Yet as she also says–proving Chemaly’s central point–the anger that has driven women to take radical political action during the last 200 years, whether as abolitionists, feminists, civil rights activists or labour union organizers, has often been airbrushed out of the picture, either conveniently forgotten or else transformed into something we find more palatable. Chemaly is particularly critical of the way patriarchal cultures deny women the right to be angry, telling them that anger is ‘unfeminine’ and therefore shameful Traister emphasizes the political as well as personal significance of women’s anger, which she regards as one of the driving forces behind ‘every major social and political movement that has shaped this nation ’. As yet I haven’t read either, but to judge from the publicity and the excerpts the authors have published, they are both calling for women to embrace their anger as a source of power. Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her was published this month Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger will be out in early October. Even if today’s feminists feel the same rage, they seem wary of expressing it in the same unapologetic way.īut as I write this (in autumn 2018), women’s rage seems to be having a moment, with two new feminist books on the subject appearing in the space of a few weeks. Other students have been equally struck by this lack of inhibition. Their responses are always varied, but there’s one thing that gets at least a passing mention from almost everyone: how angry these women were.įor Teresa Green, who turned her response into this 2016 guest post, what was most striking wasn’t just the anger itself, it was “the fact that they boldly express it with no qualms about the male egos or female delusions they tread on”. The first piece of writing students do for the course I teach on second wave feminism is a short response to the material they’ve read in the first two weeks–mostly personal essays and group manifestos dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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