The Wild Woman Returns
Tracing the Forgotten Feminine Archetype Across Myth and Modern Life
Across cultures and centuries, the figure of the “wild woman” has persisted, sometimes feared, sometimes worshipped, often forgotten. Today, she is returning. Her re-emergence in contemporary feminism, psychology, and creative practice signals a wider hunger for instinct, embodiment, and authenticity in a world that prizes control. The Wild Woman is not a fantasy of rebellion; she is the uncolonised feminine psyche. Her return marks a reckoning with what has been silenced…the parts of women’s knowing that cannot be measured or categorised.
Mythic Lineage – From Lilith to Baba Yaga
The archetype of the Wild Woman has many faces. In Jewish mythology, Lilith refuses to lie beneath Adam and is exiled for her defiance — perhaps an early symbol of female autonomy and the price of refusal. In Greek myth, Artemis roams the forest, unattached and unclaimed. In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga lives on the margins of the village, both feared and sought out for her wisdom. Across these myths, wildness represents a kind of power that unsettles order: sexual, intuitive, untamed. The Wild Woman lives beyond safe boundaries, in the dark woods where polite society warns us not to go.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves (1992) became a modern reclamation of this archetype. Drawing from Jungian psychology, Estés reframed wildness as the soul’s instinctual intelligence, the vital source of creativity, resilience, and healing that past patriarchal cultures have taught women to distrust. The “wild” here does not mean feral or chaotic; it means natural, alive, and whole.
Taming the Feminine – Religion, Reason, and Respectability
Over centuries, religious, colonial, and industrial systems have domesticated the feminine psyche. The wild woman, unpredictable, powerful, was rewritten as dangerous or shameful. Rationality and respectability became moral virtues; instinct and emotion became liabilities. Just as land was fenced off and controlled, so too were women’s inner lives. Their natural freedom and instincts were channelled into narrow roles, wife, mother, worker, within systems that rewarded obedience and punished defiance.
Foucault’s work on discipline and control helps explain how this continues today. He showed how modern societies maintain order not just through external rules but through self-regulation, when people learn to monitor and correct themselves. For women, this often means internalising expectations of calmness, care, and productivity, policing their own emotions and impulses to stay within what is considered “respectable.” The result is an invisible form of control that shapes behaviour long after overt restrictions have lifted - and an epidemic of exhaustion. The body bears the cost of perpetual containment.
Modern Life and the Silencing of Instinct
In modern society, women are celebrated for endurance but rarely for intuition. The language of “resilience” replaces the language of rest. To be strong is to survive; to be wild is to risk exclusion. Yet beneath the surface of professionalism and productivity, many women experience a quiet fracture, the gap between the life performed and the life felt. The cost of this suppression often emerges through the body. I have come to see many autoimmune and other chronic conditions as the body’s revolt against prolonged survival mode. Years of vigilance and self-containment leave physiological traces, echoes of the nervous system’s refusal to remain silent.
The Wild Woman in the Workplace – Survivor-Practitioners and Feminist Leadership
This tension between containment and instinct is particularly visible within the domestic abuse sector. My doctoral research explores how women who are both survivors and professionals navigate employment within organisations built on care yet constrained by bureaucracy. These survivor-practitioners embody a form of wild knowing — experiential, intuitive, relational — that resists managerial hierarchies. Yet the system often demands that they suppress the very instincts that make them effective: empathy, attunement, truth-telling.
Within feminist poststructuralist frameworks, these women can be read as sites of resistance and re-imagination. They hold both professionalism and lived experience, theory and body, logic and intuition, an integration that unsettles the false divide between “academic” and “emotional” knowledge. In this sense, the Wild Woman archetype offers a new model of leadership: one grounded in authenticity rather than authority, process rather than product, truth rather than image.
Reclaiming the Wild – Creativity, Rest, and Refusal
To reclaim the Wild Woman today is not to abandon civilisation but to humanise it. It means honouring cycles rather than deadlines, creativity rather than constant output, rest rather than relentless performance. This does not mean neglecting what needs to be done, but doing it differently. It means remembering that instinct is intelligence. For many women, particularly those recovering from trauma, creative practice becomes a form of rewilding — writing, art, movement, or solitude as ways to hear the inner voice again.
In feminist theory, this process can be understood through the concept of becoming (Deleuze & Guattari; Butler): identity not as fixed, but as continual creation. The Wild Woman is always in motion, refusing the binaries of victim and survivor, saint and sinner, domestic and untamed. Her return is both political and spiritual, a refusal to be reduced down to targets and tasks.
Conclusion – The Return Is Not a Regression
The Wild Woman’s return is not nostalgia for a lost wilderness. It is a call to integration, to live whole and aware in a fragmented world. For survivor-practitioners, activists, and creative women alike, this re-emergence offers a reminder: the instinct to protect, to nurture, to create, and to speak truth to power are not contradictions but continuations of the same wild lineage.
The Wild Woman does not burn the world down; she re-enchants it. In her return, we find a blueprint for recovery, not the quiet endurance of survival, but the fierce tenderness of being fully alive.