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

by Rebecca Traister

What became infuriatingly evident, through all of it, was how much time and energy women had been forced to spend maneuvering around the harasser, time and energy that might otherwise have been spent in service of their own ideas, work, advancement. This was a longtime cost for so many women who had dedicated percentages of their careers to fighting the many biases that kept their opportunities reduced and one of the true tolls of anger at injustice: the amount of time it takes away from the work we might otherwise be doing. “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.”