
I eagerly downloaded the first book in her Hidden Women series: A History of
Europe, Celts and Freedom (2017).
2
Having my hands on the beginning of Stewart’s journey through pre-
Christian Europe, I spent the winter of 2024 devouring every word of her
provocative text.
Starting with a reverent foreword called “Paean to Ancestral
Women,” and ending with an ambitious directive for her readers including
suggestions to “remove tax-exempt status from sexist institutions” and “find
commonality and shared heritage,” I felt emboldened to charge forward
amidst a worldwide political landscape that seemed to be shifting away from
women’s freedom and sovereignty.
My interview with Jacqueline Widmar
Stewart will hopefully leave you motivated to charge forward and restore
equality for all women, wherever you are on the globe.
S. Taylor: The name of the book series itself has so much to unpack there. In
your introduction of the first Hidden Women, you mentioned to proceed with
an open mind. Whether or not someone has an open mind, I feel like your
books provide that opportunity to crack them open just a bit, like a starter kit
for breaking down the tower of White patriarchy. What is an “open mind”?
J. Stewart: I’m very happy to be talking with you and it’s a great place to start.
I think that an open mind is one that doesn’t assume women are inferior. From
117birth, we’re fed the victor’s version that women are weak, sinful, responsible
for mankind being driven from the Garden of Eden, even. An open mind to
me means not taking on that guilt of the last 2,000 years. You start with a fresh
page. Women are wonderful! Those who tell you we’re not – they’re up to no
good.
S. Taylor: Agreed! We’ve had centuries of that in our school books, in our
popular culture, and now through all kinds of different media. You have
uncovered a lot of new evidence about ancient civilizations, and historians,
archaeologists, archivists keep uncovering new evidence of these ancient
civilizations, much of which you discuss in your work. You ask a very
important question, and I’ll quote right from your first book: “Will knowledge
of our forebears constant struggle against subjugation trouble today’s
descendants?” So whether we’re descendants of the subjugated or of those
who were doing this subjugating and colonizing, I think today each of us has
a role to unpack and wrestle with that history. How did you navigate through
your own history of subjugation?
J. Stewart: I feel affinity for those who have been targeted by divide and
conquer tactics. Let’s just think about the U.S. We’ve had persecutions of our
Native Americans. At the time of the Constitution, women were men’s
property and not even mentioned. Under the Confederacy, there were slave
states. Chinese slaves built the railroads. Japanese were interned in World War
II. And under the Trump presidency, children were wrenched away from their
parents at our border, and that’s threatened again. Europe had 2,000 years of
slaughter and subjugation under imperial rule, especially of Jews and women.
What is a slave? It’s master-servant, bowing down to a master, forced
worship of a make-believe father, the royalty feasting while everyone else
starves.
When we made our first trip to Yugoslavia in 1967, Eastern Europe had
been strangled by the Habsburg Empire for 700 years. People were horribly
poor and without schools. Two generations later, the grandkids are lawyers,
teachers, and engineers. It shows you that there have been extreme outside
forces. That’s what we see in the thousands of witch burnings and safe houses,
and that’s what we see in archaeology. Enslavement is such a common story
in all parts of the world. But I look at my cousins and know there’s a strong
solid core of the Celtic kind of legacy in the world, too.
S. Taylor: I love that you mentioned the Celtic connection because we’ll get
back to that in a little bit! But you mention a lot of these populations just here
in the U.S. and in Europe. You know, all of these populations that have been
subjugated and put out to the margins. You can turn on the television right
now and see it happening, and there’s a voice for them now with new
technology like YouTube and social media, and traditional books like yours
being published. With that knowledge, there’s a backlash coming and as we’ve
seen recently in the U.S. Some textbooks are being edited – being banned – so
there’s a huge effort to remove some of this very important content from
history books. How does your Hidden Women book series give the subjugated
a voice?
J. Stewart: I have to give credit to Amazon. I have published with two different
publishers in Europe, so I have some experience with this. I find that
publishing in the U.S. is an insider’s game. The big publishers have shelves in
some bookstores as though it’s a grocery store, and the big brands control the
market. Take Stanford bookstore: Follett runs 40 percent of university
bookstores, including Stanford, and decides from their central headquarters
what books go into all of their academic bookstores—no local books are
allowed. The faculty used to direct the bookstore; now it’s a for-profit
corporation. What kind of academia is that? And doesn’t that kind of
delegation of responsibility endanger Stanford’s nonprofit status?
So, essentially, the author has to become a publisher. With print on
demand you don’t need print runs of 10,000 and have to warehouse the books.
You don’t have to pay anything for the printing, warehousing, and distribution
– the book buyer does. Your books are sent out by a click of the key, plus it
works the other way around. I can get books I couldn’t otherwise dream of
getting.
Google and Wikipedia enable fantastic research, too. The Internet has
become a lifeline for authors! So you don’t have to spend all your time looking
for a publisher and then have to write to that publisher’s audience. This is an
enormous door that is open to all who have something they need to say, and
we really need to hear from the subjugated because it’s something that
desperately needs to be stopped.
S. Taylor: That gives me some inspiration as I’m in the middle of looking for
a publisher myself. I may have to second guess my whole strategy here! Thank
you for that advice, Jacqueline.
J. Stewart: Nobody talks about it, but it really has been a lifesaver for me.
S. Taylor: Good to know. All right, getting back to your books and some of
the information that you share on your YouTube videos, as well. You’re
highlighting women’s impact, particularly the learning centers in the early
Middle Ages and this knowledge distribution throughout Europe. Your books
have so many great examples: Hypatia, the female mathematician and
astronomer, the Beguines in northern Europe. Hopefully, our audience can
find more of the information through your publications to learn about these
women. How did this impact you as a scholar and as a woman trying to make
her own impact in modern times?
J. Stewart: We have such a treasury of female legal scholars. The Brehon laws
in Ireland, the Salian Frankish laws in the Rhineland, and fantastic,
courageous women like Christine de Pizan, who took on the bishops who said
women couldn’t get into heaven in the fifteenth century. And Marie of
Burgundy, the last to officiate over the Duchy of Burgundy and who saved the
Duchy’s library by hiding it in Spain. It is so inspirational to know that these
women were able to accomplish what they did under who knows what kind of
circumstances. So it means that we just have to keep trying.
S. Taylor: Definitely. I loved your examples throughout the book and they
gave me a lot of inspiration for my own writing. I’ve been writing a lot about
African-American women in the U.S. and I remember reading about a woman
who wrote her book in a closet hidden from her slave masters and I thought,
okay, that took dedication. Some of these women in Europe that you
mentioned were completely stripped of any rights and any resources—your
books are definitely full of inspiring women for everyone to know about, so
thank you.
J. Stewart: Wonderful. Thank you.
S. Taylor: You mentioned the word “Celtic” before, so let’s get back to it. The
word “Celtic”—I know there are lots of pronunciations and there are many
misconceptions and misunderstandings about the word itself. Can you
demystify what comes up when people hear the word Celtic? Are these
misconceptions based on some of the imagery that the Roman Catholic
Church wanted to perpetuate?
J. Stewart: Yes. Say “Celtic” and you think barbarian. This is because the
Roman invaders called anyone who was not a Roman citizen a barbarian. And
of course only the elite males could be citizens with a few exceptions. But the
Romans projected onto others the atrocities that they themselves were
committing, and they falsely claimed the accomplishments of others as their
own, too. Most people think of Ireland and Scotland as I say Celtic, but we've
seen evidence of Celts all across Europe. I think of Celts as a widespread
residential culture that puts family and nature first.
The church state used deception to divide and conquer. Take language
as an example of one way to perpetuate confusion. That explains why you have
different pronunciations of “Celt” even in the same language. For example in
German, Celt is spelled different ways—both with a Z and a K.
S. Taylor: In your book, and some other things I had read for my own research
on Slavic languages, and their differences and why they became different.
There’s so much history like you said earlier, just like the subjugation, and that
history is still resounding today. Thank you for adding that clarification for
our audience.
All right, so back to your first book, which you actually make available
to your audience on your website with a very easy download, which is
awesome! So get the book, get all of them and learn about this next point,
which I think is critical for us right now. You make an important point at the
end of your first book about who stands to benefit from the repeated
denigration of women. I think of a few examples when I read that: our
healthcare system, men’s salaries, our capitalist economy—are many others.
So why would someone, generally White males, change a system that they
actually benefit from?
J. Stewart: Wealth and success have been associated with cigar-smoking old,
White men for so long, it’s hard to think of anything else. Male domination
has been the Roman law for 2,000 years, after all. It wasn’t so long ago that
slave owning was a fancy thing. It’s not that far away from where we are. It’s
not about economics. It’s not about efficiency. It’s not about justice. It’s more
about fear, intimidation, and terror. If you stand up for women’s rights, you’re
subject to death threats. Look at E. Jean Carroll.
S. Taylor: Yeah, she’s one of—unfortunately—many examples. You can look
on social media and find real-time examples. On page 58 of your first book,
and there are so many more examples, but I just wanted to pin this one down.
You talk about this “divide and conquer” tactic with respect to dialects and
writing, which is really based on the church overseeing districts by class, age,
gender, hair color, and birthplace. And this division really keeps the dissent
from spreading and kind of puts the groups against one another instead of the
larger problem, which is the ruling class.
At this time in history that you’re writing about, it’s the Roman Catholic
Church. We’re seeing the same strategy being used today in the U.S. and other
countries around the world. You know, the elite ruling class instituting this
divide and conquer tactic. Jacqueline, what are some ways that we can counter
this divisiveness in our daily lives?
J. Stewart: One answer I think is unity. Stand up against it, support women
who are under attack. Don’t just snicker with men or stay silent. If those forces
get too strong, though, we have to rethink strategy. When the Nazi troops
come marching into your town to round up some scapegoats to execute on
the spot, what do you do? The answer depends on your family. How can your
family survive? Sometimes you have to march along and pretend to go along
with things, otherwise your whole family’s dead. This has happened in my
family. Other times you wage outright revolts. It all depends on the
circumstances. Our ancestors managed somehow because we’re here today.
Some fled, some stayed, sometimes they resisted; sometimes they acquiesced.
It’s a balance and you have to call it on the spot.
S. Taylor: You mentioned that balance and I think we’re all seeing that right
now. You know that instant reaction and instant feeling to revolt and then
kind of tempered with safety for your family and maybe doing some other
work, like even the work that we’re both doing right now. That balance is key.
J. Stewart: I salute your work. You’re doing huge, important work that I really
have great appreciation for.
S. Taylor: Thank you. Yeah, we all do our part. For sure it takes all of us! All
right, so let’s switch over to some of your YouTube films which you’ve made
available for viewers everywhere. Less than a minute into one of your films,
which is called “Liberty for All”, focuses on the forces driving the quest for
liberty in both France and America. You remind your viewers that “One
glaring fact needs to be confronted straight on: that the illustrious men
vaunted as heroes in forming the new United States were slaveholders”. You
go on to mention a lot of the men that we study and memorize from a young
age like Jefferson, Franklin, etc. So how do we reconcile the deletion of Black
slave women from our country’s founding story with the other knowledge that
we have continuously of these slaveholding founders?
J. Stewart: How do we interpret no mention of women at all in our
Constitution? It’s because all women were the property of men at the time.
They couldn’t inherit. They couldn’t own property. Our ancestors had to fight
to regain even those most elemental rights, not to mention the right to vote.
To have been a Black slave woman—that’s double the pain. Sex trafficking is
still an enormous problem right here in California and throughout the world
– and it’s still the slave trade.
S. Taylor: It’s been hundreds of years later, and we’re still fighting these same
battles. Thank you for sharing that. In the end of that same video, you
mentioned this continuous fight, but specifically back then during the
revolution, this American fight for liberty ignited a “suppressed memory in
the French people which led to their own revolution.” I sense that we are
having a second wave of this suppressed memory being ignited today. Can you
speak to this possibility Jacqueline?
J. Stewart: Yes, let’s think in the most basic way for a minute about original
families. Women used to be honored as the gateways to the future. That’s the
biology of it. Only females can bear males—it doesn’t work the other way around. Only women can physically nurture their babies. In the earliest times when danger came, the babies fled with mom because moms alone could
sustain them. Women used to be held in high esteem in pre-Christian
cultures, because everyone recognized how essential women are to survival.
We have to keep these fundamental truths alive. We have to look at raw
archaeological evidence and not listen to reworked propaganda about them.
S. Taylor: Propaganda is the keyword there. In your books and your material,
you discuss this dissolution of the Celtic family structure that traditionally
held women in high regard and gave them powerful positions. You highlight
that in the period of pre-Christianity, a family’s wealth, resources, and
productivity were held by the family. But then, after the conquest, it’s
redistributed and redirected into Rome’s all-White male hierarchy. It’s around
this time that women are being shut out from being celebrated as deities, they
are shut out from the abbeys, and from decision-making for their
communities. With this shift, now that they’re being blamed for sin, this
movement leads to over 100,000 women being burned at the stake during
those times. What parallels do you see with what is happening today with
women’s rights and women’s voices?
J. Stewart: Let me just clarify one small point. When it comes to history, I try
to accept as truth only what I can prove and I’ve never seen anything to
convince me of religious practices among the Celts or worship of women as
deities. The Celts strike me as fact and science based: they navigated by the
stars, they studied medicinal plants, they laid out razor-straight roadways,
they were amazing stonemasons. Their reverence for women came because
they were so crazy about children and I’m saying all this because it was this
way in my own family, and I’m projecting it onto Celts. I proceed with these
theories and test them as I go.
I have not found anything yet to make me think that Celts ever
worshipped anything. They honor their heroes and ancestors, but I don’t have
reason to believe that they deified them. What I see today is males being
glorified and females being vilified. These are the old Roman norms that were
codified by Roman law when Christianity was adopted as the official state
religion by the Roman and successive empires.
What’s happening today is consistent with treating women as men’s
property, as the Roman Christians always have. Christianity wants the woman
to be the man’s vessel for him to control. He plants his seed wherever he wants
and the victim and her children become his property, if he chooses to claim
them as his own.
We can’t give religion a pass anymore. We need to treat religious
discrimination against women as we do all other kinds of discrimination
under the law. We need to ask questions like, does this practice arbitrarily
shut women out? Does it impose a caste system on women? Does it create
unlawful classifications?
S. Taylor: All good questions that we need answers to, and answers from a
more enlightened and egalitarian perspective than what we see today and
you’re doing your part by sharing your research and your knowledge.
Throughout your first book, you do actually give a great list of destinations,
which I love and I wish I had had just even three years ago, but I’ll go back to
them! Jacqueline, you give some beautiful examples of where we can find
places across Europe that still adhere to these classic Celtic ideals that revered
women, women’s impact on society, and women’s contributions to their
communities. What advice would you give to someone who’s interested in
learning as they travel, consciously to course correct and dive deep into this
hidden culture and hidden history of women?
J. Stewart: Let me just preface my response to your wonderful question by
saying that we’re in production now with the sixth, and final, book of the
Hidden Women series. So, within a month, it should be available fully on
Amazon, as Kindle, hardback, and paperback.
In the last chapter of my new book, I list twelve places that have been
restored and they all relate to mining because this last book is about mining,
which is a very unlikely subject. I could talk for a whole hour, but I just wanted
to mention that it will be available as a source particularly of the fabulous work
UNESCO and the EU have done in restoring and rehabilitating the land that
has been so abused by past empires.
As far as the Celtic places, go to the hotsprings, the lakes, look for abbeys and the loops of the river. Why? Because genetic research teaches us that a descendant of an original settler probably will be there.
People either stay, leave, or come back to home lands. If you stand and
look where people have gazed for thousands of years, you begin to see through
the overlays. Go into the old fest halls and see if you can see the vestiges of
125those days when they were secular halls for festivities. Look for the men’s
heads placed on women’s bodies and you can often see where that cut has
been made. To measure the strength of the Celtic culture still there, see if
there are any women still in the alcoves or if the alcoves are empty or replaced
with men.
See if you can spot original secular painting: vines, grapes, roses.
Look for six-pointed stars, for synagogues and basilicas because those two old
words mean gathering halls before religions took them over. Think of the
word synagogue, knowing that “syn” means “merge,” like synthetic. It’s the
merging of things, like synopsis and synchronize. Isn’t that interesting? And
then of course, the Church State tyranny takes a word and completely
commandeers it right? Suddenly “syn” means “sin” and attaches to women.
And, of course, tyrants tried to eliminate ancient synagogues and basilicas as
public gathering places, because people could organize there.
Think of Europe without borders or multiple languages. Look for the
commonality, search for the capitals of the old family domains like Bologna,
Italy, the old Etruscan family capital, Worms, Germany, is the old Burgundian
capital and used to be Borbetomagus. Vitry-sur-Seine, France is the old Parisii
family capital. Magdalensberg, Austria, is the former capital of the Norii
family. This is particularly important because we find “Magdalena” named all
over Europe and often associated with mines. In Magdalensberg, Austria, they
were mining gold before the Roman invasion.
Look for the public domain, with the market in the heart of town, and
the fest hall that was converted to cathedral or church, and a city hall, halls
of justice, parklands. Search out the abbeys and the beauty of their layouts
with indoor/outdoor arched cloisters, libraries, and vineyards.
Try to imagine what the specialty of the abbey used to be: wools, pottery, farming, mills, metals, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, and what wine varietals were
developed there. Stay at the hot spring resorts and bathe in those pools as
people have done there for untold thousands of years when the springs were
open to all.
Savor with all your senses, in the way our ancestors did. And fight like a
tiger to stay free.
S. Taylor: I’m savoring every moment of your words, which our audience can
find on your many channels and through your books. And definitely fighting
like a tiger! We still need to rest in between the fighting because it’s arduous
126and it seems like it’s daily, which it is, but that’s okay since we get inspiration
from each other.
J. Stewart: Yes, and we have to keep the family up, keep our spirits up and
keep our sense of humor because once we start to sink we’re doomed.
Notes:
1 Stewart, Jacqueline Widmar. Hidden Women: Legacies from a Free Celtic Europe. Book 5
of the Hidden Women series. Independently published, 2023.
2
_____ Hidden Women: A History of Europe, Celts and Freedom. Book 1 of the Hidden
Women series. Independently published, 2017.
Stanford – Harvard
Alumnae Gathering, 2024
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