Who Tamed the Wild Woman?
In 1891, a group of women were causing enough trouble in Victorian Britain to earn themselves a name: the Wild Women.
They were writing, working, questioning marriage, demanding education, becoming politically active and arguing that women should have greater authority over their own lives.
Apparently, that was wild.
The name came from journalist Eliza Lynn Linton, Britain’s first salaried female journalist, who used it in a series of essays attacking the changing behaviour of women around her [1]. What she saw was a generation stepping beyond the boundaries of respectable femininity. Women were becoming too independent, too outspoken and too willing to question the authority men had long held over their lives.
There is something wonderfully revealing about the word she chose.
Because the opposite of wild is tame. A woman tamed was the desirable one.
A wild animal exists beyond our control; a tame one has learned to live within it. Domestication took this further. Over generations, humans brought dogs, cattle, horses and sheep into systems we controlled, shaping their behaviour and characteristics, determining where they lived and managing their reproduction according to what suited human needs.
Can we really talk about the domestication of women?
For centuries, a woman’s life was expected to pass from the authority of her father to that of her husband. Her access to money, property, education and work could depend upon men. Her sexuality was closely regulated, her reproductive role prescribed and her place overwhelmingly understood to be within the home. The men making the laws also determined how far women could participate in the political system that produced them.
Even the qualities attached to being a good woman tell their own story. She should be obedient, modest, accommodating and sexually respectable. Anger was unbecoming. Ambition had limits. Too much independence could make a woman undesirable. Her role was to care, soothe, support and accommodate.
And, quite literally, her proper place was said to be the domestic sphere.
So perhaps the domestication of women is not such an outrageous way of describing it after all.
But control did not only operate through laws or through men directly enforcing the boundaries of acceptable womanhood. Social expectations become powerful when they are absorbed into the culture itself. People learn the rules, internalise them and enforce them on one another.
Women learned the rules too.
That brings us back to Eliza Lynn Linton.
Linton was no Victorian patriarch writing about women from the comfort of a gentlemen’s club. She was a successful woman making a living through her writing at a time when doing so was itself unusual, yet in 1891 she publicly condemned other women for pushing too far beyond the boundaries of acceptable womanhood [1].
There is something important in that contradiction.
The rules governing women had become part of the culture itself, enforced through reputation, respectability, marriage, family and community as well as through laws written overwhelmingly by men. A woman knew what a good woman looked like. So did the women around her.
And everyone knew what happened to women who became too much.
Too loud. Too sexual. Too ambitious. Too angry. Too independent.
Too wild.
But not all women were willing to accept those rules.
In 1892, feminist writer Mona Caird published A Defence of the So-Called “Wild Women”, answering Linton’s attack directly [2]. Caird had already become a controversial figure through her writing on marriage and women’s independence, and she had little interest in reassuring critics that women would remain safely within the existing boundaries of femininity.
Instead, she questioned the boundaries themselves.
Why, Caird asked, should men have the authority to determine what women should or should not do?
A simple question, but underneath it sits much of the history of women’s rights. Who gets to decide what constitutes a respectable woman? Who determines how much independence she should have, what ambitions are appropriate, how she should behave sexually, whether she should marry, and what she owes a husband if she does?
Women’s lives had been organised around expectations they had played little part in creating, and increasingly, women were refusing to accept them.
By the 1890s, that refusal was becoming difficult to dismiss as the behaviour of a few troublesome women. Across Britain and beyond, women were entering higher education, seeking professional work, organising politically, questioning marriage and sexual double standards, and demanding greater economic and personal independence.
A new figure began appearing everywhere: the New Woman.
The term gained prominence in 1894 through an exchange between writers Sarah Grand and Ouida in the North American Review, but the woman it described had already become the subject of intense public fascination and anxiety [3]. She appeared in novels, newspapers, political debate and caricatures. She might ride a bicycle, attend university, earn her own money, reject marriage or speak openly about women’s rights. Scholarship on the New Woman describes her as both a literary phenomenon and a historical figure associated with debates over suffrage, marriage, sexuality and women’s emancipation.
To her critics, these changes were deeply unsettling. Women were becoming something other than the women they were expected to be.
And once again, the language is revealing. Women stepping outside conventional femininity were not simply described as independent. They could be unwomanly, unsexed, unruly, unnatural or wild.
The judgement was not only about what women were doing. It was about what kind of women they became when they did it.
That distinction has survived remarkably well.
More than a century later, women still learn very early that there are socially acceptable ways to occupy the world.
Be confident, but remain likeable. Be successful, but do not become intimidating. Be attractive, but not vain. Sexual, but not too sexual. Assertive, but not aggressive. A good mother, but somehow still everything you were before motherhood. Care deeply, but don’t become emotional. Carry your responsibility delicately.
And above all, manage yourself.
This is where the history of taming women becomes more difficult to leave safely in the Victorian past.
Women still carry a disproportionate amount of the mental work involved in maintaining households and families: remembering, anticipating, organising, caring, noticing what needs to be done and ensuring that it happens [4]. A 2023 systematic review of 31 studies found that women generally performed a greater share of this often invisible mental labour, particularly around household and childcare responsibilities.
Women are not only expected to carry emotional weight; they are expected to carry it well.
A woman can absorb frustration, accommodate other people’s needs, keep the peace and continue functioning. But when anger finally appears, the language changes remarkably quickly.
She is overreacting. Emotional. Dramatic. Difficult. Unreasonable. Hysterical. Crazy.
Different century. Familiar problem.
Research has found that anger expressed by women can be judged differently from the same emotion expressed by men. In a series of experiments, Victoria Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann found that angry female professionals were accorded lower status than angry male professionals, while women’s anger was more likely to be attributed to their character and men’s to external circumstances [5]. Both male and female evaluators showed the effect.
Female anger has always been particularly difficult to domesticate because anger contains information. It tells us that a boundary has been crossed, that something is unfair, that a person has had enough. Anger can lead to refusal, and refusal is inconvenient to any system that depends upon accommodation.
Perhaps that is why women have so often been encouraged to translate anger into something more acceptable: explain it calmly, soften it, make it reasonable, make sure nobody feels attacked by the fact that you are angry.
Even resistance is expected to have good manners.
And this is where wild begins to feel interesting again.
If tame means manageable, compliant and safely contained within somebody else’s expectations, then wild begins to describe something quite different from recklessness.
It begins to look like agency.
The ability to recognise your own anger rather than immediately suppressing it. To say no without turning the refusal into an apology. To leave something that is harming you. To want more. To speak when remaining quiet would make everyone else more comfortable. To decide what happens to your body. To determine what you believe, whom you love, what work you do and what kind of life you want to build.
To remain, ultimately, the person with authority over your own life.
Even today, describing a woman as wild can imply sexually uncontrolled, emotionally unstable, reckless, excessive, badly behaved. A wild woman still makes people slightly nervous. And yet perhaps wild is not about becoming anything at all. Perhaps it is simply refusing to be domesticated. Perhaps it is what is there before we became smaller, quieter, more agreeable, more acceptable.
More than 130 years after women were criticised for being wild, the question underneath the insult remains: who gets to decide how a woman should live?
The answer should always have been ours.