Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

Calling for consideration, compassion, and accountability isn’t revenge. It is a demand that systems be put in place that create safer and more egalitarian workplaces for everyone.

The importance and visibility of women’s collective anger can’t be overstated. This anger takes determination, thoughtfulness, and work. It means respecting our own anger and being willing to respect the anger of other women.

Every story counts, yet we are only just really being able to tell ours. We are still not allowed to say, from positions of communal respect and authority, what is unjust and unwarranted. Women’s judgments, thoughts, work, and contributions are constantly ignored, abbreviated, and squelched by a dense matrix of violence and discrimination. In the face of erasure, we are forced to reconcile our identities, hopes, and ambitions with a constant awareness of threats to our safety, humanity, and dignity.

Even when presented with personal experience and irrefutable evidence of bias and sexism, many men refuse to admit what the women around them are experiencing.

Women are not in competition with other women for their human rights. My rights are not relative to another woman’s pain and vulnerability. They should not be contingent on affiliative male status.

Bleeding, leaking, seeping, oozing, and defecating are the stuff of our humanity and for this humanity, we particularly learn to revile women; and, as women, to hate ourselves. And we are not supposed to feel anger about this?

Crosscultural studies reveal some universal qualities about authoritarian mind-sets: rigid adherence to rules, strict moral codes, strong feelings of contempt and disgust, obedience to social groups, an aversion to introspection, and a propensity and desire to punish others.

Research shows that adults who grew up in households that adhered to strict and punitive rules and philosophies translate their anger against their parents into strict and punitive politics. Studies reveal another consistent and related pattern: antifeminism and contempt for women are related directly to authoritarian beliefs.

In times of political tumult, women—regardless of political orientation—are given more social leeway to be angry, and they run with it. Historically, during periods of heightened public distress, women have been the engines behind not only protests but also, even before they could vote or run for office, political policy.

We all have the right to believe what we believe and to live life as we see fit. But that doesn’t mean we don’t get to call what is clearly discrimination by its proper name. Benevolent sexism is still sexism. Religious sexism is still sexism.

If there is a word that should be retired from use in the service of women’s expression, health, well-being, and equality, it is appropriate—a sloppy, mushy word that purports to convey some important moral essence but in reality is just a policing term used to regulate our language, appearance, and demands. It’s a control word.

We are done with control.

Anger is a moral emotion that hinges on our making judgments about the people and world around us. As women, we are supposed to be one step removed from both moral thinking and the authority that comes with it. Our feelings of anger, deep in our bones, our blood, and our minds, are a refutation of that oppressive standard and the control of women that comes with it. It is not only that we have the right to claim anger. It is that our anger is a moral obligation.