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

by Rebecca Traister

was Woody Allen who first called it “a witch hunt,” publicly at least, in a particularly ill-thought-out interview given ten days after the Weinstein allegations came to light. Professing his sadness for the women who’d accused Weinstein, the producer of several of his films, Allen had warned, “You also don’t want it to lead to a witch-hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.”

Their hyperbolic language offered a hint of how instinctively men understood the potentially revolutionary power of women’s anger,

The upset of power dynamics creates chaos. Women’s anger, publicly and loudly expressed, is all of that: unnatural, chaotic, upsetting to how power is supposed to work.

“The ‘Am I qualified?’ stuff we used to hear, when women would talk themselves out of running for office—what is the time management going to be, wondering how they’ll talk to their husband or partner or boss about this, worrying that they can’t make this work with their job, or that legislatures pay crap—now all of that is being negotiated in a positive way.” Instead of talking themselves out of it, they’re talking themselves into it. “It’s like lightbulbs are going off everywhere,”

She and her peers were using a language of awakening and liberation that was redolent of past insurgencies.

“Every time I see an Ossoff sign I feel like I have an ally,” said Tamara Brooking, a fifty-one-year-old research assistant to a novelist. A lifelong Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders before she voted for Clinton, Brooking said that after the election, “I was fucking furious. I was insanely mad.” Now that she’s become active in Democratic organizing, she said, “I’m feeling like I’m working toward something. After the anger and depression faded, the motivation kicked in.”

women “understand that this has to be the beginning of something. . . . Because they’ve seen, for the first time, the real consequences of inaction. So you have women who are waking up and seeing that they don’t have the luxury of going back to sleep.”

I confess that I am now suspicious of nearly every attempt to code anger as unhealthy, no matter how well meaning or persuasive the source. I believe that Stanton was correct: what is bad for women, when it comes to anger, are the messages that cause us to bottle it up, let it fester, keep it silent, feel shame and isolation for ever having felt it or rechannel it in inappropriate directions.

Consider that the white men in the Rust Belt are rarely told that their anger is bad for them. Rather, and correctly, we understand that what’s bad for them are the conditions that have provoked their frustration: the loss of jobs and stature, the shortage of affordable health care, day-care, the scourge of drugs. We understand their anger to be politically instructive, to point us toward problems that must be addressed.