Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

it was revealed that Lloyd, a longtime antiabortion crusader, had discussed subjecting the teen to a scientifically unproven and highly controversial procedure meant to “reverse” a medically induced abortion midway by administering progesterone against her will.

“The Trump administration had discussions about performing medical experiments on an undocumented minor simply because she was in their custody and they thought they could.”

In 2014, ignoring the thirty-two thousand US women impregnated through rape each year, yet a third pronounced, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Of state representative

“[Reproductive Justice] is a political movement that splices reproductive rights with social justice,” writes scholar-activist Loretta Ross,

The historical focus on abortion as the central reproductive rights issue in the United States reflected fairly narrowly defined issues of “choices” that were mainly prioritized by white, heterosexual, cisgender women.

This framing also enabled politicians to more easily reduce the conversation, dominated by abortion, to a debate over women’s “choice” and people’s opinions about those choices.

Reproductive justice, not reproductive rights, asks us as a society to recognize the full context of women’s rights

An estimate of 60 percent of women in the United States who have abortions are already mothers, a fact that makes it difficult to argue that women who seek abortions are craven, immoral, selfish baby killers.

When women are forced to give birth, there is a far higher likelihood that they will feel anger related to being mothers.

A 2015 study found that more than 95 percent of women who had ended pregnancies didn’t regret their decision. Only 5 percent reported feeling guilt, sadness, or anger. Giving up a child for adoption is significantly more stressful and traumatizing to women, with 95 percent of those who gave up their babies experiencing sadness, guilt, and grief that persist for decades.

Women denied abortions are far more likely to live in poverty and with long-term economic insecurity than women whose desire to end a pregnancy is respected.

The anger women experience over being forced to give birth against their wishes is often expressed as resentment of their unwanted children.

Many women don’t want to get pregnant, have babies, or be mothers, and for this, they are considered freakish, incomplete, unfeminine, and even ignorant about their “real” desires. Doctors, for example, sometimes actively resist patient requests for sterilization because they believe that they know better than women themselves do. (That resistance is, however, infused with institutional racism when you consider repeated incidents of women of color being sterilized nonconsensually in hospitals and prisons,

opprobrium

The choice not to have children inevitably means being shamed, insulted, and even bullied, often by family members. Women who make this decision have to deal with insensitive “jokes,” most hiding a genuine discomfort and hostility, about ticking clocks, being cat ladies, or not being “real” women.

Women who openly share their misgivings with being mothers, even if they chose to do so, are treated with even more suspicion than women who have chosen to be child free. In 2015 Israeli sociologist Orna Donath published a study of two dozen women who were willing to discuss maternal regret.

motherhood ideals undermine women’s ability to function as full citizens and workers.

Mother regret sounds like a luxury to women who struggle to have children or have no choice but to leave their children.

mothers who express frustration, regret, and anger might anger other women.

Most people, needing help raising their children, don’t want to think of this kind of child care in terms of the commodification of maternal ideals. And yet we as a society often demand that immigrant and impoverished women meet these ideals while simultaneously denying them the ability, by socially maintaining their low status, low wages, and lack of benefits or childcare support, to mother their own children.

suppressed anger and stress negatively affect the efficacy of fertility treatments.

Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a prevalent cause of infertility, report more difficulty labelling and sharing feelings of anger and suffer from higher rates of depression.

while sadness is a socially palatable response to these often life-altering events, rage, frustration, jealousy, and guilt are not.

When having a baby is seen as a type of success, then not having a baby is a failure that can fill us with feelings of inadequacy.

What she thought, what she knew, and how she felt, however, were not, in the end, what mattered. What her doctor considered natural is what mattered. A woman’s confidence in the sense she has of her own body and needs is, in fact, what ends up seeming unnatural.

cudgel,

It is not and should not be, however, the inevitable path for all girls and women; the standard against which we are all measured. It is a basic human decency to create a society in which motherhood is not wielded as a weapon against women, in which it is not coerced, forced, punishing, violent, and life threatening.

So much mother-related rage comes from desires that we have as nonreproductive people. If we are mothers, we are allowed to be angry about what happens to our children and families, we are allowed to be angry at our families and children as mothers and partners, but we are not allowed to be angry about what happens to us in the experience and expectations of motherhood.

The challenge we face is in being unapologetic about our desires and decisions and in not judging other women’s choices. It is in rechanneling the anger, guilt, and shame that we often encounter into creating a culture that no longer conflates the word woman with mother and the word mother with sacrifice.

I was angry, but I had learned long ago that reacting in anger might lead to worse outcomes.

I usually freeze—like many of us do. My brain and heart race to determine the nature of the risk and calibrate my response.

Anger is typically considered the “fight” instinct to fear’s “flight” in the face of a threat.

I know many girls who are flattered when they are first harassed and even more women who bemoan the loss of attention as they age.

A world full of women who smile on demand is a world where women’s anger is irrelevant and where the threat of male violence is legitimized.

For women with disabilities who frequently navigate difficult public space, street harassment is cruelly adaptive, with men, for example, positioning their crotches in the faces of women using wheelchairs. Rubbing salt in the wound is the idiotic suggestion that women with disabilities should appreciate the attention because it is humanizing in the sense that they are often not seen as sexual beings.

it only makes them less safe not more fully human.”

LGBTQ people. Fully half said they deliberately avoided public spaces because they feared being harassed.

Lesbians, gay men, and trans people in South Africa are often, like Gunn, “correctively” raped and killed.

Men learn to regard rape as a moment in time; a discreet episode with a beginning, middle, and end. But for women, rape is thousands of moments that we fold into ourselves over a lifetime.

flummoxed

his initial reaction, irritation, I felt, was directed at me and not at the fact that this was a common inconvenience in our lives. I, too, was irritated and angry, but who was I going to be angry with?

the relationship between harassment, objectification, body evaluation, and depression and shame, and discovered that a large number of women experience what the study’s authors called “insidious trauma” over time, leading to the development of symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. If a woman had been sexually assaulted, the results were much stronger. These dynamics can also often leave the victim feeling disassociated from her own body.

Doctors have long puzzled over why, if some women don’t go to war, they exhibit higher levels of post-traumatic stress than men. Unwanted sexual advances, objectification, and persistent harassment are partially to blame.

Girls and women adapt to these intrusions, usually by not talking about them, blaming themselves, or doing their best to ignore what is happening around them.

we carry the message of ‘not right now’ when it comes to addressing our pain if the offender is black,”

The same male entitlement behind these propositions and the violent retaliation when men are spurned is what lies behind obfuscating language about “unrequited love,”

“Vulnerability is not an inherent characteristic of women’s bodies,” explains Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. “Rather, it is an effect that works to secure femininity as a delimitation of movement in the public and an overinhabitance in the private.”

Harassment and the ever-present suggestions of violence at this scale constantly reminds women and girls of their place.

It’s about social control.

in the face of what is clear social, legal, and political inequality, it is rape that keeps women, women’s physical freedom, and women’s rage, in check. Women’s experiences of harassment carry the psychological resonance of actual rape threats,