Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

by Soraya Chemaly

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

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.

In a society where male violence toward women is a reality for many of us, we simply cannot know how a man—whether someone familiar or a stranger—will respond and if he will be violent. We can only trust, hope, and minimize risk.

Anger is like water. No matter how hard a person tries to dam, divert, or deny it, it will find a way, usually along the path of least resistance. As I will discuss in this book, 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.

Anger has a bad rap, but it is actually one of the most hopeful and forward thinking of all our emotions. It begets transformation, 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.

When a girl or woman is angry, she is saying “What I am feeling, thinking, and saying matters.”

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.

A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women—not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.

Multiple experiments reveal that an angry woman’s face is one of the most difficult for people to parse, and an androgynous face with an angry expression is overwhelmingly categorized as male.

We are so busy teaching girls to be likeable that we often forget to teach them, as we do boys, that they should be respected.

Because of the prevalence of boys’ and men’s perspectives, girls learn early to put themselves in boys’ and men’s shoes. A girl’s imagination would be a barren place if she didn’t. Boys, however, are far less likely to do this and are, in some cases, shamed for doing this. Boys generally don’t look up to women as role models, and they don’t have to cross-gender empathize when they consume media.

Anger remains the emotion that is least acceptable for girls and women because it is the first line of defense against injustice. Believing that you have the right to use your anger with power reflects multiple, overlapping social entitlements.

Girls think about killing themselves almost twice as frequently as boys do, but boys have traditionally used more dangerous and lethal methods, succeeding at four to five times the rate of girls.

sexualization remains the most available, albeit very narrow, path to power for girls.

Power and empowerment are not the same. Neither are sexual objectification and sexuality,

How many times does a woman say, “I’m so tired,” because she cannot say, “I am so angry!” How many times is women’s anger deliberately miscast as exhaustion?

regardless of marital status or sexual orientation, they continue to carry the burden of responsibilities for chores, child care, elder care, and emotional labor—both in and out of the workplace. This tacit, and sometimes explicit, mandate that women care has remained remarkably inflexible in the face of other societal changes related to gender roles. The caring mandate is stressing us out and making us angry, sick, and tired.

A 2016 study found that women in the United States and Western Europe have twice the levels of daily stress that men do. Women describe being under constant, intense stress as the result of workplace hostility and disproportionate responsibility for caring.

women between the ages of eighteen and forty-four are nearly twice as likely as men to say they feel “exhausted” or otherwise worn out every day.

A meta-analysis of almost two hundred studies conducted in more than fifteen countries found that women are more physically and emotionally exhausted than men, accounting for their higher rates of burnout in many sectors, such as media. “An awful lot of middle-aged women are furious and overwhelmed,”

No amount of work stress, or anger that I felt related to work, came close to the stress I felt at home.

Many boys and men, trying to do their best and also feeling tremendous time pressure, believe instinctively that this information is wrong and that they do their “fair share.” However, studies show that men reliably overestimate their domestic contributions. Many men also undermine efforts at equalizing the distribution of work.

In one 2014 study (conducted in the United Kingdom by a large retailer), 30 percent of surveyed heterosexual men admitted to purposefully doing household work poorly so that their partners would stop asking and do the work themselves.

We are often busy not only managing our own feelings but also for regulating the feelings of others.

For many men, the expectation that women be eternally engaging in their emotional management turns into the expectation that they provide sex to do it.

Starting at a young age, girls around the world do roughly 30 percent more unpaid work than their brothers. That percentage is 50 percent by adolescence. They are laundering, vacuuming, clearing dishes, and more likely to be helping with the care of younger siblings. Boys may do these things too, but they are still more likely to be taking out the trash, washing cars, mowing lawns, and doing general maintenance work. When asked what they are responsible for, boys list almost 50 percent fewer chores than girls do. Sometimes physical size differences and strength matter, but most of the time—particularly when it comes to taking care of siblings or housekeeping—gender role makes the more significant difference.

We’ve even convinced young women that keeping their own names when they get married is selfish, damaging to their families, and a social affront.

“Women tend to be angered by the negative actions of men,” explains Professor Ann Kring, chair of the University of California at Berkeley’s Department of Psychology, in a paper on gender and anger, whereas “men tend to be angered by women’s negative emotional reactions and self-focused reactions.”

Single, childless women are the only women who report that they have the time and freedom to pursue interests, ambitions, and hobbies at the same rate as married heterosexual men do.

Men do one-third the amount of work of what women do at home. Contrary to what might seem sensible, men whose wives earned more did even less than those whose wives did not.

The belief that women will happily, willingly, and freely provide care means that women’s time and work are chronically undervalued and underpaid.

The more “feminized” a job, the less people will pay for someone to do it.

In category after category, when women migrate into a field, median salaries drop. When men go into a field, salaries go up.

Even as women continue to struggle financially, emotionally, and physically to personally rectify “second shift” (working for pay, then getting home and doing the bulk of unpaid care and domestic work) impacts, they are now also engaging in a powerful “third shift.” To make ends meet, women are side hustling.

An annual health study of more than eight thousand people in the United Kingdom, like similar studies in the United States and other countries, found that women are consistently less satisfied and happy than men are over multiple life stages. Women surpassed men in terms of life satisfaction and happiness only in their eighth decade. In other words, until they are no longer responsible for caring for other people.

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.

One study found that one-third of women who were prevented from terminating their pregnancies describe long-term resentment of their offspring and were aware that these feelings were related to neglect and poor parenting.

Anger is one letter short of danger.

They looked at 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.

There is deep cultural resistance to taking women’s fears of male violence seriously.

A woman’s chance of being sexually assaulted in her lifetime is one in five. For men, it’s one in seventy-seven.

Ask a man what his greatest fear is about serving jail time, and he will almost inevitably say he fears being raped. What can we deduce from the fact that jail is to men what life is to so many women?

At least one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused during her lifetime, overwhelmingly by men they are related to, be it a father, brother, spouse, or domestic partner.

When women display anger, men are more likely to respond with anger, but when men show anger, women respond with fear.

Men’s bodies release the chemicals norepinephrine and cortisol, which prompt fight-or-flight behaviors. Women, too, experience faster pulses and elevated blood pressure, but their bodies, instead, produce two different chemicals: endorphins and oxytocin, which lead to “tend-and-befriend” behaviors. Women become more affiliative and appear to be friendly. “Fight or flight” is the “normal” response . . . if you are a man, yet it is the standard to which women are held.

Simply “leaving” or “walking away” is often not a rational option. When we feel fear, or anger, or a combination of both, we often freeze, act confused, and stop talking in order to think. We become still and quiet, and we smile. We make our rage small; we acquiesce, deflect, soothe, and shrug. Giggling is sublimation. Laughing is a path to survival. And if smiling and laughter are not options, we cry: a self-silencing deferral that is often misinterpreted as weakness.

Financial dependence is a near constant issue for women victims of domestic violence who must be able to secure, at the very least, housing if they leave, particularly with children.

When men abuse children, women, who are often themselves victim, are sometimes prosecuted for not sufficiently protecting their children from a violent partner.

Myrna Dawson, an associate sociology professor at the University of Guelph, has studied what happens to men who kill women family members and found that they receive shorter prison sentences compared with men who kill strangers. She calls this an “intimacy discount.” Reasons why this is the case include the notion that men are provoked into spontaneous violence, a “crime of passion” defense. Dawson, however, also describes that what the leniency may reflect is that, across the criminal justice system, “women murdered by male partners are seen as property.” Property can’t fight back.

Studies have found that projects run by men get twice the budget and three times the people power.