a book

Women Who Run with the Wolves

Name: Women Who Run with the Wolves
Rating: 5 (7 reviews)
Author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés
ISBN: 9780345409874

Clarissa Pinkola Estés · 1995 · 584 pages

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • More than 2.7 million copies sold! • “A deeply spiritual book [that] honors what is tough, smart and untamed in women.”—The Washington Post Book World

Book club pick for Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf

Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society’s attempt to “civilize” us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls.

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.

Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.

recommended by 7 people

sourced from public statements

Emma Watson
“Estes' ideas are both ancient and completely new. She points to storytelling, our ancient narratives, as a way for women to reconnect to the Wild Woman all women have within themselves, but have lost”↗
Brie Larson
“It’s a series of folklore tales from all over the world and it makes me want to go to South America, Greece and Japan, and see the roots of all these cultures.”↗
All 32 of Emma Watson
“As a young girl growing up in northern Michigan, Estes felt most at home in the woods where she often heard wolves howling. Instead of scaring her, the animals’ cries comforted her in a way she was later able to express in this book. Wolves and women share many qualities: playfulness, strength, curiosity, bravery, they are adaptive, and each care deeply for their young. But both wolves and women have suffered a similar fate of being hounded, harassed, exhausted, marginalized, accused of being devious and of little value. How does one reconnect with our deepest, most true selves when today’s world demands us to conform to ridiculous expectations? Estes retells ancient myths and fairy tales from around the world and in doing so shines a light on a path which leads us back to our natural state — and help us restore the power we carry within us.”↗
Jeanette Winterson
“I know this is Joseph Campbell for Girls, but when you remember that the Star Wars Trilogy started the popular version of Campbell’s hero’s journey, and that women other than Princess Leia speak for 63 SECONDS of the films’ 386 MINUTES, then, boy oh boy, do we need this great, smart, empowering womanopedia of myth and what to do with it.”↗
Alicia Keys
Rupi Kaur
Sjana Elise Earp