Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

While parents talk to girls about emotions more than they do to boys, anger is excluded.

By staying silent and choosing this particular outlet for her feelings, she communicated a trove of information: for example, that anger was experienced in isolation and was not worth sharing verbally with others. That furious feelings are best kept to oneself. That when they do inevitably come out, the results can be scary, shocking, and destructive.

Coping often involves self-silencing and feelings of powerlessness.

Plate throwing did, however, allow my mother to be angry without seeming angry. In this way, it allowed her to be a “good” woman, which, significantly, meant not being demanding, loud, or expressing her own needs.

While we experience anger internally, it is mediated culturally and externally by other people’s expectations and social prohibitions. Roles and responsibilities, power and privilege are the framers of our anger.

In the United States, anger in white men is often portrayed as justifiable and patriotic, but in black men, as criminality; and in black women, as threat. In the Western world, which this book focuses on, anger in women has been widely associated with “madness.”

These anger feedback loops often directly implicate unacknowledged social injustice.

One of the most common feedback loops that women live with involves anger caused by discrimination that, if denied, intensifies, increasing stress and its effects.

men more frequently associate feeling powerful with experiencing anger, but women, notably, associate powerlessness with their anger.

Gender-role expectations, often overlapping with racial-role expectations, dictate the degree to which we can use anger effectively in personal contexts and to participate in civic and political life.

Gender schemas—organizing generalizations that we learn early in life—simplify the world around us, but they also reproduce problematic discrimination.

It’s as children that most of us learn to regard anger as unfeminine, unattractive, and selfish.

In boys and men, anger has to be controlled, but it is often seen as a virtue, especially when it is used to protect, defend, or lead.

Socially discouraged from seeming feminine (in other words, being empathetic, vulnerable, and compassionate), their emotional alternatives often come down to withdrawal or aggressive expressions of anger.

reviled.

Our society is infinitely creative in finding ways to dismiss and pathologize women’s rage.

When a woman shows anger in institutional, political, and professional settings, she automatically violates gender norms. She is met with aversion, perceived as more hostile, irritable, less competent, and unlikeable—the

The same people who might opt to work for an angry-sounding, aggressive man are likely to be less tolerant of the same behavior if the boss were a woman.

Black girls and women, for example, routinely silenced by “Angry Black Woman” stereotypes have to contend with abiding dangers of institutionalized violence that might result from their expressing justifiable rage.

This persistent denial of subjectivity, knowledge, and reasonable concerns—commonly known as gaslighting—is deeply harmful and often abusive. Women’s anticipation of negative responses is why so many women remain silent about what they need, want, and feel, and why so many men can easily choose ignorance and dominance over intimacy.

Women’s anger is usually disparaged in virtually all arenas, except those in which anger confirms gender-role stereotypes about women as nurturers and reproductive agents.

If a woman is angry in her “place,” as a mother or a teacher, for example, she is respected, and her anger is generally understood and acceptable. If, however, she transgresses and is angry in what is thought of as a men’s arena—such as traditional po...

Anger is usually about saying “no” in a world where women are conditioned to say almost anything but “no.” Even our technology incorporates these ideas, in deferential female-voiced virtual assistants (Siri, Alexa, and Cortana come to mind) for whom the responses “yes” and “what can I do for you?” are prime directives and raisons d’être.

girls and women learn to put aside anger in order to de-escalate tension or conflict,

abandoning our anger is a necessary adaptation to a perpetual undercurrent of possible male violence.

Androgynous, nonbinary/gender-fluid people, freer from gender-based displays and roles, tend to be able to express anger more productively and, in general, to develop a robust ability to control and use their emotions more effectively.

women often “feel” their anger in their bodies. Unprocessed, anger threads itself through our appearances, bodies, eating habits, and relationships, fueling low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, self-harm, and actual physical illness.

Gendered ideas about anger make us question ourselves, doubt our feelings, set aside our needs, and renounce our own capacity for moral conviction.

treating women’s anger and pain in these ways makes it easier to exploit us—for reproduction, labor, sex, and ideology.

begets

manifesting our passion and keeping us invested in the world. It is a rational and emotional response to trespass, violation, and moral disorder. It bridges the divide between what “is” and what “ought” to be, between a difficult past and an improved possibility. Anger warns us viscerally of violation, threat, and insult.

In expressing anger and demanding to be heard, we reveal the deeper belief that we can engage with and shape the world around us—a right that, until now, has almost always been reserved for men.

This is the real danger of our anger: it makes it clear that we take ourselves seriously.

By effectively severing anger from “good womanhood,” we chose to sever girls and women from the emotion that best protects us against danger and injustice.

As women, we often have to bite our tongues, eat our words, and swallow our pride. It’s almost, as one of my daughters put it, as if we are supposed to keep our anger in the kitchen.

It took me too long to realize that the people most inclined to say “You sound angry” are the same people who uniformly don’t care to ask “Why?” They’re interested in silence, not dialogue.

It is easier to criticize the angry women than to ask the questions “What is making you so angry?” and “What can we do about it?”—the answers to which have disruptive and revolutionary implications.

Self-help, different from self-efficacy, is frequently what you do when you aren’t getting the help you need from your society. We cannot “self-help” our way to being heard, taken seriously, paid fairly, cared for adequately, or treated with dignity. We cannot “self-help” our way to peace or to justice.

Shit life syndrome

What would it mean to ungender our emotions? What

platitudes

Angry school-age girls tend not to vent but, instead, to dig in and find ways to protect their interests quietly.

Children in the United States showed the largest gender gaps in self-regulation. Researchers found that parental and teacher expectations of gender informed the way that children acted and were evaluated, and, ultimately, whether or not they were held accountable for controlling themselves.

Adults even attribute gendered emotions to simple line drawings. A series of 1986 experiments revealed that when adults studying a particular drawing thought that the artist was a boy, they were inclined to describe the images as angrier, or more violent and hostile.

Harriet Tenenbaum, a developmental psychologist at England’s University of Surrey, has studied the ways that parents talk to children. “Most parents say they want boys to be more expressive,” she explains, “but don’t know [they] are speaking differently to them.”

“It’s okay—even expected—for men to express anger,” she said. “But when women have a negative emotion, they’re expected to express their displeasure with sadness.” Sex bias leads us to see happiness and fear on women’s faces more easily, categorizing women’s neutral faces as less angry than men’s faces. In studies, women’s neutral faces are described as “submissive,” “innocent,” “scared,” and “happy.”

an androgynous face with an angry expression is overwhelmingly categorized as male.

Power, considered by some theorists to be the “entrance requirement” for anger, is not necessary for sadness. Anger is an “approach” emotion, while sadness is a “retreat” emotion.

Anger, not sadness, is associated with controlling one’s circumstances, such as competition, independence, and leadership. Anger, not sadness, is linked to assertiveness, persistence, and aggressiveness. Anger, not sadness, is a way to actively make change and confront challenges. Anger, not sadness, leads to perceptions of higher status and respect. Like happy people, angry people are more optimistic, feeling that change is possible and that they can influence outcomes. Sad and fearful people tend toward pessimism, feeling powerless to make change.

Sad people expect and are satisfied with less.

What does separating anger from femininity mean for us as women? For one thing, it means that we render women’s anger ineffective as a personal or collective public resource. This treatment of women’s anger is a powerful regulation; an ideal way to reduce women’s pushback against their own inequality.