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

by Rebecca Traister

This book also aims to show how this anger—so instrumental to the nation’s growth and progress—has never been celebrated, rarely even been noted in mainstream culture; how women are not lauded for their fury, and too often have had their righteous passions simply erased from the record. We aren’t taught that Rosa Parks, the perfectly demure woman whose refusal to give up her seat kicked off the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, was a fervent antirape activist who had once told a would-be attacker that she’d rather die than be raped by him and who, at ten years old, threatened by a white boy, picked up a piece of brick and drew it back to strike him if he approached. “I was angry,” she’d later say of that youthful act of resistance. “He went his way without further comment.”7 We are never forced to consider that rage—and not just stoicism, sadness, or strength—were behind the actions of the few women’s heroes we’re ever taught about in school, from Harriet Tubman to Susan B. Anthony. Instead, we are regularly fed and we regularly ingest cultural messages that suggest that women’s rage is irrational, dangerous, or laughable.

The black feminist Audre Lorde famously argued in her germinal essay “The Uses of Anger,” which is about women responding to racism, including the racism of other women, that “every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy, serving progress and change.” Lorde was very firm that she did not mean temporary, cosmetic change, not simply “the ability to smile or feel good.” Rather, she argued, well-aimed anger from women can lead to “a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.”

That he was the candidate felt absurd, anachronistic in the era we were assured was postfeminist. Yet a postelection study done by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, looked at the nation’s leading newspapers and news networks and found that the press covered Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton equivalently, as if they and their faults were legitimately comparable. The ratio of negative to positive coverage of their fitness for office was the same: 87 percent of the stories about each of them were negative, thirteen percent were positive.21 This relative parity in coverage, the both-sides-ism that defined media coverage of the race, was a reflection of the lie at the center of everything. Because the reality was that Trump’s racist and sexist attitudes were not in fact out of line with contemporary assumptions; they were not disqualifying. They were measured on the same scale that weighed Clinton’s real but politically ordinary flaws, because on some level, his biases were still considered legitimate. The idea that the nation had moved beyond retro, macho white attitudes about who could lay claim to political power had always been a fable, one that had worked to quash the dissent and discourage the disruptive fury that might have otherwise had more power to beat back Trump before his rise.

This is the revolutionary mission, what the idealized vision of what this country might be was born of: the righteous fury of the unrepresented. We are taught it—give me liberty or give me death, live free or die, don’t tread on me—as patriotic catechism, but only when it has been expressed by white men has it sounded or been transmitted to us as admirable, reasonable, as the crucial catalytic ingredient to political change. 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.