The Fungal Feminine: Mushrooms, Mothers, and the Stories We Tell

In the old stories, mushrooms were witches' work. They appeared overnight, in rings, in the dark, in places where the ground had been disturbed. They were not plants, exactly, and not animals, exactly, and this in-betweenness made them suspect. They were associated with decay, with the moon, with the kind of knowledge that women were not supposed to have. A mushroom was a thing that grew from rot and was beautiful anyway. You can see why the stories were nervous about them.

Science has not been immune to this coding. For centuries, fungi were classified as plants, a mistake that persists in the way we talk about them. They were the passive ones, the ones that waited for something to die so they could eat it. They were the decomposers, the janitors of the forest. It was not until relatively recently that we understood that fungi are their own kingdom, closer to animals than to plants, and that their role in the forest is not cleanup but connection.

The mycelium that produces a mushroom is a network, a web, a vast and ancient conversation between tree roots and soil and everything in between. It is not passive. It is not waiting. It is doing something that we are only beginning to understand, and the language we have for it is still catching up.

The Stories We Inherited

When I was a girl, I was told not to touch mushrooms. They were dangerous. They were dirty. They grew in the dark where things grew that shouldn't. I was told this by people who loved me, who wanted to keep me safe, and who had inherited their fear from people who had inherited it from people who had watched other people get sick. The fear was not irrational. But it was not the whole story either.

The whole story is that mushrooms have fed people for millennia. They have been medicine and food and poison and sacrament. They have been the subject of reverence and the subject of terror. They have been coded feminine because they grow in the dark, because they appear without warning, because they are associated with the moon and with decay and with the kind of slow, patient, underground work that does not announce itself.

I think about this when I write. I think about the stories I inherited about what writing is supposed to look like, what it is supposed to do, who it is supposed to be for. I think about the pressure to be productive, to be visible, to be above ground. And I think about the mycelium, doing its work in the dark, not waiting to be seen.

Rewriting the Underground

The fungal feminine is not a metaphor I invented. It is a way of reading the stories we already have. When the witch in the fairy tale gathers mushrooms in the dark wood, she is not just gathering ingredients. She is gathering a kind of knowledge that has been pushed underground. When the mushroom ring appears in the meadow, it is not just a curiosity. It is a door.

To write about mushrooms is to write about the things that grow in the dark, the things that connect us, the things that are patient and strange and not quite what we expected. It is to write about the underground. And the underground, as any forager knows, is where the real story is.