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

by Rebecca Traister

In the United States, we have never been taught how noncompliant, insistent, furious women have shaped our history and our present, our activism and our art. We should be.

This book is about how anger works for men in ways that it does not for women, how men like both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can wage yelling campaigns and be credited with understanding—and compellingly channeling—the rage felt by their supporters while their female opponents can be jeered and mocked as shrill for speaking too loudly or forcefully into a microphone.

Johnson knew that Hamer’s anger would be meaningful and sought to draw America’s attention away from it.

Perhaps the reason that women’s anger is so broadly denigrated—treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational—is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn the very systems that have sought to contain it. 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.

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

We cannot afford to dismiss or fetishize or marginalize or rear back from women’s anger any longer if we want this moment to be transformative. We have to look at it straight, stop hemming and hawing around it or trying to disavow it or worrying that it might offend and discomfit. It must be and always has been at the heart of social progress.

despite the fact (or, more precisely, because of the fact) that what they were advocating was a return to traditionalist roles for women and reduced government investment in nonwhite people.

To fight her, and her predecessor—another history-making challenge to white masculinity—the Republican Party had chosen a figure who embodied every one of the strains of denigration and disrespect that had historically worked to bar women and nonwhite men from the presidency and to deny them equal access to political power.

That’s because white men were always and have remained the rational norm, the intellectual ideal, their dissatisfactions easily understood as being grounded in reason, not in the unstable emotional muck of femininity.

We are primed to hear the anger of men as stirring, downright American, as our national lullaby, and primed to hear the sound of women demanding freedom as the screech of nails on our national chalkboard. That’s because women’s freedom would in fact circumscribe white male dominion.

We may not be literally collared anymore, but the men who tell us to smile on the street so we’ll be prettier (reminding us simultaneously to stifle negative thoughts and that our purpose is to decorate their world) are echoed around us on national stages.

The best way to discredit these women, to make them look unattractive, is to capture an image of them screaming; the act of a woman opening her mouth with volume and assured force, often in complaint, is coded in our minds as ugly.

Perhaps the negativity around the yelling woman goes back to the disproportionate labor they perform as caretakers of the young, women’s raised voices an unhappy reminder of reprimands, tones that make men feel like children again, under the punitive thumbs of their mothers, grandmothers, older sisters, nannies, and teachers who nurtured and educated them.

There’s perhaps no neater example of how rage is an emotion that is permitted and encouraged in (some) men—and can be used to their advantage—while for women it is forbidden, invalidated, and treated as a path to self-defeat, than the 2016 presidential election.

As it turns out, for men, a little warmth goes a long way. For women, a little strength goes way too far.

Guys can be a little nice, without throwing out their strength. But women cannot add a little strength without losing warmth.”

but for black American women, there is an added expectation of interminable gratitude, the closer to groveling the better, as though their citizenship is a phenomenon that they cannot take for granted.”

many white women rely on black women, expected to be angry as a default setting, to perform the emotion in their stead.

But we don’t need thanks—we need you to get out of the way and follow our lead.”

“you can’t be angry for yourself,” said Clinton. “You just can’t. You can be indignant, you can be annoyed, you can be frustrated, but you can’t be angry.”

at the time, impersonating a member of another gender was illegal in New York City, dressing in less than three pieces of gender-appropriate clothing was considered grounds for arrest.

There have been studies showing that when women who accuse men of domestic violence get angry while testifying, judges are likely to go easier on the accused; but if they show grief while on the stand, and thus comport with a view of vulnerable and nonabrasive femininity, the sentence is likely to be heavier.

men and women self-report instances of anger at similar rates, women report feeling more shame about them.

Whatever the connection, there’s been a lot of crying in politics, and very little of it has stemmed from women feeling sad.

“Rarely do the tears of a nonwhite woman carry any value. . . . The damsel in distress is never black.”

It is the suppression and censure of profanity that gives it its potency, something that those who remain invested in repressing women’s fury might do well to remember.

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

White men have had a nearly exclusive grip on political, economic, social, and sexual power in the United States, despite being only around a third of its population. The way that a minority power protects itself from the potential uprising of a majority is to discourage unification of that majority. And the best way to discourage unification is to split the majority against itself, by offering benefits and protections of power to some, while denying them to others.

women earn less money than men; these conditions have rendered them dependent on men. And women’s dependence on men has in turn made it in many women’s interests to support policies and parties that protect the economic and political status of the men on whom they depend.

For white women, this dependency on white men incentivizes a dedication to and protection of white male power, because these women’s advantages are linked so closely to white men having the power to in turn dole out to them.

“In every focus group for two years basically, always white women, some college-educated, but most not, would say things [to us] like, ‘I’m not sure if my husband likes her. He’s gotta like her for me to vote for her.’ ‘It doesn’t really matter to me that she’s the first woman president.’ ‘Is it really that historic?’ A thing that people don’t realize is that we knew that non-college-educated white women were the problem.”

Black men may enjoy, and work to perpetuate, advantages that accrue to their gender, even as they are oppressed because of their race.

But that echo is lost on too many white women, who have a hard time absorbing the ways that even as they have been marginalized by men, so they themselves have often marginalized nonwhite women.

“I think the reason white women are the way they are is because the system is working for them and because they’re comfortable in their Lululemon and comfortable putting aside their law degrees. So they want us to shut the fuck up because the system is working for them.”

The post-2016 moment offers a chance for white women to be awakened to the many reasons that they should be angry. But crucially—urgently—the opportunity is not simply to be angry on their own behalf, but also at the injustices faced by other women, women who experience those injustices in part thanks to the very mechanisms that protect and enrich those white women. And in order for a new white wokeness to be integrated effectively into a contemporary movement, it must not take it over; there must be acknowledgment that white women are late to the party.

“As women of color who came into this effort, we came in not only to mobilize and organize, but also to educate, to argue that we can’t talk about women’s rights, about reproductive rights, about equal pay, without also talking about race and class.”

How do you preserve your own job, how do you preserve your own space, and how do you preserve your physical safety as a woman? A lot of that is: we have to be nice.”

This bolt is the most shocking and unnatural incident ever recorded in the history of womanity. If our ladies will insist on voting and legislating, where, gentlemen, will be our dinners?”

It was surely not entirely fun to live through the era of quickly disintegrating marriages, though let’s pause to acknowledge that it was also not fun to live through eras in which divorce was hard to obtain, and marriages, even abusive and unhappy ones, were not easy for women to extract themselves from.

“Feminism didn’t make good marriages go bad.”9 But it did challenge men to be better, and offered women the opportunity to plan their lives around ambitions and desires not directly tied to husbands.

Any time that men’s power is questioned or tempered or rebuked or challenged, it seems, they are made to feel uncomfortable, and it often feels that any form of male discomfort is untenable.

“But I just can’t believe that men are that weak. I’m really sorry, but if men are that weak and we have to defend them all the time, then why do they have all the power?”

Of course, the fact that they have all the power is precisely what permits them to turn every instance of their misbehavior into a referendum on whether the women around them are reacting appropriately.

We can’t be the party that says we stand up for women only when it’s politically convenient.

For years—forever—simply being the powerful man was plausible exculpation for monstrous behavior toward women.

In hearing these tales of sexual harassment, we were getting a view of the architecture of sexism that had been holding everything up. We could see that the men who had had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers were in many cases also the ones in charge of our political and cultural stories. And perhaps most chillingly, that part of the reason they had gotten so far was not simply that they had cleared the field of competition by harassing or demeaning women around them, but because they had capitalized on a broad cultural desire to see women belittled, humiliated, diminished.

The reality was that in many, many instances, men had not succeeded in spite of their noxious behavior or disregard for women; they have often succeeded because of it.

The tsunami of #metoo stories hadn’t just revealed the way that men had grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it had also shown us that they had done it all while building the very world in which we still were forced to live.

Lots of people talked about Weinstein and some of the other guys as monsters, but the real horror-movie terror wasn’t about individual Freddies or Jasons. It was the revelation of systemic menace: that everyone around you was in on the threat.

And to be fair, for many of those women, women who’d spent years breaking ground in their industry, there’d been plenty of evidence that there were certain behaviors, certain realities of male-dominated culture and institutions, about which they simply had not ever been allowed to be angry.