What makes you angry? For me, today, it’s Trump celebrating violence against one journalist while protecting the people who dismembered another. I’m still pissed about the president mocking Christine Blasey Ford’s memories of sexual abuse. And I’m furious that 12,800 children are being held in detention centers, many of them ripped from parents seeking asylum at the border. Those are just my pre-breakfast outrages.
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Today’s op-ed pages are all about partisan rage leading up to the November 6 midterm elections. Progressives are being cautioned to not “go low.” And Republicans . . . let’s talk about rage.
Angry survivors and loud women lined the streets of Washington, D.C. during the Senate hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. They accosted Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator. They are protesting sexual harassment at McDonald’s, and calling out powerful men in the media and in the entertainment industry.
Women’s anger is surging now, and, according to Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, it’s time to own it and harness it to transform a system that rewards white male power at the expense of brown, black, and feminine people.
Good and Mad is, somewhat paradoxically, an inspiring read. For those of us who have been taught to squelch negative emotions in order to look more reasonable, Traister’s perspective is deeply liberating. Her message provides hope that our justified rage will connect us and lead us to a better place.
Traister's message provides hope that our justified rage will connect us and lead us to a better place.
I spoke to Traister soon after the televised Senate Judiciary Committee hearings where an admittedly “terrified” Blasey Ford went up against a petulant, wrathful Kavanaugh. Like many, I was struck by the contrast in their demeanors. But for Traister, the display confirmed one of the primary observations of her book: Women’s anger and men’s anger are heard differently.
“There was this tremendous contrast between the range of emotion that was available to the nominee and Christine Blasey Ford because we know she couldn’t rage,” says Traister. “She would not have been taken seriously. The press would have suggested she was ‘unhinged’ or too emotional or addled by anger. Women’s anger is considered irrational. But anger from men is heard as bolstering their righteousness.”
Traister, who has been covering feminism and politics for nearly two decades for New York magazine and other outlets, wrote the book in four months. She rushed to get the book to print because she sensed that something was changing—dramatically, radically—and that she wanted to capture a moment.
“Last fall, during the flood of #metoo stories, it felt radical to me,” Traister told a packed room during an October 13 appearance at the Wisconsin Book Festival. “Having grown up in the backlash era of the ’80s and ’90s, I had never known radical feminism and I wanted to try to capture that. Because I know all too well how time covers up that sort of spikiness and complexity and difficulty of those moments and I wanted to try my best to catch it while it was still fresh in my own mind.”
In our interview, she expanded on this difficult moment we’re in.
“What I was seeing was a willingness to express fury and dissent about the way power has accumulated in this country,” she says. “That is what I saw with the health care protests, the resistance to the travel ban, teacher strike, gun control, and Black Lives Matter, and Occupy. We have been building the insistence that we take the charges against men like Bill O’Reilly and [Bill] Cosby seriously. I felt it was building and layering on and that the work of these activists and protesters might be changing us. And so this is an iteration, the next chapter in a story I’m trying to tell.”
Good and Mad is grounded in history, and Traister is an excellent storyteller. She explores the intersection and tension between the anti-slavery movements and the suffragists. She explicates how historians rewrote the story of Rosa Parks from that of a seasoned anti-rape activist to a weary seamstress and unwitting participant in the civil rights movement. She is tuned into the history of intersectionality, and the racial dimensions of power, and spends a good amount of space unpacking the complex interplay between movements led by women of color and the women’s movement. She argues that the rage of women of color has been appropriated by white women who have, as she describes it, outsourced their anger in order to gain power by proximity to white men. She looks at white male anger, which arguably propelled Trump to the presidency, and anger between different factions of leftist movements.
Traister’s end game is to reframe the way we see and hear women’s anger from something negative and soul-sucking to something liberating and galvanizing. “Anger has driven women to develop a million approaches to changing the world,” she writes in a later chapter titled “The Exhilaration of Activism.”
“Anger has driven women to develop a million approaches to changing the world.”
“It’s prompted some to put the sources of their pain and suffering on display: from Mamie Till’s determination to show the world her son’s battered dead body to the editors of Ms. magazine, who in 1973 published a photo of Geraldine Santoro, a Connecticut woman who’d bled to death after an illegal abortion, to Diamond Reynolds, who in 2016 live-streamed the murder of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, by policemen as her four-year-old daughter watched in terror from the backseat.”
She talks with women on the front lines of today’s struggles: fighting voter suppression, protesting the Muslim ban, survivors and leaders of #TimesUp and #MeToo. And she revisits the March for Our Lives last spring when “the young, furious activist Emma Gonzalez dared to make everyone terribly uncomfortable by holding them in silence, without explanation or apology, until the six and a half minutes it had taken for a student to kill seventeen of his former classmates had ticked out.”
The first question after Traister’s talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival, though, had to do with anger burnout. The woman, a longtime activist, was tired of being angry, she said, and was instead focusing on love. Wasn’t anger bad for us?
Traister says the four months she spent in “an anger biodome” while writing the book were healthiest and happiest of her adult life. “I slept like a log every night. I was eating well, I was exercising more than I ever have in my life because I felt like it. I was having a good sex life with my husband. I was being literally paid to be angry. And more than that, my anger was being taken seriously.”
Then she quoted Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement: “Nobody’s asked us why we’re so angry.”
But for myriad reasons, Traister says she can’t counsel living each day in anger. You could get fired if you get angry at your boss, she offers, or if you’re a black woman angry about being pulled over by the cops, you could be killed. But in many cases, she adds, the anger isn’t the problem—it’s the unequal distribution of power.
“I wanted to challenge the notion that the anger is what’s bad for us. Because the anger is part of the full range of human expression and a valid, reasonable reaction to inequality in the world, and to injustice,” says Traister.
At at time when the world feels like it’s going off the rails, Good and Mad helps reorganize our understanding of history and, perhaps more importantly, shows us the possibilities inherent in owning our rage.
Men, especially white men, regularly use anger to illustrate their seriousness and rationality. “I don’t think we think their anger is eating them up inside,” says Traister. “Why not? In part because it’s being put in the world and people are listening to it and taking it seriously.”
At at time when the world feels like it’s going off the rails, Good and Mad helps reorganize our understanding of history and, perhaps more importantly, shows us the possibilities inherent in owning our rage.
“The only prescriptive thing I can say...is hear women’s anger differently. See it differently. We have to change the system. We have to value it, take it seriously, treat it as instructive and diagnostic, the way we are taught to treat men’s anger,” says Traister. “The anger expressed by women, and more broadly by people with less power, should point us to things we need to fix and address.
“I want to present anger—without denying that it can be divisive and destructive, which it can be—but I suggest that it can also be a liberating, joyful, communicative tool that brings people together.”