Women are reclaiming deathwork
On International Women’s Day, we trace how deathcare moved from women and community into a male-dominated industry—and how it’s shifting again.
Long before hospitals and funeral homes, women were the ones closest to the human body’s most intimate transformations.
Just as women have historically been closest to birth—as the ones who give birth, and as the midwives and caregivers who once guided that process in the home before it was medicalized—they were also often the ones closest to death. They tended to the dying, cared for the body, and helped others throughout the end-of-life journey. Today, we call a person who does that an end-of-life doula or a death doula.
Men have long been involved in deathcare too, but mostly as the muscle. Taking on roles such as digging graves or being undertakers—people who “undertook” the practical arrangements around a funeral, like a tradesman (woodworker, carpenter, or cabinetmaker) who could make a coffin and also handle transport and supplies.
That balance began to shift in the mid-19th century when Abraham Lincoln’s embalmed body was transported across the country for public viewing after his assassination. The visibility of the preserved body helped normalize embalming during and after the Civil War as a means of transporting deceased soldiers home to their families. It also ushered in a new way of thinking about the dead—one that transitioned care out of the home, away from the hands of women, and helped give rise to the modern funeral industry. The term “undertaker” evolved into “funeral director,” and caring for the dead became a professional, mainly male-dominated industry. Bodies were sanitized, packaged, and sold back to families as something that should be hidden from view—either in sealed caskets or urns.
But, after nearly 150 years of a male-dominated industry, women and grassroots community efforts are starting to reclaim deathwork again.
The resurgence of green burial and the innovative method of human composting, also known as natural organic reduction (NOR), or terramation, is one example that signals a return to treating death as part of the body’s natural relationship with the earth. And many of the people leading the way are women. So it feels fitting on International Women’s Day to highlight two people leading that return: Katrina Spade and Caitlin Doughty.
Last year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Katrina Spade, the founder of Recompose, the world’s first human composting facility that offers an eco-friendly alternative to fire cremation or conventional burial. Caitlin Doughty is a well-known mortician, an advocate for funeral industry reform, an author, and the host of the popular YouTube channel Ask a Mortician. She is also the founder of the Order of the Good Death—a nonprofit she started in 2011, which is largely credited with helping pave the way for the death-positive movement and working to legalize human composting and water cremation in all fifty states. (Caitlin, if you ever see this, I’d love to interview you, too!)
Note: I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention that there are thousands of other women (and men) working tirelessly and contributing to the work of the death-positive movement—from death doulas and social workers, to hospice nurses and doctors, to chaplains, morticians, advocates, and more.
Decomposition as bodily sovereignty
I came across the clearest articulation of this reclamation of deathwork and women’s bodies in Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, a book about death practices around the world.
Normally, I do not write book reviews (and this isn’t one), but I found myself so completely fascinated by and immersed in Doughty’s writing style. Her boundless curiosity and dark humor (my love languages) were the perfect recipe for writing about what most would consider morbidly focused travels around the world. Imagine Anthony Bourdain, but instead of food as the central theme, it’s dead bodies and funeral customs. After reading the book, I thought to myself, I would love to see this turned into a documentary series.
While reading, I highlighted entire pages, including one passage that I’m going to share with you today, because it opened my mind to something I had never thought about before: decomposition as a form of freedom and bodily sovereignty—especially for women’s bodies.
For context in this reading, the “recomposition project” mentioned is referring to human composting. And at the time this book was written, Doughty was visiting Katrina, who was working with Dr. Cheryl Johnston and her students at the Forensic Osteology Research Station at Western Carolina University to perfect her human composting method.
The following passage is written by Doughty and taken from the “North Carolina: Cullowhee” chapter of her book:
It’s worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women—scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, and architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong. They’ve given prominent space in their professional careers to changing the current system of death. Katrina noted that “humans are so focused on preventing aging and decay—it’s become an obsession. And for those who have been socialized female, that pressure is relentless. So decomposition becomes a radical act. It’s a way to say, “I love and accept myself.” ...
I agree with Katrina here, Women’s bodies are so often under the view of men, whether it’s our reproductive organs, our sexuality, our weight, our manner of dress. There is freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild. I relish this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse ...
When deathcare became an industry in the early twentieth century, there was a seismic shift in who was responsible for the dead. Caring for the corpse went from a visceral, primeval work performed by women to a “professional,” an “art,” and even a “science,” performed by well-paid men. The corpse, with all its physical and emotional messiness, was taken from women. It was made neat and clean, and placed in its casket on a pedestal, always just out of our grasp…
Maybe a process like recomposition is our attempt to reclaim our corpses. Maybe we wish to become soil for a willow tree, a roebush, a pine—destined in death to both rot and nourish on our own terms.
When I first read this passage, it resonated so deeply with something inside my body. I’ve felt the pressures that both Katrina and Doughty describe of being a woman.
This passage also articulated an opinion from Doughty that I agree with: we essentially owe our lives to the earth. After all, the plants and animals we consume during our lifetime are grown and nourished by the soil. Furthermore, it touches on a similar thread we’ve pulled at before in the article, “What the dying regret most isn’t what you’d think.” This post speaks to the regret some people feel at the end of their life regarding all the ways they’ve withheld themselves from their bodies—how long they spent hating them, ignoring them, refusing pleasure, refusing movement.
A woman’s many endings
Women are experts at endings. Our lives are marked by many small deaths and transformations: leaving girlhood behind with menstruation, becoming partners and wives and sometimes mothers who give our bodies over to pregnancy, shifting our identities. Some of us leave work to raise children. Some endure divorce and other losses. And, eventually, we leave our fertile years behind with menopause.
And many women spend a lifetime being managed by beauty standards, reproductive politics, medical systems, and the male gaze, to name a few of the pressures we face. Our bodies are monitored, picked at, sexualized, legislated, and marketed for our entire lives. Decomposition is a radical act for women’s bodies—a chance to express ourselves and our values. It’s a kind of final bodily sovereignty that is the ultimate refusal to perform or fit in.
Today, no matter how you identify, notice the moments you try to manage your body into being more acceptable—smaller, smoother, younger, quieter.
And if decomposition is the ultimate final freedom, think about what “bodily sovereignty” looks like for you in death. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
— Maura
P.S. If you’ve asked me to review your book and I declined or haven’t responded to you, please know it’s not personal. I just may not have the bandwidth for it at that moment. But I’m always happy to hear about what you’re working on and add your book to my reading list!
A lot to unpack here. I am Catholic and want to be cremated and my ashes buried. As Catholics, our ashes must not be separated, scattered , turned into jewelry or records or kept in perpetuity on someone’s bookcase or mantel (despite the fact that many Catholics not abiding by the Catechism do those very things). Other than that, I strongly agree with your comments about how women have traditionally been the ones to care for the deceased bodies of their loved ones. Every time I was the nurse assigned to a baby or child that died in the PICU, I always asked the bereaved families if they wanted to help me get their child’s body bathed and dressed prior to going to the morgue or the funeral home. Almost always, they said yes. There was only one time I remember that the mother was angry and refused so the dad and I bathed and cared for their little boy together. I found it so odd that I could go to that safe place in my head while we were doing this so I could be fully present in his time of grief and mourning. I don’t ever regret those times, even though they were deeply distressing.
This is fascinating! As we see the women of the great wealth transfer take over, it’s only natural that we will feel more comfortable dealing with women service providers as well. I hadn’t thought about this angle of it.