Good and Mad Quotes

“But I say this to all the women reading this now, and to my future self: What you are angry about now - injustice - will still exist, even if you yourself are not experiencing it, or are tempted to stop thinking about how you are experience it, and how you contribute to it. Others are still experiencing it, still mad; some of them are mad at you. Don’t forget them; don’t write off their anger. Stay mad for them. Stay mad with them. They’re right to be mad, and you’re right to be mad alongside them. Being mad is correct; being mad is American; being mad can be joyful and productive and connective. Don’t ever let them talk you out of being mad again.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“On some level, if not intellectual then animal, there has always been an understanding of the power of women's anger:that as an oppressed majority in the United States, women have long had within them the potential to rise up in fury, to take over a country in which they've never really been offered their fair or representative stake. Perhaps the reason that women's anger is so broadly denigrated--treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational--is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn the very systems that have sought to contain it.
What becomes clear, when we look to the past with an eye to the future, is that the discouragement of women's anger--via silencing, erasure, and repression--stems from the correct understanding of those in power that in the fury of women lies the power to change the world.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“I confess that I am now suspicious of nearly every attempt to code anger as unhealthy, no matter how well meaning or persuasive the source. I believe Stanton was correct: what is bad for women, when it comes to anger, are the messages that cause us to bottle it up, let it fester, keep it silent, feel shame, and isolation for ever having felt it or re-channel it in inappropriate directions. What is good for us is opening our mouths and letting it out, permitting ourselves to feel it and say it and think it and act on it and integrate it into our lives, just as we integrate joy and sadness and worry and optimism.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Here’s the validation that I hope it can offer: that those who are furious right now are not alone, are not crazy, are not unattractive.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein's earliest and most vociferous accusers, recalled being asked "in a soft NPR voice, 'What if what you're saying makes men uncomfortable?' Good. I've been uncomfortable my whole life. Welcome to our world of discomfort.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“The British feminist Laurie Penny tweeted in July 2017, “Most of the interesting women you know are far, far angrier than you’d imagine.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Americans who might have exerted more energy to oppose Trump or support Clinton—especially white women—were goaded into inaction by the assurance that sexism and racism were things of the past, and that to work themselves up about either would look silly, would be unnecessary exertions on behalf of an imperfect candidate.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“anger is often an exuberant expression. It is the force that injects energy, intensity, and urgency into battles that must be intense and urgent if they are to be won. More broadly, we must come to recognize our own rage as valid, as rational, and not as what we’re told it is: ugly, hysterical, marginal, laughable.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“As Amanda Litman... has written, 'Instead of resisting (anger) or avoiding it, let your fury push you to action. Embrace your anger and put it to work.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Yes, it is out of control. It is a loud and livid objection to the kinds of control that have long been in place in a nation built by white men who, when they angrily broke free of imperialist control themselves, promptly encoded protections of liberty and independence only for themselves, building their new nation on slavery and the oppression of women, on the legal and civic subjugation of that nation’s majority.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“We’re your sass, your nonchalance, your fury, your delight, your annoyance . . .” the writer Lauren Michele Jackson told journalist Amanda Hess, who argued that “on the internet, white people outsource their emotional labor to black people.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“We are taught it—give me liberty or give me death, live free or die, don’t tread on me—as patriotic catechism, but only when it has been expressed by white men has it sounded or been transmitted to us as admirable, reasonable, as the crucial catalytic ingredient to political change. That’s because white men were always and have remained the rational norm, the intellectual ideal, their dissatisfactions easily understood as being grounded in reason, not in the unstable emotional muck of femininity.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“In the United States, we have never been taught how noncompliant, insistent, furious women have shaped our history and our present, our activism and our art. We should be.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“one of the reasons why you see such an affliction of drugs on black communities and low-income communities throughout the United States today is because rage has lost its respectability since the 1960s. The thing that you had in the civil rights revolution was an absolute upfront embrace of rage . . . when you don’t rage against the evils and the enemies against you what you do is you turn in against yourself and you begin to despair and give up . . . and that leads to this kind of plague proportion of drugs.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Maybe we cry when we're furious in part because we feel a kind of grief at all the things we want to say or yell that we know we can't. Maybe we're just sad about the very same things we're angry about.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“The fact that we can often only register the fury of white men as heroic is so established that it would verge on the comical if it weren’t so deeply tragic.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Because while it surely felt cathartic to see it all laid bare, even briefly, the view did not undo the damage. We could not go back in time and have the story of Hillary Clinton be written by people who had not also pressed their erections into the shoulders of young women who’d worked for them. We could not retroactively resituate the women who’d left jobs and whole careers because the navigation of the risks, of the daily abuses, drove them out. We would not see the movies or the art that those women would have made, could not live by the laws that they might have enacted, could not read the news as they might have reported it, had they ever truly had a fair shake at getting to tell it their way. The tsunami of #metoo stories hadn’t just revealed the way that men had grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it had also shown us that they had done it all while building the very world in which we still were forced to live.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“What becomes clear, when we look to the past with an eye to the future, is that the discouragement of women’s anger—via silencing, erasure, and repression—stems from the correct understanding of those in power that in the fury of women lies the power to change the world.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“We are never forced to consider that rage—and not just stoicism, sadness, or strength—were behind the actions of the few women’s heroes we’re ever taught about in school, from Harriet Tubman to Susan B. Anthony. Instead, we are regularly fed and we regularly ingest cultural messages that suggest that women’s rage is irrational, dangerous, or laughable.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“During the period in which newspapers were initially reporting on how asylum-seeking immigrants were having their young children ripped from them, presidential daughter and advisor Ivanka Trump tweeted a photograph of herself beatifically embracing her small son. When Samantha Bee performed a fierce excoriation of Trump’s incivility in both supporting her father’s administration, and posting such a cruel celebration of her own intact family, she called her a “feckless cunt.” It was this epithet, one that Donald Trump had himself used as an insult against women on multiple past occasions, that sent the media into a spiral of shocked alarm and prompted Trump himself to recommend, via Twitter, that Bee’s network, TBS, fire her. But neither Trump’s past use of the word to demean women, nor his possible violation of the First Amendment, provoked as much horror as the feminist comedian’s deployment of a slur that she had used before on her show often in reference to herself. Typically only the incivility of the less powerful toward the more powerful can be widely understood as such, and thus be subject to such intense censure. Which is what made #metoo so fraught and revolutionary. It was a period during which some of the most powerful faced repercussion.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“One year after Donald Trump had faced no repercussion for having admitted to grabbing women nonconsensually, women appeared hell-bent on ensuring that other men would be forced—at long last—to accept some consequence.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Well, now those young women had gotten angry. And some older women were rearing back in horror at the force of their rage, and at the fact that a lot of that rage involved interrogating the whole system within which their feminist elders had risen. This moment was asking not just men but the pioneering women who'd succeeded alongside them to reckon with what had not been changed by feminism, how much gendered inequity older feminists had decided to live with, to participate in.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“The other side of the anger is the hope. We wouldn't be angry if we didn't believe that it could be better.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“This book is about how anger works for men in ways that it does not for women, how men like both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can wage yelling campaigns and be credited with understanding--and compellingly channeling--the rage felt by their supporters while their female opponents can be jeered and mocked as shrill for speaking too loudly of forcefully into a microphone.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Of course it’s not a waste to fight for justice, to work to right wrongs; but it is an extra tax on those already working from power deficits.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“We cannot afford to dismiss or fetishize or marginalize or rear back from women’s anger any longer if we want this moment to be transformative. We have to look at it straight, stop hemming and hawing around it or trying to disavow it or worrying that it might offend and discomfit. It must be and always has been at the heart of social progress.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“movements are made up of moments, strung out over months, years, decades. They become discernible as movements—are made to look smooth, contiguous, coherent—only after they have made a substantive difference”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Men literally have no idea how to even legitimately recognize or name our anger—largely because we don’t either. This is new territory for everybody. Women’s rage has been so sublimated for so long that there’s simply no frame for what happens when it finally comes to the surface. —Sara Robinson”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“I’d like to extend a hearty fuck you to the national news media. This is for spending more time talking about my emails than all policy issues combined. . . . This is for constantly saying I “am flawed” or “have flaws” . . . motherfucker, name one!!! My fucking charity that gives HIV meds to poor people? Are you for real with this shit? And the Monday morning quarterbacks right now? You’re gonna criticize my campaign?? Bitch, I won the popular vote and I was running against America! Last toast: undecided voters . . . honey, if you were undecided after the Mexican rapist speech it means one thing: You needed me to be perfect. . . . You know, back in 1965, I ran for class president of my high school and lost to a boy who told me, “You are really stupid if you think a girl can be elected president.” Well, I put in fifty years of tireless, grueling work, and now, at long last, that little boy has been vindicated.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“This is one of anger's most important roles: it is a mode of connection, a way for women to find each other and realize that their struggles and their frustrations are shared, that they are not alone, not crazy. If they are quiet they will remain isolated. But if they howl in rage, someone else who shares their fury might hear them, might start howling along. This is of course, partly why those who oppress women work to stifle their rage.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger