Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

Anger is a forward-looking emotion, rooted in the idea that there should be change. Resentment, on the other hand, is locked in the past and usually generates no meaningful difference in the situation.

Women surpassed men in terms of life satisfaction and happiness only in their eighth decade.

a historical cult of domesticity or the “cult of true womanhood,”

This ideology placed women—idealized as frail, feminine, caring mothers who embodied “womanly virtues”—squarely in the home as carers, helpmeets, and sex providers.

“Woman” in this estimation meant white and upper-middle class. Working-class women, black women, brown women, Asian women, and immigrant wo...

The “natural” desire to care is supposed to subsume any anger we feel about its provision, despite the stress and economic vulnerability it cultivates.

As mothers, women aren’t supposed to care if they have status or not.

sidesplitting laughter after hearing news reports that a clinical trial testing a male contraceptive had been brought to an early close because men in the study didn’t like the side effects. These included acne outbreaks, mood swings, low libido, depression, and weight gain.

Laughter enhances relationships by buffering tension and anger. Like crying, it can be a palliative behavior when we feel ire or disappointment bubbling up.

most men really don’t know much about birth control. Not about the side effects of the most commonly used methods, how much it costs, or how complicated and time consuming it is to obtain.

any point in the process, multiple people that a woman will never have sex with, or even see again as long as she lives, have the power, based on their own opinions, to deny her effective and safe choices.

making access difficult, costly, and possibly embarrassing.

Denying or controlling access are intrusions against a woman’s interests, disparagements of her moral character, refusals to acknowledge her autonomy, and violations of her privacy and even safety,

At the heart of the caring mandate is the particular entanglement of “woman” and “mother.”

The demands of motherhood, as an ideology, frame the thirty to forty years an average woman spends managing her fertility, if she is lucky enough to be able to manage it at all. Each decision she makes—or, even more importantly, is socially prohibited from making—affects her body, her relationships, her ability to earn a living, and her sense of herself.

Just a woman’s potential for pregnancy affects how the people around her think about her and her capabilities and responsibilities. It also provides dangerous rationales for paternalistic male oversight. It’s traditional.

we are all mothers in waiting, and that, as mothers, we will happily sacrifice our bodies, health, work, and sense of selves.

As a pregnant person, I was as much an object of reproduction as I have ever been an object of sex.

The physical transformation of a person’s pregnant body, in a rapid and highly visible way, is a material objectification.

Pregnant women are, studies show, associated with mindlessness, meaning lacking in thought or consciousness, or, at least, a different kind of mind, one with less agency.

when women themselves perceive that they are being objectified, which happens every day to a visibly pregnant woman, they act more like objects, moving less and speaking less.

When we erase women in our images of pregnancy, we erase how women feel and what they need physically and emotionally. When we erase women, we can more easily ignore their rights and the enormous costs they bear when they bring new humans into the world.

images depicting growing fetuses as separate individuals perpetuate that problem.

Pregnancy-related depression affects 37 percent of women

10 percent of pregnant women and 13 percent of those who have given birth

In developing countries the averages are higher: 15.6 percent of women are depressed during pregn...

some doctors still add a “husband stitch”: an additional closure to “tighten” the vaginal canal and thus enhance the woman’s partner’s sexual pleasure.

At work, pregnancy generates biases about women’s abilities, competence, and commitment, and sheds light on deep prejudices.

nearly four in five (77.9 percent) reported discrimination. Of those, 66 percent said that they had experienced gender-based discrimination in the form of disrespect, exclusion, and wage-parity issues. When asked about the nature of that discrimination, 35.8 percent said it was related to their maternity and particularly acute during pregnancy (89.6 percent) and maternity leave (48.4 percent),

Becoming a parent is the riskiest financial decision a woman can make. Compared with childless women, mothers are offered an average of $11,000 less when they get a new job. For every child a woman has, she faces a wage decline of −7.8 percent per child, and it’s cumulative.

“motherhood penalties” and they have a gender-flipped corollary in the “fatherhood bonus.” Becoming a father makes a man more likely to be hired—even more likely than a childless man. Also, for ev...

middle-lower and low-income hourly wage earners, who for a variety of reasons are more likely to divorce. Many women in this situation are severely limited in their ability to access credit or emergency supplemental income.

Even women who intend never to have children may become ensnared in the same net: if you are thought to be in the “fertile zone,” your work, salary, and tenure are indexed to employers’ perceptions of your potential to give birth.

A 2014 survey conducted in the United Kingdom surveyed five hundred managers. Two in five admitted to being “wary” of hiring women of childbearing age. Fully one-third said that they would prefer to hire men in their twenties or thirties in order to avoid the costs of women’s potential maternity leave.

Single and child-free people may experience unfair distributions of time and effort when they work alongside parents, whom, it is often felt, aren’t pulling their weight, but the problem is not parents; it’s ideologies about motherhood and gender that shape workplace norms.

Even though these are still covered by law, women and families in the United States pay more for pregnancy and childbirth than anywhere else in the world. By an order of magnitude. A natural birth brings a bill of $30,000, on average. A Cesarean section often sends the cost soaring to more than $50,000. Insurance will cover roughly 50 percent of these expenses.

every ninety seconds a woman dies from a preventable pregnancy-related complication.

the United States has the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world and is the only country in which that rate is growing.

black mothers in the United States die at three to four times the rate of white mothers, one of the widest of all racial disparities in women’s health.

Doctors in training for maternal-fetal medicine can be certified without ever having had a rotation in an actual labor and delivery unit. Maternity wards are being closed in hospitals with little or no provisions being made for women in distress.

After giving birth to her daughter in September 2017, tennis champion Serena Williams spoke and wrote openly about her emergency C-section and possibly deadly risks that cascaded in its wake.

in 2003 philanthropist and supermodel Christy Turlington Burns almost bled to death from postpartum hemorrhaging.

Improving maternal outcomes means valuing women not only as reproductive engines but also as human beings—something

women around the world experience “poor treatment during childbirth, including abusive, neglectful, or disrespectful care” because of a pervasive “lack of respect for women.”

By the end of my term, I had gained more than half of my prepregnancy body weight.

My cardiologist and ob-gyn were not communicating.

I liked and trusted my doctors, but I knew that they were beholden to the Catholic Church’s Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs),

In 2009 Sister Margaret McBride, a Roman Catholic hospital administrator in Phoenix, was caught in the crosshairs of this reality. She saved the life of a twenty-seven-year-old woman who arrived at the hospital three months pregnant and suffering from dangerous pulmonary hypertension. McBride, on the hospital’s ethics committee, approved a procedure that would save the woman’s life but ended the pregnancy, arguing that abortion was not its primary objective. The young mother of four lived, but McBride was excommunicated. “The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s,” read the bishop’s statement in explaining why both the mother and McBride were excommunicated.

Religious preferences and a willingness to sacrifice women, not the word of God, are what overruled sound medical protocols that would have saved Savita Halappanavar, a thirty-one-year-old pregnant woman who died in an Irish hospital in 2012.

A gestating girl or woman is perceived by many people as a carrier, a baby machine, a vessel, or, as an Oklahoma state representative asserted recently, a “host” who “invites” a baby in.