Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

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.

Women feel shame more than men, who are more inclined to say they feel guilt. Guilt is the response of a person who feels he had some control but failed to exercise it properly. Shame, on the other hand, reflects no expectation of control. It is a feeling that you, your essence and being, are wrong.

The belief that women should be babyish and childlike means that women physically infantilize themselves. The physical and emotional softness, smoothness, and suppleness that women pursue isn’t only a matter of attractiveness. 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.

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.

We’ve even convinced young women that keeping their own names when they get married is selfish, damaging to their families, and a social affront. Today only an estimated 8 percent to 10 percent of women in the United States keep their names after marriage, down from a mid-nineties peak of 23 percent. Three in five Americans think that women should take their husbands’ names, and more than half believe it should be enforced legally. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a woman deciding to change her last name.

There is no title for a man that identifies his marital status as the first and most important aspect of his identity, the way that Mrs. and Miss do. Ms. is a word meant to, as the 1901 coiner of the term put it, be “a more comprehensive term which does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation.”

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. Our legal and ethical considerations still do not address adequately women’s experiences of being both one and two (or more) at the same time, and images depicting growing fetuses as separate individuals perpetuate that problem. For the record, being treated like a fetal container is enraging.