Rage Becomes Her

[silentcrow]

Rage Becomes Her is a new book by Soraya P Chemaly, due out on 20th Sept. I've had it on my wishlist for a bit, but wasn't sure what angle the author would take and was waiting for reviews before buying.

Review
'How many women cry when angry because we've held it in for so long? How many discover that anger turned inward is depression? Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her will be good for women. After all, women have a lot to be angry about.' (Gloria Steinem) (taken from amazon)

However, I've just come across this article by her: Does Your Daughter Know It's OK To Be Angry?
www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2016-05-daughter-know-ok-angry/#disqus_thread

And it seems to tap into a lot of the points we make here about sexism, erasure of women, gender stereotypes, etc (and doesn't conflate sex with gender, for a change). It's also got me thinking about how angry I am, and about how I handle my daughters' anger. It's quite a long article but I'd love to discuss it with you all.1

www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2016-05-daughter-know-ok-angry/#disqus_thread

Sorry. Still not figured out that click link in the first post thing.

You might be interested in this: All the rage

Traister emphasizes the political as well as personal significance of women’s anger, which she regards as one of the driving forces in ‘every major social and political movement that has shaped this nation [i.e., the USA]’. Yet as she also says, the anger that drove women to take radical political action as abolitionists, feminists, civil rights activists and labour organizers has often been either forgotten or else transformed into something we find more palatable. As an illustration she quotes Angela Davis’s point about Rosa Parks (recorded in Pratibha Parmar’s aptly-titled 1991 documentary A Place of Rage): now often remembered as that nice, respectable Black lady who refused to go to the back of the bus because she was tired, Parks was actually an experienced, canny and courageous political activist.

Similarly, here in Britain, where we’re currently commemorating the centenary of (some) women’s right to vote, it’s clear that a lot of people either don’t know or would rather not acknowledge the anger of the militant suffragettes and their willingness to commit acts of violence that would now be regarded as terrorism. They didn’t just vandalise property, they also carried out attacks in which people were injured and could have been killed. Many other feminists and supporters of women’s rights (including some within the suffragettes’ own organisation, the WSPU) were strongly opposed to these tactics: as they saw it, such extreme displays of anger and violence did the cause more harm than good.

hyenainpetticoatsblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/19/all-the-rage/

arranfan you are right, that was interesting! I've been thinking about how I was as a teenager in the 80s/90s. Really quite formidable; in my mind I could do anything a boy could do and often better, nothing could stop me and I wasn't afraid to let the odd slap fly, either. But that anger really fizzled out when I saw how stacked against women and families the working world was. It felt - and still does feel - insurmountable. And now I have daughters, and the world is twice as shitty as it was when I was scared of the Cold War. You better believe I'm angry.

The trouble is you're not allowed to be angry in the middle class world are you. It's particularly true for women. You need to work in the middle class professions to get a reasonable wage nowadays, and if those already existing in those professions catch a hint of it, they will find a way to block you.

I think you’ll like this article:

www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/magazine/i-used-to-insist-i-didnt-get-angry-not-anymore.html

I think my whole life from eating disorders through anxiety and depression and insomnia has all been a battle with rage. Realising how angry I am has been a good first step to coping better with life.

Thanks for this thread, it's really interesting. I am very aware of how much I repress my own anger so I actively praise dd for expressing her annoyances and dissatisfaction and listen when she's angry. I hope she will be more in tune with her full emotional spectrum than I was growing up.

It's fascinating how righteous anger and wrath are air-brushed out of biographies of icons even when it's wholly pertinent.

There have been many references to the Santa Classification of Martin Luther King Jr that effectively weakens his intellectual legacy by omitting many of his race and class narratives in favour of the ones that all of the USA can get behind. This also removes references to the physical attacks and violence MLK received.

It's interesting to see it happen to Rosa Parks.

Yet as [Traister] also says, the anger that drove women to take radical political action as abolitionists, feminists, civil rights activists and labour organizers has often been either forgotten or else transformed into something we find more palatable. As an illustration she quotes Angela Davis’s point about Rosa Parks (recorded in Pratibha Parmar’s aptly-titled 1991 documentary A Place of Rage): now often remembered as that nice, respectable Black lady who refused to go to the back of the bus because she was tired, Parks was actually an experienced, canny and courageous political activist.

On the other hand, I can think of several white POTUS whose despicable rhetoric, anger, and actions have been deleted as they're increasingly presented as cuddly grandfather types.

qumquat great article! I loved the Audre Lords quotes about anger not just being a fire that burns everything to the ground, but something that brings us together and drives us forward. I do think men as a class are terrified of that.