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

by Rebecca Traister

The Feminine Is not Dead Nor is she Sleeping Angry, yes, Seething, yes. Biding her time; Yes. Yes. —ALICE WALKER

A desperate rage at being manhandled, ignored, sidelined, and not taken seriously was driving this group of revolutionaries—some of them leading public figures in the still-coalescing second-wave feminist movement—to behave outlandishly.

Yet just two and half years later, while taking the subway home from the second annual Women’s March, protests conceived in response to the inauguration of President Donald Trump, I scrolled through images on my social media feeds and saw another cascade of wrath. There were pictures of the marchers, middle fingers raised in vivid loathing at buildings owned by the president, who was of course not a woman, but rather a white supremacist, admitted sexual harasser, and businessman who’d capitalized on the fury of white America and male America to defeat a woman and replace the black man who’d previously held the job.

The #metoo movement had felt almost like a forty-five-year-late return on Flo Kennedy’s promise that “The next son of a bitch that touches a woman is gonna get kicked in the balls.”

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.

It’s crucial to remember that women’s anger has been received—and often vilified or marginalized—in ways that have reflected the very same biases that provoked it: black women’s fury is treated differently from white women’s rage; poor women’s frustrations are heard differently from the ire of the wealthy. Yet despite the varied and unjust ways America has dismissed or derided the rages of women, those rages have often borne substantive change, alterations to the nation’s rules and practices, its very fabric.

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.

It’s about women who found themselves at the Women’s March holding signs, and experienced a kind of awakening there—one third of those women had never been to a political protest before—and wondered for the first time how on earth they’d been lulled to sleep in the first place.

at the kinds of privileges and incentives certain women—white women—have been offered in exchange for shutting off or turning down their anger, and about the price other women—nonwhite and especially black women—have paid, always having had reasons to be angry and having rarely been offered reprieve or reward for the act of suppressing it. In

Here’s the validation that I hope it can offer: that those who are furious right now are not alone, are not crazy, are not unattractive. That in fact, female rage in America has a long and righteous history, one that we have, very pointedly, never been taught.

They were illegal in part because in those years women, mad at how they were discriminated against and harassed, had expressed their fury, had brought lawsuits.

some of these, including Eleanor Holmes Norton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, went to work advocating for women. A willingness to be mad as hell changed the legal system and provoked legislative changes and protections, including the Civil Rights Act, altering the professional landscape for my aunt, in ways that would have been inconceivable to even her older sister.

“Those women left their husbands,” Esther marveled to me, noting with wonder that “social movements have the potential to radically change us, not just radically change the world.” What she was pointing out was that this contemporary wave of women’s rage in the early twenty-first century—over sexual assault and harassment and workplace discrimination and political power imbalances—also entailed a wholesale reevaluation of women’s pasts, a remaking of their perspectives, on themselves and on gendered power and its abuses.

massive spike in the divorce rate, it also created a next generation that wanted to avoid the pitfalls of broken marriages that their parents had experienced, a population of women who expected more from the institution and so delayed marriage, or didn’t marry at all, and instead expanded the possibilities for women to enjoy economic, social, and sexual independence. Those women’s lives were remapped.

“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.”

“It was so stark, watching these men grill this woman in these big chairs and looking down at her,” Patty Murray, senator from Washington state, has recalled. Murray and a lot of other women were so outraged by the treatment of Hill that an unprecedented number of them ran for office in 1992.

Perhaps the most politically effective strike came from the right, with the Tea Party protests that began in 2009, soon after President Barack Obama took office.

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.’”

cheerful feminism was gone; in its place a slick wrath, a punitive and righteous rage, presented as having been pent up, like floods and flames, now pouring forth onto the streets.

“I just assumed he wouldn’t win,” her constituents said in retrospect. “I could have done more. I should have done more.”

millions who would show up not just in Washington, but in cities around the country and the world—including in Antarctica. The Women’s March on January 21, 2017 was the biggest one-day political protest in this country’s history, and it was staged by angry women.

“I don’t honor him, I don’t respect him, and I don’t want to be involved with him,” Waters said early in the administration, later calling him a “disgusting, poor excuse of a man.”

“Most of the interesting women you know are far, far angrier than you’d imagine.”

Chisholm, in the midst of her presidential campaign, spoke to students in fluent Spanish; she talked about health care, poverty, women’s rights, racial justice, and immigrants’ rights.

Above all, she must not be heard. The brank—also known as a scold’s bridle, or a witch’s bridle—was a sixteenth-century torture device used to muzzle a defiant or cranky woman, her head and jaw clamped into a metal cage. Some of the bridles, which were made of iron, included tongue depressors that would be inserted into the woman’s mouth; some of those had spikes on the bottom to pierce the tongues of the insubordinate.

The notion of bitterness, a word and descriptor that suggests cramped, uptight sourness—something that no one wants to express—crops up all the time around angry women.

The impulse to depict the most powerful woman in Congress as threatening or unstable, and to direct her ideological foes to do what they can to shut her mouth, almost certainly can be traced directly to fear of her efficacy.

Powerful women—especially those whose talents are inarguably more impressive than that of their male peers—are often perceived as monstrous or perverse, unwell or unwholesome in their challenge to male authority. “Madness,” a term used to designate mental illness, is also a description of anger, and for women, the two seem to be understood as related.

The idea that women’s anger is fundamentally illegitimate, because they have nothing real, no big things to be rationally angry about, is part of what undergirds the claim that furious women are mentally ill. But it can also cause women to feel crazy.

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.

“I struggle to think of women who lost their tempers in public and didn’t face ridicule, temporary ruin, or both,” wrote the feminist essayist Lindy West in 2017, citing public outcry against and condemnation of singers Sinead O’Connor, the Dixie Chicks, and Solange Knowles, as well as Juli Briskman, a government contractor who was fired after she was photographed giving Trump’s presidential motorcade the finger.

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. “We’re raised by women,” said Gloria Steinem, “so we experience female power when we’re younger. And men, especially, when they see a powerful woman as an adult, feel regressed to childhood and strike out at her.”16

There is a persistent conviction that to be angry is bad for women. In early 2018, my dentist estimated to me that three-quarters of the women who’d come to see him since Trump’s election were livid, information I quickly understood as a hopeful sign. But he shook his head sadly. “It’s bad for them,” he said. “They grind their teeth.”

They ask this question as if anger is an unreasonable emotion when considering the inequalities, challenges, violence, and oppression women the world over face.”

Washington Post reporter Joel Achenbach fantasized about the good old days of the brank’s bridle, writing that Clinton “needs a radio-controlled shock collar so that aides can zap her when she starts to get screechy.”

America’s cheapest caricature was cast on her: the Angry Black Woman. Women, in general, are not permitted anger—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.”

“Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, the blame for our own victimization, and all the subtler, invisible cuts that undermine us daily,” wrote West. “We are not even allowed to be angry about it.”

“to carry the rage of women through the centuries with you this morning!”

have warned that 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.

Maybe we cry when we’re furious in part because we feel a kind of grief at all the things we want to say or yell that we know we can’t. Maybe we’re just sad about the very same things that we’re angry about. The

“Never let them see you crying,” she told me. “They don’t know you’re furious. They think you’re sad and will be pleased because they got to you.”

“If a guy says something in his own defense,” she said, “he’s standing his ground. If you say it, you’re just being petty or being thin-skinned. Women are just supposed to put up with it, suck it up, and move on.”

The rage had been building, had leaked out earlier in the mini-uprisings, the insistence that other men whose behaviors had been open secrets—from comedian Bill Cosby to Fox News machers Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes—be finally made to pay a price for their behavior toward women. But something had shifted. Perhaps it was the election of Donald Trump, the fact that he stood in as the ultimate, inflated embodiment of white patriarchal power abuse who had faced no repercussion for his behavior, or maybe it was having seen women gather as armies to bring down Cosby and Ailes and to protest Trump’s inauguration and the Muslim ban and efforts to repeal health care. Then again perhaps it was simply the impossibility of containing the fury any longer, after we’d had this view of its injustice, its breadth and depth.

“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands,” Abigail Adams warned her own husband presciently in the spring of 1776. “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion.”

“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman,”

It was a deeply subversive document. By making it a play on the Declaration of Independence, the suffragists were employing the language and logic of righteous rage that America revered—the rage of the founders, white men who were furious about limitations set on their liberty—and using that blueprint to express ire on behalf of a population on whose liberties those founders had, in their moment of righteousness, set about limiting. It

Feminists fought for the legalization of birth control and abortion and for laws that made it easier for them to leave bad marriages; they fought about pornography, and worked to acknowledge women’s sexual appetites and establish their right to sexual autonomy and self-determination.

“Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back.”

“I stuffed all my harassment memories in an emotional trash compactor because there are just so many,” said my friend, the writer and podcaster Aminatou Sow. “Now the trash compactor is broken, and everything is coming up.”

“The very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison once said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”