Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

Here are a couple of my favourite helpful excerpts from this book:

"The history of wolves is like the history of women, regarding both their spiritedness and their travails."  

"Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion.  Wolves and women are relational be nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength.  They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack.  They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances, they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.  Yet both have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors.  They have been targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind.  The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar."  

"This wilderwoman is the prototypical woman...no matter what culture, no matter what era, no matter what politic, she does not change.  Her cycles change, her symbolic representations change, but in essence, she does not change.  She is what she is and she is whole."  

Pinkola Estes C (1992) Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wold Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books. New York