“Wildlife and Wild Women are both endangered species” is how the Amazon #1 Best Seller Women Who Run With the Wolves starts. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés wove together myths and legends about women and girls to explain the “wild woman archetype” in this recently popularized spiritual book.
First published in November of 1996, Estés’s book is getting new attention almost 30 years later.
“Every single woman needs to read this book,” Sierra Nichole said on X. She warned her audience to prepare for what the book entails: a powerful way of using a story to tell the woman how to release her inner wildness in a world that tries to determine how she lives.
The book was radical for its time in the ’90s. As Estés wrote, the ’50s were a time when women were limited to working in the home, followed by the ’60s and ’70s when women flaunted their sexuality to an extreme. The ’90s third-wave feminism left women wondering what being a woman looked like in an ever-changing gendered society. Women were redefining femininity, embracing individualism and diversity.
Anita Hill testified against a Supreme Court nominee on grounds of sexual harassment in 1991. The band Riot Grrrl ushered feminism into the punk rock music sphere. Shows like Sex and the City displayed four women figuring out what they wanted sexually, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of many TV shows and movies of the time with a powerful female lead.
“Wildlife and Wild Women are both endangered species.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The book discusses the pressure women faced during this time while figuring out what it meant to live as a woman. It’s profoundly reminiscent of America Ferrera’s monologue in Barbie when she laments the impossibility of being a woman who is always extraordinary.
“You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time,” Ferrera’s character, Gloria, says in the film.” You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people “I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us.”
In many ways, Women Who Run With the Wolves is about just this. The Barbie movie wasn’t popular for its radically new ideas, and neither is Estés’ book.
Estés advises the “wild woman” on following her intuition, choosing a partner, interacting with other women, starting a family, and picking a career. Her book is one guide of many at its time to do so, but Women Who Run With the Wolves is still relevant to many women today, even 28 years later.
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