From the “Child Woman” to “Wonder Woman”

Balsam proposes that power and aggression can now be conceived as inherently feminine attributes. She discusses psychoanalysis and society’s evolving attitudes toward women looking at two different female ideals, the “Child Woman” and “Wonder Woman,” and their cultural contexts. The “Child Woman” – beautiful, promiscuous, supposedly lacking intelligence, dependent, and masochistic – exemplified the female ideal of 1900s Vienna, where Freud wrote his theory about women. Wonder Woman, introduced in 1941 when women were joining the workforce, was also the main character of a film in 2017. She is bright, physically powerful, independent, and aggressive. Balsam maintains that psychoanalysts should explore female patients’ symbolization of their bodies, (including their procreative bodies) as symbols of power and aggression.