Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

by Rebecca Traister

Myisha Cherry, has recently argued, “I want to convince you that there are types of anger that are not bad.”

So when someone is angry at injustice they’re not just concerned with themselves but also other people . . . this anger does not violate other people’s rights and most importantly, it desires change.”

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Anger at injustice and inequality is in many ways exactly like fuel. A necessary accelerant, it can drive—on some level must drive—noble and difficult crusades. But it is also combustible, explosive; its power can be unpredictable and can burn.

posits that there is a lesson in how hard the powerful—very often the white and the male—have worked to shut up angry women,

What becomes clear, when we look to the past with an eye to the future, is that the discouragement of women’s anger—via silencing, erasure, and repression—stems from the correct understanding of those in power that in the fury of women lies the power to change the world.

“I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it.’”

anger is often an exuberant expression. It is the force that injects energy, intensity, and urgency into battles that must be intense and urgent if they are to be won. More broadly, we must come to recognize our own rage as valid, as rational, and not as what we’re told it is: ugly, hysterical, marginal, laughable.

It is a mass fury: occasionally so frenzied that it makes people nervous. Were it any other way, nothing would ever change.

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“Think of all the times where you are either mentally or physically gripping yourself,” she said. “[Willing yourself] not to respond, not to lash out, not to display the anger that you feel, because you know it will redound to your detriment. So you swallow it.”

The fact that we can often only register the fury of white men as heroic is so established that it would verge on the comical if it weren’t so deeply tragic.

anger turned inward leads to depression, perhaps making it no coincidence that one of the most common ways for women to express their anger is through tears.

when comedy actually challenges power too sharply, power will condemn the comedy.

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very important for women in public life to be able to express anger on behalf of all of us who feel it [is] so that we can have a champion,”

The cheapest way to weaken and undermine a mass movement is to use its differences to divide it, and thus maintain power over it.

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“Contentious dialogue is by design,”

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those who have pushed the movement from the inside, forcing it to grow and change and be better—even when they haven’t always agreed on what better meant—have helped it to meet the shifting forms and expressions of inequity from era to era.

Of course it’s not a waste to fight for justice, to work to right wrongs; but it is an extra tax on those already working from power deficits.

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we can change it by doing what the world does not do: by acknowledging, paying attention to, respecting, and not shying away from other women’s anger. Seek it out, notice it, ask women what makes them angry and then listen to them when they tell you. If part of what they’re angry at is you, take it in, acknowledge how their frustrations might mirror your own, even if they are refracted at you.

whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”

“They thought they could bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.”