Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

The expectation of forgiveness often involves shaming you for not feeling forgiving.

Forgive nothing until you are good and ready to, especially if there has been no indication that the behavior causing you distress has changed.

it is important to consciously balance how your body looks with your body’s health and competence, meaning health and functioning as opposed to attractiveness. Self-objectification

there are people in your life telling you or girls that you know that “girls are prettier with their mouths shut,” demand that they stop.

Girls who participate in team sports have higher self-esteem, are more resistant to rigid gender norms, are more ambitious politically and professionally, and are more inclined to be leaders.

Parents will ignore fear and anxiety in boys but cultivate them in girls. By the time a girl is seven years old, her mother’s anger habits and risk perceptions are passed on to her.

women are consistent about the primary causes of anger in their lives: overwork and stress;

Whenever she raised the issue of gender inequality in her home, she explained, her parents punished her by refusing her dinner and confining her to her bedroom.

Girls and women can now transcend their historic isolation from one another.

seek out people with whom you might otherwise not overlap. Without effort, any community you form is almost certainly bound to be homogeneous. Studies show that racial, religious, and ethnic segregation continue to be prevalent, with negative effects for all of us. Fill your world with different voices and perspectives.

The private/public divide is fundamental to keeping women isolated from one another and, historically, from engaging in politics and commerce. The divide also masks the relationship between interpersonal sexism and institutionalized discrimination.

binary to reconsider is the one that supports stereotypes about emotions and reason, instinct and thinking. It is frequently used to invalidate women’s anger and concerns.

TRUST OTHER WOMEN

Nlog

Sometimes we are our own worst enemies.

some of us learn to resort to cattiness, silent treatments, passive aggression, and the “mean-girl” behaviors thought to be inherent to being female.

cadre

if you have always thought that the vagaries of female friendship are too demanding and that male friends are “so much easier to deal with,” it might be worthwhile to consider if you are the “cool girl,” the “no-drama” type that some men love and what that might mean.

Cool girl

When other women are angry, are you very critical? As women, we are even more judgmental about other women’s violations of rules about anger than men are. Before we reach puberty, we learn, as girls, to police other girls’ anger. As women, we need to learn resistance to a fundamental lesson of misogyny: that other women are untrustworthy and deficient and that, in anger, they are dangerous.

Trust other girls and women, and give them leeway.

We are as exposed to sexist ideas as men are and often held responsible for enforcing them. Denigrating other women can be a blood sport.

Empathy is critical, and kindness is usually possible.

It is a symptom of a larger problem of sexism that one of the only acceptable and predictably talked-about forms of anger in women is a girl’s anger toward her mother.

the time when we come to a growing awareness of our inequalities, we are supposed to focus our anger on another woman.

I’ve been asked how awful it is to have teenage daughters because, the myth goes, I would find them enraging, and they would f...

Each woman clearly defined her life’s work as the legacy of having witnessed the exhausting and brutalizing reality of discrimination. Each woman said, in her own way, “I was enraged by what my mother lived with, and this rage, corralled into making change, has shaped my life.”

Bianca

The first women we know are our mothers, and yet we sometimes treat them, especially when they are angry, with the least compassion. That becomes a model for how we treat other women.

Power is, for example, associated in implicit bias studies with domination and not nurturing. Powerlessness is, on the other hand, implied in femininity.

Both interpersonally and socially, the mockery that women anticipate and dread from men—mockery that sometimes spills into contempt—has been tied to men’s attempts to justify higher status.

On September 15, 1963, a Sunday morning, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the predominantly African American Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls. Famed singer Nina Simone, born in Saint Louis but a French citizen since the 1930s, was overcome with shock and rage. “I had it in mind to go out and kill someone,” she explained when describing how she came to write “Mississippi Goddamn,”

In writing, the anger I felt might overcome me became a vehicle instead of a destination. The clinical term for this is sublimation, defined as a mature defense mechanism that, unconsciously, transforms socially unacceptable feelings and behaviors into socially acceptable ones.

sublimation

In 2016 Monáe launched the grassroots organization Fem the Future to advocate for women’s parity in the entertainment industry.

genealogical

She was having none of the invisibility and quiet imposed on women who have outlived their sex appeal and fertility.

equanimity.

Angry women burn brighter than the sun.

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