Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

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.”

Additionally, men more frequently associate feeling powerful with experiencing anger, but women, notably, associate powerlessness with their anger.

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.

I have always understood that being seen as an “angry woman”—sometimes simply for sharing my thoughts out loud—would cast me as overemotional, irrational, “passionate,” maybe hysterical, and certainly a “not-objective” and fuzzy thinker.

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.

We understand that abandoning our anger is a necessary adaptation to a perpetual undercurrent of possible male violence. In a society where male violence toward women is a reality for many of us, we simply cannot know how a man—whether someone familiar or a stranger—will respond and if he will be violent.

Anger is like water. No matter how hard a person tries to dam, divert, or deny it, it will find a way, usually along the path of least resistance.

Saying “I am angry” is a necessary first step to “Listen.” “Believe me.” “Trust me.” “I know.” “Time to do something.”

It took me too long to realize that the people most inclined to say “You sound angry” are the same people who uniformly don’t care to ask “Why?” They’re interested in silence, not dialogue. This response to women expressing anger happens on larger and larger scales: in schools, places of worship, the workplace, and politics. A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women—not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.

We cannot “self-help” our way to being heard, taken seriously, paid fairly, cared for adequately, or treated with dignity. We cannot “self-help” our way to peace or to justice.

In my experience, it is difficult for many adults to accept that boys can and should control themselves and meet the same behavioral standards that we expect from girls. It is even harder to accept that girls feel angry and have legitimate rights not to make themselves cheerfully available as resources for boys’ development.

What does separating anger from femininity mean for us as women? For one thing, it means that we render women’s anger ineffective as a personal or collective public resource. This treatment of women’s anger is a powerful regulation; an ideal way to reduce women’s pushback against their own inequality.

For black girls, being expected to smile is additionally infused with racism and historic demands that black people set white people at ease by showing they are not actually unhappy with circumstances of inequality.

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.

Because of the prevalence of boys’ and men’s perspectives, girls learn early to put themselves in boys’ and men’s shoes. A girl’s imagination would be a barren place if she didn’t. Boys, however, are far less likely to do this and are, in some cases, shamed for doing this. Boys generally don’t look up to women as role models, and they don’t have to cross-gender empathize when they consume media. The centrality and visibility that exist, particularly, in the United States, for young, white boys is a source of confidence, invisible capital that becomes evident in self-esteem.

There is no time of life when our anger is acceptable. Teenage girls are spoiled, silly, or moody for standing up for themselves. Older women, fed up and saying so, are bitter castrators. Angry women are butches, lesbians, and man haters. We are called Sad Asian Girls, Hot-tempered Latinas, Crazy White Women, and Angry Black Women. 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.

But implicit-bias studies show that girls who are assertive, don’t hedge their speech, actively claim verbal space, and, yes, maybe say they are mad, are considered rude, confrontational, uncooperative, and transgressive by adults.

“When girls make a choice to value their emotions,” explains Simmons, “they value themselves.”

The ability to assess and adapt in this way, meaning, basically, having to control oneself in situations that often generate a sense of risk or threat, is a skill that sometimes results in women being described as “manipulative” and “deceptive.”

In truth, anger in girls is highly rational. We live in a culture that grinds their pride and confidence in being girls into a fine pulp and then blows it back in their faces. They acutely feel the very real disparate impact of limitations on their physical freedom and behavior. Feelings of anger become enmeshed in ideas about being “good,” and about beauty, bodies, food, relationships, and power. Experiences like these provoke frustration, depression, anxiety, and sometimes violence in even the most rational men. When it does, we don’t talk about their hormones.

What matters appears to be parental support for a girl’s staying true, first and foremost, to herself, and community honesty about discrimination and building resilience to that discrimination.

It is hard to overstate how problematic the transfer of anger, as a resource, from girls to boys and women to men is—not only to us as individuals but also to our society. This transfer is critical to maintaining white supremacy and patriarchy. Anger remains the emotion that is least acceptable for girls and women because it is the first line of defense against injustice. Believing that you have the right to use your anger with power reflects multiple, overlapping social entitlements.

The relationship between “woman” and “dignity” and “rights” is far weaker than that between “man” and “property” and “free speech.”

Being indignant is a powerful emotional response to insults and to threats against dignity. It is a specific kind of anger rooted in believing that you are being treated unfairly. A precondition for indignation is a secure sense of your worth and an equally strong sense that some valuable standard or norm has been violated. Subjecting someone to indignity involves making a person feel shame or a loss of self-respect. It’s the core of humiliation, embarrassment, and loss of face as well as pride. It is the bleeding edge of dehumanization and violence.

Looking perennially young means not looking as though we have successfully weathered life in such a way that we might have authority or have developed expertise, wisdom, and skills that are of value to us or to the people around us.

Improved survival seen in studies about women who expressed anger does not prove that saying “I am angry” effects a cure, but rather that the ability to think and talk about emotions, and, in the case of anger in particular, feel control over factors in one’s life, might lead to deeper understanding, more aggressive approaches to treatment, and overall healthier decisions.

As a society, I explained, we love motherhood, but not mothers, especially those who operate independently of men. We are happy to say “parenting” but not to extend institutional support to people who parent.

The lack of institutional support for women’s wage earning makes clear that we are supposed to care in ways that do not infringe on men’s ambitions, success, or earning potential. Masculinity and men’s caring is affirmed in moneymaking, whereas women’s isn’t. So boys and men are taught that the way to demonstrate care for their loved ones is to provide and protect. Making money is the primary way that men are expected to do this.

Feminism isn’t ruining marriage—sexism and the persistent expectation of masculine entitlements are.

Care is expensive, so care often comes down to money. No one wants to think of caring in monetized terms because attaching actual money to care sullies our gender ideals. But all caring is monetized, and for women, negatively so, particularly in consideration of long-term financial security. Not only is caring expensive and financially risky, but this gendered care mandate continues to be the major roadblock to virtually every established path to financial stability and leadership that women might pursue.

Women are aggregated in sectors where being cheerful, accommodating, flexible, and patient, no matter the circumstances, are job requirements. These are idealized maternal qualities that, when fulfilled on demand, require constant suppression of negative emotions and trigger high stress.

To overcome these wage gaps, many women seek out higher education, meaning that they incur more student loan debt. Women hold 65 percent of student loans. These loans, in turn, are harder to repay because of wage gaps

Women’s unpaid and undervalued care work stands as the single greatest wealth transfer in today’s global economy. Without this provision of care, markets would crash, economies would grind to a halt, and men could not continue to dominate entire job sectors and institutional hierarchies.

Women understand birth control. We understand the risks, and we understand the costs of unwanted pregnancies. What we don’t understand is people who refuse to think about the lives we lead and the calculations we make. This level of blithe ignorance not only affects us personally, in terms of our relationships and sexual lives, but politically, in terms of gross negligence and cluelessness shaping public policy.

When we erase women in our images of pregnancy, we erase how women feel and what they need physically and emotionally. When we erase women, we can more easily ignore their rights and the enormous costs they bear when they bring new humans into the world.

In pregnancy, women are often taken aback by strong feelings of anger—anger generated by shifting relationships—with spouses, siblings, other children, friends, employers—and, for some women, a newfound awareness of double standards and discrimination.

Beyond changing relationships in her life, a pregnant woman is also experiencing a changing relationship with herself, unanticipated transformations in identity that are difficult and unsettling.

Improving maternal outcomes means valuing women not only as reproductive engines but also as human beings—something that is still, quite apparently, a problem.

But the culture that we all operate in does not adequately recognize what it means for us to be both women and human, and, in pregnancy, to be both ourselves and another. An ethos of maternal sacrifice, largely religiously derived, underlies our social and institutional interactions.

A gestating girl or woman is perceived by many people as a carrier, a baby machine, a vessel, or, as an Oklahoma state representative asserted recently, a “host” who “invites” a baby in. Women are not hotels, or inns, or beakers, or vials, either, even if they are treated as though they are.

Reproductive justice, not reproductive rights, asks us as a society to recognize the full context of women’s rights and, as Roberts explains, “the right to have children and to raise them with dignity in safe, healthy, and supportive environments.”

It is absurd that every day women have to contend with the possibility that they will be attacked verbally or physically. When women leave their homes, they consider the possibility, however remote, of being mutilated, terrorized, or killed for not acceding to the demands of aggressive men. As women, we can lose our dignity and any sense of safety or feelings of rights to public space that we might have—all on someone else’s whim. This is how we come to accept the harsh fact of our violability. We bite our tongues, sometimes until they bleed.

Women with tenure, expertise, and knowledge are routinely passed over in favor of mediocre men with less of all. Across industries, endless parades of all-male panels (or “manels,” as they are not-so-affectionately called) suggest that women are incapable of simultaneously sitting in chairs, thinking, and speaking out loud.

Humor as a response to claptrap is always welcome, but tongue-in-cheek slang such as mansplaining, manterrupting, hepeater, and manvalidation—words that give us a way to describe common experiences—mask the corrosive belief that women are less credible and less knowledgeable than men are, all strengthened by racist, ethnocentric bias.

When a girl is told to cross her legs and close the gates to hell, when she can’t truly participate in religious services, play on coed sports teams, is required to wear clothes that limit her mobility and impair her health, is this sexism or love? Is it really that hard to say? At least we should give up the pretense of equality and equal dignity. Religious sexism is still sexism.

The centering of able-bodied independent men in the construction of the world, using their experiences, bodies, and needs to design products and services, seeps into our lives every day.

Women who are actively aware of discrimination and develop a comfort level in speaking about it openly are the most likely to challenge aggressions in their daily lives and report higher levels of “closure” and satisfaction than those who don’t.

If you are a man sitting in a room where there are no or few women or people of color, your first question should be whether you want to be complicit in the perpetuation of these problems. If your answer is no, then your second is to consider what you are willing to do about it.

If #MeToo has made men feel vulnerable, panicked, unsure, and fearful as a result of women finally, collectively, saying “Enough!” so be it. If they wonder how their every word and action will be judged and used against them, Welcome to our world. If they feel that everything they do will reflect on other men and be misrepresented and misunderstood, take a seat. You are now honorary women.