Rebecca Traister

Journalist Rebecca Traister’s New York Times bestselling exploration of the transformative power of female anger and its ability to transcend into a political movement is “a hopeful, maddening compendium of righteous feminine anger, and the good it can do when wielded efficiently—and collectively” (Vanity Fair). Long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women’s March, and before the #MeToo movement, women’s anger was not only politically catalytic—but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates its crucial role in women’s slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men. “Urgent, enlightened…realistic and compelling…Traister eloquently highlights the challenge of blaming not just forces and systems, but individuals” (The Washington Post). In Good and Mad, Traister tracks the history of female anger as political fuel—from suffragettes marching on the White House to office workers vacating their buildings after Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Traister explores women’s anger at both men and other women; anger between ideological allies and foes; the varied ways anger is received based on who’s expressing it; and the way women’s collective fury has become transformative political fuel. She deconstructs society’s (and the media’s) condemnation of female emotion (especially rage) and the impact of their resulting repercussions. Highlighting a double standard perpetuated against women by all sexes, and its disastrous, stultifying effect, Good and Mad is “perfectly timed and inspiring” (People, Book of the Week). This “admirably rousing narrative” (The Atlantic) offers a glimpse into the galvanizing force of women’s collective anger, which, when harnessed, can change history.

The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

Good and Mad

Lindsay

I’m turning my anger into action. I’m trying to convert my anger into inspiration. I’ve taken my anger and channeled it into activism. My anger has hardened into determination.

The experience of having patriarchal control compromised felt, perhaps ironically, like a violation, a diminishment, a threat to professional standing— all the things that sexual harassment feels like to those who’ve experienced it.

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.

These structural assumptions are why calls for civility almost always redound positively to the oppressors, because incivility against the oppressed is not only so normalized, it is also so comforting that it can barely be detected as oppression; while even the most trivial challenge from the less powerful sets off alarms.

Except, of course, the fact that it took these privileged white women’s stories to get anyone to take sexual power abuse seriously also made them emblematic of the stark, maddening inequalities in place when it came to which kinds of women’s stories were of interest, and which kinds of women were readily believed.

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.

 other words, what the feminists who’d long yearned for a wave of youthful fury had not expected was that some of that fury might be directed toward them, or at least toward the men who had become their friends, lovers, husbands, and colleagues; that a fresh generation of enraged activists would be looking straight at them, their feminist foremothers—the generation from which younger women had run for decades, imagining them to have been wicked old man-hating hysterics—and pretty much accusing them of not having been angry enough.

Plenty of people, including me, initially understood the divides between some feminists on the usefulness and righteousness of #metoo as breaking along generational lines—between the angry young women and a more sanguine older generation. On one side of this divide, I thought for a while, were women who had come of age before Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas, who had perhaps been raised to assume they’d encounter harassment and had resolved to tough it out, whose own desires and turn-ons had been shaped by assumptions about power and sex, masculinity and femininity, and were very different from what younger women wanted and assumed them to be. To this contingent, younger women’s complaints could sound hand-wringingly excessive: What did those girls expect? Wasn’t part of the thrill of a heterosexual encounter tied to domination and power differentials?

But here was a sharp irony: as a feminist journalist, I’d for years been interrogated by older women about what was wrong with young women: Why weren’t they angry? Why didn’t they identify with feminism? Why were they complacent? Why didn’t they want to go further toward changing the world?

My friends and I, including Irin Carmon, who had made the “trust no one” reference to Get Out, began to describe female defenders of powerful men as Women of the Sunken Place, a reference via that same film to their inability to resist the powerful pull of white patriarchy. It was just a dumb joke, memed in other contexts on social media, but I thought about it a lot. Lots of people talked about Weinstein and some of the other guys as monsters, but the real horror- movie terror wasn’t about individual Freddies or Jasons. It was the revelation of systemic menace: that everyone around you was in on the threat.

But the letter was clarifying in certain ways. It made explicit what had been implicit in much of the internal feminist criticism of #metoo: that some of the accused men’s staunchest female defenders were defending in part their own ascension within the system that had permitted the men to be abusive. The appreciation of the man in question hinged on women’s experiences of having been personally offered opportunities for advancement by him; they owed him. Never mind that this same power— the chance that he might champion her, and that his ability to offer women at the network opportunities for advancement— was exactly what Vester understood, what she said kept her from barring him from her hotel room, or crossing him earlier in her career by telling people what had happened there or filing a complaint.

They had defended him in part because they had been forced to depend on him after twelve years of Reagan and Bush administrations; he was the leader of the party that was invested in women’s rights, the president who had appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, who had signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, who was married to a feminist many of them had then admired tremendously. But the choice not to condemn Clinton for his abuse of professional and sexual power had in fact worked to halt feminist momentum in the years after the Anita Hill accusations against Clarence Thomas had brought the term “sexual harassment” into the national lexicon.

This history meant that every contemporary feminist who wanted to make a point about #metoo— even those of us who had been in high school or college during the Clinton administration— had to answer for Clinton’s behavior: Did we condemn it? Yes we did. But we were also called on to evaluate the feminists who had come before us and defended Clinton: Had this been a strategic and moral error? Yes it had been. Any of us who had supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 were additionally asked whether the feminist argument for her was compromised by her own complicity in defending her husband and denigrating Lewinsky to a friend in a conversation that would later be reported.

The answer to that last one— for me, anyway— was perhaps especially fraught, but at some point it was hard not to notice that there seemed to be an extremely wide circle of censure in which everyone— from old feminists to young feminists to Hillary Clinton to anyone who had ever said a good word about either Hillary Clinton or about feminism— was being asked to answer for Bill Clinton’s shitty behavior . . . everyone that is, except for Bill Clinton.

Women of color, and specifically black women, are the demographic most likely to see their struggles as intertwined both with other women’s and with black men’s, and to work alongside white women and black men— often pioneering the thinking and doing the labor of organization— central to movements for liberation and equality. Which makes it a terrific injustice that the movements to liberate women and African Americans have so often been understood as having been led by white women and black men. They are understood this way because white supremacy and patriarchy permit white women and black men greater access to money, and more proximity to the media that covers social movements and the politicians who respond to them, than black women have.

But when black women push back against the white women who come in and take up a disproportionate amount of space, when their own complaints about race complicate a white women’s movement, it is too often black women who are framed as the ones being divisive. This dynamic was reflected in the coverage of the Women’s March conflicts, in which black women letting white women know that they had not invented political resistance to white patriarchy were viewed as somehow inhospitable.

Part of the problem stems from understanding whiteness as simply normative, central— any challenge to it is disruptive in the same way that challenges to patriarchy are disruptive, insofar as they discomfit the more powerful group. But that echo is lost on too many white women, who have a hard time absorbing the ways that even as they have been marginalized by men, so they themselves have often marginalized nonwhite women.

Alicia Garza described her experience of reading Hillary Clinton’s righteously angry memoir about the 2016 election and being “befuddled” by it. “Yes, women’s anger is not considered to be valid or legitimate,” said Garza. “So in one way she has every fucking right to be mad as shit about the way in which the patriarchy has impacted her aspirations and goals, and even though I disagree with her on a lot of things, she deserves to be seen in her humanity and in her dignity.” But, she went on, “I am livid when I read these excerpts. Because, yes, you get to be in all of your anger. But what I felt very viscerally from her anger was that it wasn’t just [directed] at the men who kept her down, it was also very much [directed] at the people”— including Black Lives Matter activists and criminal justice reformers—“ who challenged her around things she absolutely should have been challenged around.”

As Brittney Cooper has regularly observed, it’s the fact that black women have been offered neither patriarchal nor racial advantage in exchange for support that has enabled their steady and unremitting leadership of the resistance to white patriarchal power in America. “White women and black men both want what white men have— white women want to have corporate power and black men want to be patriarchs. Black women a) know we’re never going to get that and b) don’t want that. We don’t want to wield corporate power and we don’t want to oppress people. That’s why I look to black women as the political future.”

Black women have long been the backbone of our political and progressive past: the strategists and protesters and organizers and volunteers, the women who’ve gotten out the vote and licked the envelopes, pioneered the thinking that led to the revolutions. Yet they’ve been only barely represented in leadership of the political parties they’ve bolstered, their policy priorities have often gone unaddressed and unrecognized; their participation has long been taken for granted. And when white women have caught up to where black women have been for a long time, the work of the black women has often been appropriated, ignored, and uncredited by those with greater economic, cultural, and racial advantage.

Those white women who are or have been most directly connected by marriage to white men are far more likely to vote Republican than their never-married peers. According to a paper published by political scientists Dara Strolovitch, Janelle S. Wong, and Andrew Proctor, who reviewed the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election study numbers on voting patterns, a majority 59 percent of never-married white women voted for Hillary Clinton, compared to the almost reverse majority of married white women, 57 percent, who voted for Donald Trump. Sixty percent of white widows voted for Trump; 56 percent of white women who were separated from husbands voted for Trump; and 49 percent of white divorced women voted for him. In other words, the study concluded, “The more distant” white women are “from the benefits of and investments in traditional heterosexual marriage, the less likely they are to support Republican presidential candidates,” i.e., candidates of the party more likely to support traditional white heteropatriarchy.

And so, some American women have been offered the advantages of white supremacy, advantages that turn on other women’s disadvantages. But even white women’s privileges to some degree have turned on all women’s patriarchal subjugation, and the dependency dynamics that patriarchy creates: Women were historically legally barred from property ownership, educational and professional opportunity, the chance to build their own credit or the ability to control their own reproduction; some of these challenges remain, as does wage inequality that means, simply, that women earn less money than men; these conditions have rendered them dependent on men. And women’s dependence on men has in turn made it in many women’s interests to support policies and parties that protect the economic and political status of the men on whom they depend.

This dynamic applies most specifically to white women, who—as wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, neighbors, employees, colleagues, and friends of white men—have been offered a kind of proximal power: greater access, via their relation to powerful white men, to wealth, jobs, educational opportunities, housing, and health-care options. For white women, this dependency on white men incentivizes a dedication to and protection of white male power, because these women’s advantages are linked so closely to white men having the power to in turn dole out to them.

But importantly, the magnification of internecine resentments to diminish the power of insurgent movements isn’t the only tool available to the powerful against the marginal: the powerful minorities also have the power to create the inequities that provoke those resentments to begin with.

White patriarchal minority rule was established by America’s founders when they encoded slavery into our founding documents and built our electoral apparatus around its protection. It was strengthened when they granted white men the franchise and violently guarded that exclusivity for almost a century, ensuring that it was only they who created and controlled the courts, the businesses, the economic systems, who wrote the legislation and created the customs and set the norms on which the country was built. The mechanisms of white male minority rule have been varied: from the denial of equal pay protections to the criminalization of reproductive autonomy and the denial of full health- care options to women, and especially to poor and nonwhite women. From racist housing policy to social safety nets and government- subsidized benefits that have accrued predominantly or exclusively to white Americans, from the enforcement of marital law that left women unable to exert financial or legal independence to the failures of protection against rape, lynching, assault, harassment, and discrimination.

White men have had a nearly exclusive grip on political, economic, social, and sexual power in the United States, despite being only around a third of its population. The way that a minority power protects itself from the potential uprising of a majority is to discourage unification of that majority. And the best way to discourage unification is to split the majority against itself, by offering benefits and protections of power to some, while denying them to others.

Juneja said she’d been thinking a lot about “who’s even allowed to be pissed off and how they’re allowed to express it” since the election. She said that she stopped watching Trump speeches or news about him almost a month before he was elected, because the experience of watching him, yet not seeing any of the rage he inspired in her reflected in the news media’s coverage of him, was leaving her crippled by vertiginous self- doubt. “I felt like I was hearing him say things that didn’t make sense or that contradicted what he’d just said, but no one else was hearing this.” The political media was covering him and the things he said as legitimate. “And I was questioning myself.”

At some point in 2017, Juneja mentioned to her father that she’d stopped watching coverage of Trump because it had made her feel so confused and her father replied, “Well, I wasn’t confused; I knew exactly who he was.” Juneja said that she looked at her father with perplexity before realizing: “Oh, congratulations, no one has socialized you to wonder if maybe you’re the one who’s wrong. No one ever told you that the way you feel about the world is not valid.”

The writer Roxane Gay has described how “at many events where I am speaking about feminism, young women ask how they can comport themselves so they aren’t perceived as angry while they practice their feminism. They ask this question as if anger is an unreasonable emotion when considering the inequalities, challenges, violence, and oppression women the world over face.”

Women yearn for permission, and simultaneously hunger for someone to express any curiosity at all about what they might be feeling.

“We get told all the time that our anger is disruptive, that it is a distraction, that it is not helpful, and that in fact it is divisive and moving us backwards,” said Alicia Garza. “Yet nobody ever seems to question: why are you so fucking mad?”

For a while, she said, she “transplanted [her] anger, which is not uncommon for women to do, into other things.” She could be angry at anyone who treated an animal badly, or another person, but not angry on her own behalf.

When she was in her thirties and a working journalist herself, established as a glamorous denizen of the early 1970s New York media scene, Steinem made waves by posing as a Bunny at the New York Playboy Club and then writing about the experience; she’d also covered the antiwar and black power movements, and she’d been sent to cover a hearing on abortion. As Steinem recalled, “I’m sure that [anger is] what I felt at the first abortion hearing, the moment when I suddenly realized that yes, I had had an abortion, and so had one in three other women [but that it was illegal]. I’m sure what I felt was anger: How is this okay? This is completely irrational! I was fueled by anger.” That fuel propelled her into the women’s movement. Still, she said, for many years, “I could finally tell people on a Thursday that I’d been angry on Monday. I couldn’t tell them in real time.” Still, she said, with half a century as a feminist organizer and women’s leader under her belt, as a woman who understands that “anger is great fuel for political activism; it’s wonderful and I value it, I treasure it”—still, she said, to this day, she can express anger in real time “only occasionally.”

If it is so difficult for Gloria Fucking Steinem to confidently let loose with fury, is it any wonder that in many places when I speak to students, young women ask me how they might express their own ire? They are scared, they tell me—in high schools, and on college campuses—to be publicly open about their rage, because they are afraid it will be alienating to their friends, to their peers, to men. They fear it will make them sound deranged or aggressive. They’re not deranged and they’re not aggressive; they’re just angry. But how can they say that they’re mad without drawing condemnation and raised eyebrows? How can they be confident and unapologetic in their rage? Won’t they scare people off? They ask me what my secret is: How did I figure out how to get up on the stages at their schools and speak angrily?

Perhaps the negativity around the yelling woman goes back to the disproportionate labor they perform as caretakers of the young, women’s raised voices an unhappy reminder of reprimands, tones that make men feel like children again, under the punitive thumbs of their mothers, grandmothers, older sisters, nannies, and teachers who nurtured and educated them. “We’re raised by women,” said Gloria Steinem, “so we experience female power when we’re younger. And men, especially, when they see a powerful woman as an adult, feel regressed to childhood and strike out at her.”

Do a Google image search on any of the powerful women in politics or public life, especially those who threaten white male power—by pressing for reforms in the military, the criminal justice system, the banking industry, or by running to beat powerful men—and you’ll turn up scores of photos of Waters and Pelosi and Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren with their mouths open, unrestrained: mid-yell, spittle-flecked, the very act of making a loud noise a sign of their ugly and unnatural personalities. The best way to discredit these women, to make them look unattractive, is to capture an image of them screaming; the act of a woman opening her mouth with volume and assured force, often in complaint, is coded in our minds as ugly.

The idea that women’s anger is fundamentally illegitimate, because they have nothing real, no big things to be rationally angry about, is part of what undergirds the claim that furious women are mentally ill. But it can also cause women to feel crazy. “Our anger gets dismissed and devalued and gaslighted,” Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza told me, speaking specifically about black women. “We are angry because people are telling us what is happening to us right in front of our faces is not in fact happening, and that is crazy to me.” 

Whether angry women are driven crazy, or whether their anger is confused for mental illness, the claim about them in a society that treats mental illness as a delegitimizing aberration becomes the same: they are received as emotionally precarious, irrational, untrustworthy, marginal, and unattractive.

There will be, already is, a desire to treat this iteration of women’s uprising as hysteria, a mob, a witch hunt, a passing phase, a childish tantrum, something irrational, something niche, something that can be averted or neutralized as soon as everyone just calms down. There will be assertions that the anger is not authentic but performed. There will be tremendous pressure to not take it seriously, to not listen too carefully to what the loud shrill voices are saying, insistence that women giving voice to their rage are sure to lose, or are simply working to provoke further discrimination and disregard. Women’s anger will be— as it has long been— cast as ugly, unappealing, dangerous, something to be shut down or jeered. Nothing, we have long been assured, is more unattractive in a woman than anger, and those messages will be especially damaging— as they have always been— to nonwhite women. But these are all strategies that have long been used to get people, including women themselves, to look away from, disregard, and suppress one of the great drivers of social upheaval and political change in this country: their own fury.

This surety, that Clinton had already won the presidency, was what prompted so many white people on the right, including white women, to vote against the creeping ascendency of women, especially against the woman who’d been so effectively vilified on both the left and the right. It was also what disabused women on the left of the purportedly overdramatic notion that the country was still powered by enough misogyny and racism that it would elect an openly hateful bigot, or that they needed to truly stir themselves on Clinton’s account in order to combat those biases and beat Trump. In treating her as though she had already beat him, and not like the single tool on the table with which the nation might stop this monstrous racist patriarch, we talked ourselves out of the outrage we should have been mustering. We didn’t have to be angry on behalf of Hillary Clinton, this seductive song went. If anything, we should be angry at her, for not having done enough for us with the power we imagined she had.

hileahrious

Brilliant. An inspiring, articulate, historical, and eye-opening read on how women’s anger has been viewed differently than men’s, and how that is SO much part of the problem. But also how it is so necessary in order to change the system. I particularly value Traister’s inspection of the intersectionality of feminism and women’s activism, especially post-Nov2016. She comments that many white women who have “awoken” to activism against the injustices of our misogynist system have been repeatedly reminded that they are not the first women to do so (cue loads of African American and other women examples - read this book to learn more). There are so many reasons to read this book, I highly recommend it, especially if you need a political pick-me-up after these past two years of having the scum of the earth as president. And for those who think it’ll be a constant blast on men by an “angry feminist”, think again because it is very clearly written and includes just the right amount of profanity. And your resentment of women’s anger is actually just fear telling you it’s a zero-sum game; don’t be an idiot!

This book is perfect for me, it says everything and more I wish I knew how to express about identifying as a feminist. It has helped me to see that my anger is valuable, that I can use it in productive ways, and most importantly, it encourages me to continuously not “ever let them talk [me] out of being mad again.”

Alexa M

such a great read!!! very informative and made me quite emotional.

Ashley Johnson

I’m buying this book for every woman I’ve ever met.

Serge L

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Zoe Proegler

***NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*** ***BEST BOOKS OF 2018 SELECTION BY*** * WASHINGTON POST * People * NPR * ESQUIRE * ELLE * WIRED * REFINERY 29 * “In a year when issues of gender and sexuality dominated the national conversation, no one shaped that exchange more than Rebecca Traister. Her wise and provocative columns helped make sense of a cultural transformation.”—National Magazine Award Citation, 2018 “The most brilliant voice on feminism in this country.”—Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird From Rebecca Traister, the New York Times bestselling author of All the Single Ladies comes a vital, incisive exploration into the transformative power of female anger and its ability to transcend into a political movement. In the year 2018, it seems as if women’s anger has suddenly erupted into the public conversation. But long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women’s March, and before the #MeToo movement, women’s anger was not only politically catalytic—but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates the long history of bitter resentment that has enshrouded women’s slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men. With eloquence and fervor, Rebecca tracks the history of female anger as political fuel—from suffragettes marching on the White House to office workers vacating their buildings after Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Here Traister explores women’s anger at both men and other women; anger between ideological allies and foes; the varied ways anger is perceived based on its owner; as well as the history of caricaturing and delegitimizing female anger; and the way women’s collective fury has become transformative political fuel—as is most certainly occurring today. She deconstructs society’s (and the media’s) condemnation of female emotion (notably, rage) and the impact of their resulting repercussions. Highlighting a double standard perpetuated against women by all sexes, and its disastrous, stultifying effect, Traister’s latest is timely and crucial. It offers a glimpse into the galvanizing force of women’s collective anger, which, when harnessed, can change history.

Good and Mad The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

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