Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

Why do we so rarely learn how to be angry?

In the United States, anger in white men is often portrayed as justifiable and patriotic, but in black men, as criminality; and in black women, as threat. In the Western world, which this book focuses on, anger in women has been widely associated with “madness.”

It’s as children that most of us learn to regard anger as unfeminine, unattractive, and selfish. Many of us are taught that our anger will be an imposition on others, making us irksome and unlikeable. That it will alienate our loved ones or put off people we want to attract. That it will twist our faces, make us ugly. This is true even for those of us who have to use anger to defend ourselves in charged and dangerous situations. As girls, we are not taught to acknowledge or manage our anger so much as fear, ignore, hide, and transform it.

When a woman shows anger in institutional, political, and professional settings, she automatically violates gender norms. She is met with aversion, perceived as more hostile, irritable, less competent, and unlikeable—the kiss of death for a class of people expected to maintain social connections.

Women’s anticipation of negative responses is why so many women remain silent about what they need, want, and feel, and why so many men can easily choose ignorance and dominance over intimacy.

women often “feel” their anger in their bodies. Unprocessed, anger threads itself through our appearances, bodies, eating habits, and relationships,

When a girl or woman is angry, she is saying “What I am feeling, thinking, and saying matters.”

What would it mean to ungender our emotions?

Angry school-age girls tend not to vent but, instead, to dig in and find ways to protect their interests quietly.

We are so busy teaching girls to be likeable that we often forget to teach them, as we do boys, that they should be respected.

It goes without saying that “angry women” are “ugly women,” the cardinal sin in a world where women’s worth, safety, and glory are reliant on their sexual and reproductive value to men around them.

What I eventually taught myself to do is to channel my anger into empowering my feminist activism—to do something about the conventions and cultures that tell women that emotions and feelings are weaknesses and that they cannot handle female anger while giving men a pass for maiming/injuring/killing women just because they can’t handle their own anger at rejection.”

The need to protect white women, portrayed as frail, innocent, and defenseless, is a centuries-old justification for terroristic racist violence.

Young white girls are seen as and portrayed in American culture as the apex of innocence, in need of masculine protection. It is no accident that these are the girls and women who are seen as least capable to lead or to feel as though they can.