Feminist author Rebecca Traister talks 'female rage'
Angry women are having a moment. They’re protesting, rabble-rousing and running for office. They’re shouting at a senator in an elevator, demanding that he look at them and attracting the eyes of the nation. Amid all of this comes Rebecca Traister’s new manifesto, “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.”
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More than a moment, Traister argues that women’s anger is a movement. That these past few years, marked by the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, will have long-term, multi-decade effects. That despite the patriarchy’s very best efforts, women’s anger — their righteous rage! — will change the country.
It has before.
“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 calms down,” she writes in her new book. “But these are all strategies that have been long 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 their country: their own fury.”
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Anita Hill shows up in much of Traister’s work, including in “All the Single Ladies,” where she explored how Hill’s unmarried status was used to discredit her 1991 testimony that Clarence Thomas, then a nominee for the Supreme Court, had sexually harassed her. In “Good and Mad,” Traister references Hill a dozen or more times, pointing out how women, watching those Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, “were so outraged by the treatment of Hill that an unprecedented number of them ran for office in 1992.”
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Her book questions the idea that anger is inherently unhealthy, that rage eats away at the body. Instead, she argues, anger turns bad when it’s swallowed down and choked back. When Traister finished writing “Good and Mad,” she looked back and realized what a healthy time it had been for her. She had slept well and eaten well, exercised often and had great sex. She credits that to “the very rare freedom and encouragement to express my anger and take the anger of other women seriously.” She knew her editors, too, would take it seriously. That space was freeing, energizing, even joyful. If only more women could live in such a place.
http://www.startribune.com/feminist-author-rebecca-traister-talks-female-rage-ahead-of-st-paul-event/495210311/
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