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Summary
Summary
A New York Times BestsellerA Best Book Pick of The Washington PostA Best Book Pick of PeopleA Best Book Pick of NPRA Best Book Pick of EsquireA Best Book Pick of ElleIn 2018, women's anger seems to have erupted into the public conversation. But long before the Women's March and the #MeToo movement, female anger was both politically catalytic and politically problematic. With eloquence and fervor, Rebecca Traister tracks the long history of women's anger as political fuel: from suffragettes marching on the White House to office workers walking out after the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation. Highlighting a double standard held against women by all sexes, Traister offers a glimpse into the galvanizing force of women's collective anger, which, when harnessed, can change history.
Author Notes
Rebecca Traister is a writer based in New York. Her work has been published in New York magazine, Elle, The New Republic, Salon, The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Glamour and Marie Claire. She is the author of All the Single Ladies, Big Girls Don't Cry, and Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Traister (All the Single Ladies , 2016) takes a deep dive into the current political climate to explore the contemporary and historical relationship women have with anger and the ramifications of expressing and suppressing feminine rage. Traister uses the 2016 election as a jumping off point, when to the shock of many, an eminently qualified female candidate was defeated by an inexperienced white male businessman who spouted off sexist and racist comments without compunction. While Donald Trump's and Bernie Sanders' angry rhetoric was lauded, Hilary Clinton was lambasted for being shrill and screechy (ditto, other female firebrands like Kamala Harris and Maxine Waters). Traister uses this startlingly obvious double standard to explore how attaching negative connotations to women's anger has always been used to silence and dismiss them. Although at times that anger boils over and energizes a movement, such as when suffragettes fought for the right to vote in the nineteenth century and when in 2017 the revelation of the depth and scope of Harvey Weinstein's crimes against women ignited the #MeToo movement. Traister doesn't shy away from the complicated issues surrounding feminine rage, exploring, for example, the ways white women have discounted and discredited the experiences of women of color. Timely and absorbing, Traister's fiery tome is bound to attract attention and discussion.--Kristine Huntley Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
RAGE BECOMES HER The Power of Women's Anger By Soraya Chemaly 392 pp. Atria. $27. REVOLUTIONARY POWER IS ascribed to many cultural and commercial products, but the journalist Rebecca Traister means the subtitle of her book "Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger" in the old-fashioned sense: "This is about the specific nexus of women's anger and American politics, about how the particular dissatisfactions and resentments of America's women have often ignited movements for social change and progress." In her rousing look at the political uses of this supposedly unfeminine emotion, Traister, a columnist for New York magazine and the author of two previous books on women and politics, cites the 18th-century slave Elizabeth Freeman, whose suit for freedom in the Massachusetts courts - based on the rhetoric of inalienable rights that she overheard being discussed by her owners - led to that state's outlawing of slavery; the girls working the Lowell mills, whose organized walkouts would inspire a larger labor movement; Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Frances Willard and Carrie Nation; Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Florynce Kennedy, Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin, as well as many less famous women who were part of the abolition, suffrage, temperance, labor, civil rights and feminist movements. What they all have in common is that at some point they found they could no longer tolerate the conditions under which they lived. In other words, they got mad. Though their efforts obviously involved much more than feeling angry, Traister spotlights the one emotion that, she contends, often gets underplayed in public discussions of history's female activists, including the ones we now hold up as heroes. Anger, she writes, "has rarely been acknowledged as righteous and patriotic when it has originated with women, though women have often taken pains to mimic or reference the language and sentiments of America's founding while making their own angry demands for liberty, independence and equality." "Anger" can mean several different things for the purposes of the book: It's a spontaneous emotional response to mistreatment, a motivating force for political action, an affect for which women are disproportionately criticized and penalized and an important aspect of public political expression that can be deployed in various ways. Indeed, a clearer taxonomy might have been helpful, given that Carrie Nation's hatchet-swinging attacks on saloons during the temperance movement are a different kind of angry expression from Rosa Parks's steady refusal to leave her seat, and both are different still from the teenage girl who survived the Parkland shooting and tweeted "I don't want your condolences you [expletive] [expletive]," in response to Trump. The movement Traister spends most of the book analyzing is the one currently unfolding, the wave of female-led, progressive activism that began with Black Lives Matter, swelled after Trump's election and produced a major shift in the cultural consensus on sexual harassment through #MeToo. Traister analyzes media coverage of the election and the women's marches. She interviews Second Wave leaders, current politicians and activists, and a group of liberal suburban women who've just started pounding the pavement in Southern red states. She reviews the increased interest in feminism over the last 10 years, and describes a professional world in which, until 2016, women quietly hoped to overturn stereotypes and beat sexism by working hard and being charming (she counts herself among them). For such women - decently compensated, largely white and benefiting in many respects from the status quo - the election of Trump was a moment of bitter disillusionment leading perhaps to the first display of raw fury and political activism of their lives. For many women of color, and for many women who are immigrants, or poor, Trump's victory was both more directly threatening and less surprising. "Among African-American women, there's been a long consistency of action," the Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams tells Traister. "What you're seeing in the suburbs is now a version of that." The various coalitions that have formed since the election have occasionally been fractious, but even more so they have been energized and highly effective in organizing and turning out the vote for a historically high number of female Democratic Party candidates. The unprecedented, if cautious, sense of solidarity among women (long an elusive ideal in a population sharply divided by class and race) is almost as important a theme in the book as anger itself. The same could be said of Soraya Chemaly's book, "Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger," a biting polemic that points to the pressures that women in sexist society face in common, even as those pressures are borne differently and unequally in different communities. Chemaly, a longtime writer and feminist activist, notes that girls and women are commonly socialized to suppress their anger, which is a shame because a ready arsenal of rage and invective comes in handy when you're the subordinated gender: "By effectively severing anger from 'good womanhood,' we choose to sever girls and women from the emotion that best protects us against danger and injustice." Despite its title, Chemaly's book is not so much about anger as about all the disparities that might - and should - make women angry: disproportionate poverty, wage gaps, discrimination, harassment, condescension and perhaps above all the high rates of violence against women (domestic, sexual and otherwise) with which we have yet to fully reckon. "Most of us learn to think that boys and men are the world's risk takers," she writes, "but that is only because we don't seriously address the risks women must take as they navigate boys and men. We take risks when we post our profiles on dating websites and meet up with strangers. We take risks when we can't pay for gyms (in lieu of exercising outside), taxis or car services, and other pricey 'safety' measures. We take risks every time we get pregnant. We take risks when we report sexual harassment, assault and domestic violence. We take risks when we go to the police.... We are experts at risk-taking." Chemaly cites many studies showing anti-female bias on all these fronts. The data comes flying at the reader so quickly that it can be hard to absorb. But it's a reminder of how much social science research has been done in the last few decades on the subject of gender-based (as well as racial) discrimination, showing again and again that unconscious bias regularly shapes decision-making even when all parties are acting in good faith. Written with energy and conviction, these celebrations of the galvanic possibilities of anger make for galvanizing reading. While their positive view of political anger makes sense within the context of social justice movements, I did wish for an accounting of anger that could also take in what's happening just outside the frame. There is obviously a lot of anger on the right, including among the majority of white women who voted for Trump - a fact that both authors acknowledge without letting it trouble their emphasis on women's political anger as a specifically progressive force. Conservative radio and television hosts have spent decades stoking their audience's fury at liberals, immigrants and feminists to create unlikely support for a batch of policies (more pollution, fewer consumer protections) that defy any common-sense standard of public benefit. More recently, mainstream Democratic Party liberalism has come in for much criticism on the left, and with it the supposedly moderation-loving liberal temperament. Angry expressions of ethno-nationalism are rising in many parts of the world, while angry expressions of misogyny are abloom on social media. Traister and Chemaly embrace feminist anger at a time when anger is the widespread mood of the moment. (It's also the political style of the moment, and both authors might have paid more consistent attention to the distinctions between anger as a felt emotion and angry expression as a political tactic - categories that may overlap in complex ways but don't always do so.) Looking around at the various angry constituencies, it's hard to draw conclusions about what kind of voter or citizen or activist anger creates. Is an angry voter a skeptic who sees through politicians' lies, or a pawn in the hands of moneyed interests? Does the angry citizen have a keen sense of justice, or a propensity to join mobs? Is the anger felt by a crowd marching for immigrants' rights categorically different from the anger of a crowd marching against immigration? These questions may be outside the scope of the books, but they seem all the more pressing in light of Traister's and Chemaly's revelations. ELAINE BLAIR is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
School Library Journal Review
The vast and often surprising political energy stemming from the rage that ensued after the 2016 presidential election inspired feminist journalist Traister to examine the contemporary and historical impact of anger-specifically women's anger-within American society. The author states that women's anger has long been dismissed and repressed, and angry women often ridiculed as hysterical, irrational, even crazy. Yet she asserts that women's fury at injustice has been one of the most powerful forces in U.S. politics and culture, coalescing in numerous protests and movements that brought about lasting change. Traister explores the characteristics and themes of anger as well as the ways in which it took shape within social movements. She also recounts anger's role in defining the women's suffrage and feminist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Traister's arguments are deeply thought provoking and endlessly compelling, although she isn't always inclusive-she offers a thorough analysis of the different characteristics of white and black women's anger but mentions only briefly other women of color. Librarians should note that the cover's background pattern features a potentially offensive expletive. VERDICT Recommended for burgeoning activists and teens interested in politics, history, and current events.-Kelsy Peterson, Forest Hill College, Melbourne, Australia © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
In this resounding polemic against political, cultural, and personal injustices in America, Traister (All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, 2016, etc.) studies women's anger as a tool for change.Citing fury as a driving force of her journalism career, the author, a writer at large for New York magazine and contributing editor at Elle, set out to write this book as a means to convey her own rage in response to innumerable inequities. She explores how feminist outrage has been suppressed, discouraged, and deemed unattractive and crazy. With articulate vitriol backed by in-depth research, Traister validates American women's anger as the heart of social progress and attributes its widespread denigration to the "correct understanding of those in power that in the fury of women lies the power to change the world." Some of the major topics of these clear, blistering pages include Donald Trump and the 2016 presidential election, ongoing sexual assault scandals and the #MeToo movement, systemic racism, and the public censure of women. The author weaves together discussions of the long-silenced accounts from women who were molested by powerful men with the deafening calls, by women across the country, for men who've abused their authority to be held accountable. She draws from a staggering number of sources, ranging from dozens of newspaper articles to Abigail Adams' 1776 warning to her own husband to pay attention to women. Traister has meticulously culled smart, timely, surprising quotations from women as well as men. The combined strength of these many individual voices and stories gives the book tremendous gravity. It is neither a witch hunt nor a call for vendettas against men. Rather, the author provides a reflective, even revolutionary reminder that women's collective capacity to catalyze change outweighs individuals' fear of backlash or turning a blind eye to ongoing subjugation. The goal is not anger for its own sake but to access, acknowledge, express, and use it to rebuild structures.A gripping call to action that portends greater liberty and justness for all. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Traister (All the Single Ladies) explores the power of women's anger, both individually and collectively, to bring about systemic change. The author argues that women expressing anger, black women in particular, have historically been caricatured as unhinged and hysterical; their legitimate concerns and grievances dismissed or ignored. She asserts that anger is a natural reaction to blatant injustice and should be harnessed, not quelled. She compares the fury and shouting of Bernie Sanders, which was applauded on the campaign trail in 2016, with the poise Hillary Clinton conveyed at all times, lest she appear strident. Unpacking the #MeToo Movement, she discusses ways in which pent-up feelings of injustice over rape, sexual assault, and harassment against women in the workplace finally boiled over to create a wave and also touches on the backlash such waves of rage can provoke. While Traister's thesis that women's anger "must be and always has been at the heart of social progress," is incomplete, she sends a clarion call for a more intersectional approach to feminism in order to effect lasting change. VERDICT A solid choice for feminist collections and for fans of Traister, although readers may find Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her more convincing.-Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., ID © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Good and Mad CHAPTER ONE SLEEPING GIANT The contemporary reemergence of women's rage as a mass impulse comes after decades of feminist deep freeze. The years following the great social movements of the twentieth century--the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement--were shaped by deeply reactionary politics. When Phyllis Schlafly led an antifeminist crusade to stop the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment--the twenty-four-word constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed equal rights regardless of gender--finally succeeding in 1982, it was a sign that the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, and the righteous fury that had ignited it, had been sidelined. More broadly, the Reagan era, in which increasingly hard-right reactionary politics had joined with a religious "moral majority," gave rise to a cultural backlash to all sorts of social progress. Under sharp attack were the benefits, rights, and protections that afforded poor women any stability, as well as the parts of the women's movement that had produced legal, professional, and educational gains for middle-class women, better enabling them to live independently, outside of marriage, the patriarchal institution that had historically contained them and on which they had long depended. The right wing of the 1980s was driven to restrict abortion access and deregulate Wall Street while simultaneously destroying the social safety net, which Ronald Reagan had made sure was embodied by the specter of the black welfare queen. A 1986 Newsweek cover story, meanwhile, blared the news that a single woman at forty was more likely to get killed by a terrorist than get married. That later-debunked study was a key point of Susan Faludi's chronicle of the era, Backlash, in which she tracked the varied, suffocating ways in which women's anger was muffled throughout the Reagan years: how feminist activism was blamed for the purported "man shortage"; the day-care that enabled women to work outside the home vilified as dangerous for children. Popular culture showed liberated white career women as oversexed monsters, as in Fatal Attraction, or as cold, shoulder-padded harpies who had to be saved via hetero-union or punished via romantic rejection (see Diane Keaton in Baby Boom, Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl). There was far too little space afforded to black heroines, and even some of the most nuanced were often crafted to serve male creators' investments in how women's liberation might serve their messages: Spike Lee's view of the sexually voracious Nola Darling in the 1986 film She's Gotta Have It and Bill Cosby's Clair Huxtable, the successful matriarch who, given the context of Cosby's own racial politics, served as a repudiation of black women who were not wealthy hetero-married mothers with law degrees. Who wanted to be a feminist? No one. And the anxiety about the term wasn't about any of the good reasons to be skeptical of feminism--like the movement's racial exclusions and elisions--but because the term itself, the idea of public and politicized challenge to male dominance, had been successfully coded as unattractively old, as crazy, as ugly. Susan Sarandon, the rare celebrity who actually maintained her publicly left politics through the 1980s and 90s, once explained why even she of the unrelenting commitment to disruptive political speech preferred the misnomer "humanist" to calling herself a "feminist": "it's less alienating to people who think of feminism as being a load of strident bitches." 1 To be sure, there were eruptions of fury, coming from people--often from women--who were waging battles against inequities. In 1991, the law professor Anita Hill testified in front of an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas, her former boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then a nominee for the Supreme Court, had sexually harassed her. Many women were taken aback by the way the committee insulted, dismissed, and ultimately disbelieved Hill, confirming Thomas to the court, where he sits today. "It was so stark, watching these men grill this woman in these big chairs and looking down at her," Patty Murray, senator from Washington state, has recalled. Murray and a lot of other women were so outraged by the treatment of Hill that an unprecedented number of them ran for office in 1992. Four, including Murray, won Senate seats; one of them, Carol Moseley Braun, became the first-ever African-American woman elected to the Senate. Twenty-four women were elected to the House of Representatives for the first time, more than had been elected in any other previous decade. These years sometimes included violent rage in response to racism: in 1992, after four white cops were acquitted by a mostly white jury in the brutal beating of African-American taxi driver Rodney King in Los Angeles, the city erupted in fury. Angry protesters looted stores and set fires; sixty-three people died. At the time, the news media and local politicians were quick to describe the events as riots, throwing around the term "thugs." But one Los Angeles Democratic representative saw something else in the riots: "There are those who would like for me . . . to tell people to go inside, to be peaceful, that they have to accept the verdict. I accept the responsibility of asking people not to endanger their lives. I am not asking people not to be angry," said first-term congresswoman Maxine Waters, who represented a big part of the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where much of the unrest was unfolding. "I am angry and I have a right to that anger and the people out there have a right to that anger." 2 Waters spent days tending to her constituents, bringing food, water, and diapers to Angelenos living without gas or electricity; she also pushed to charge the police officers civilly, and objected to Mayor Tom Bradley's use of the word "riot" to describe events. Instead, she saw the politically rational frame for the resentments being expressed, calling it "an insurrection." 3 Eventually, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates was fired, and two of the police officers were convicted for violating Rodney King's civil rights. 4 There were other moments of political protest: those against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 and marches against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example. But much of the spirit of mass, brash, sustained political fury that had animated the 1960s and 1970s was muffled in the 1980s and stayed that way for decades. The journalist Mychal Denzel Smith has written of how this suppression worked itself out around expressions of black rage in the years in which he'd grown up, noting that during most of the 1990s, "there was no longer a Reagan or a Bush to serve as an identifiable enemy," and that a pop commitment to "multiculturalism" permitted the illusion that racial progress had been achieved, so rage as a mass impulse had subsided. 5 There had been a brief revival during the second Bush administration, Smith argued, recalling how, in the wake of the derelict response to Hurricane Katrina, rapper Kanye West had yelled that George W. Bush "doesn't care about black people." But that surge of fury had been quieted by the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Obama's historic drive had relied in part on his ability to reassure white voters that he was not an angry black man, that he was cut from a different cloth than some of his more bellicose black predecessors, including Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and did not in his demeanor threaten white supremacy. But Obama's reputation for cordiality was gravely imperiled by the appearance of old-style black rage, when Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the man who had married the Obamas, became a campaign story, along with his much-played sermon, during which he'd exhorted, "God damn America!" The specter of Wright's version of confrontational blackness was enough to remind America of Obama's outsider status, and thus Obama was forced to quash it, becoming, in Smith's words, "the first viable black presidential candidate to throw water on the flames of black rage." The anger expressed by Wright, Obama would say in his famous speech on race, "is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems." But partway through the Obama administration, some political fury had begun to bubble over and break through this veneer of calm, in part driven by, or in ways that meaningfully sidelined, the angry voices of women. ANGER RIGHT AND LEFT Perhaps the most politically effective strike came from the right, with the Tea Party protests that began in 2009, soon after President Barack Obama took office. In response to Obama's plan to bail out some homeowners who'd been caught in the housing crisis, cable news reporter Rick Santelli angrily called on television for the "Tea Party" to object. The reference, of course, was to the 1773 revolutionary protest of colonists who threw tea in Boston Harbor to register their objection to being taxed by Britain, which was using tariffs not to support the colonies but to stabilize its own floundering economy, and had imposed them on colonists who had no representation in British Parliament. 6 The contemporary version was portrayed as a leaderless grassroots movement, though almost from its start, right-wing mega donors the Koch brothers had been funding its protests and its candidates. In theory, the agitation was in response to the far right's view that Barack Obama's administration was misusing taxpayer money, but the Tea Party was also driven by a wave of revanchist rage and racial resentment toward Barack Obama; no amount of nonconfrontational rhetoric could convince overwhelmingly white Tea Partiers he wasn't a threat to their status and supremacy. Though the public face of the Tea Party protesters was that of furious white men--often dressed in colonial-era tricorn hats in their early gatherings--some polls indicated that the majority of the faction's supporters were women. Its most audible early female voice belonged to former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who in one address to activists called the movement "another revolution." In 2010, a number of Tea Party-affiliated female candidates ran; Palin, who'd cast herself as a pit-bullish hockey mom, dubbed them "Mama Grizzlies." And while the movement's theatrics--funny hats and grizzly bears--were reminiscent of some of the performative exertions of the Second Wave, its mission was the precise opposite, more of a callback to the Schlafly-led antifeminist crusades of the 1970s and 80s. Somehow, as with Schlafly, these women voicing their anger and throwing around their political weight weren't caricatured as ugly hysterics; instead they were permitted to cast themselves as patriotic moms on steroids, some bizarro-world embodiment of female empowerment, despite the fact (or, more precisely, because of the fact) that what they were advocating was a return to traditionalist roles for women and reduced government investment in nonwhite people. Once they landed in the United States Congress, their obsessive mission was to vote to take away the federal funding received by family planning programs, to outlaw abortion, to punish Planned Parenthood, and to reduce government safety net programs such as food stamps and what remained of welfare. "Conservative women have found their voices and are using them, actively and loudly," Tea Partier Rebecca Wales told Politico in 2010. Another Tea Partier, Darla Dawald, put it this way: "You know the old saying 'If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy'? When legislation messes with Mama's kids and it affects her family, then Mama comes out fighting--and I don't mean in a violent way, of course." 7 As more moderate Republicans got knocked out of their seats by Tea Party candidates, and those who remained moved further right, an angry protest in New York was drawing crowds of agitators from the other side. In the fall of 2011, in Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, young people gathered to voice their fury at economic inequality, the widening gap between rich and poor, the rampant deregulation of and tax breaks for corporate America and Wall Street, and the steady gutting of social welfare programs. Occupy Wall Street's impact on the American left was crucial and long-lasting; the movement helped to popularize the view of economic inequality that set the 99 percent against the nation's richest 1 percent. It was both a symptom and a fomenter of increased interest in socialist economic policy. That interest would help push the Democratic Party--which had for decades run screaming from the notion of even "liberalism"--further left, boosting the profiles and fortunes of politicians including Elizabeth Warren, who was elected Senator for Massachusetts in 2012, and Bernie Sanders, an independent who'd served in Congress for twenty-six years and would mount an electrifying campaign for the presidency in 2016. Many different types of people participated in Occupy--estimates varied, but reportedly around 40 percent of the protesters were women, and 37 percent identified as nonwhite, making it far closer to representative of the United States than, say, Congress. 8 - 10 Yet despite the fact that its structure was consciously collaborative and nonhierarchical, it was nevertheless a movement dominated publicly by the voices and ideas of white men. There were enough allegations of rape, groping, and sexual assault at Zuccotti Park that after several weeks, women-only tents were set up. Kanene Holder, an artist, activist, and black woman who served as one of Occupy's spokespeople, told the Guardian that even within this progressive space, "white males are used to speaking and running things. . . . You can't expect them to abdicate the power they have just because they are in this movement." Eventually, Occupy had to adopt special sessions in which women were encouraged to speak uninterrupted. 11 More than that, some of the righteously radical men who dominated Occupy were reportedly inhospitable to internal feminist critique. As one activist, Ren Jender, wrote after a proposal to better address sexual assault allegations was met with defensive anger from some of these radically progressive men, "I wasn't angry with only the people who . . . said stupid, misogynistic shit . . . I was angry with the greater number of people who hadn't confronted the misogyny." 12 Occupy was a reminder to many who agreed with its principles that the left was no more free of gender hierarchies and power abuses than the rest of the country. Then, in 2013, in the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, the longtime progressive activist Alicia Garza wrote a note on Facebook, which concluded with the sentences, "Black people, I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives matter." The artist and activist Patrisse Khan-Cullors appended a hashtag to it, #BlackLivesMatter; the writer and community organizer Opal Tometi helped to push the message out over social media. A movement--born of grief, horror, and unleashed fury at the persistent killing of African Americans by the state, by the police--was born. And while it, like Occupy and the Tea Party, was purposefully nonhierarchical in its internal structure, it had been founded by women, and many of the most prominent voices of the movement belonged to women, including Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie, Nekima Levy-Pounds, and Elle Hearns. Khan-Cullors later wrote of how black liberation movements of the past had been led largely by straight men, "leaving women, who are often queer or transgender, either out of the movement or in the background to move the work forward with little or no recognition. As younger organizers, we recognized a need to center the leadership of women." 13 Black Lives Matter increased national awareness of common racist policing practices that had remained largely invisible, especially to white eyes, but which millions of Americans now understand to be a systemic reality. The movement, which spread across the country and the world, staged days of protest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown; activists pioneered a new age of public demonstration, staging "die-ins," in which protesters laid on the ground in recognition of African Americans gunned down in the streets. In 2015, in the wake of the mass killing of black churchgoers by a white man in Charleston, activist Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole at the South Carolina State House, removing the Confederate flag that had long hung there, an act that provoked a wave of removal of statues of Confederate leaders throughout the South. So in the years leading up to the 2016 election, there was a building, public rage--rage that had an impact on politics, on civic structures, on public spaces. More than that, there were women finding contemporary ways to broadcast their powerful, desperately felt anger to the nation. And, at least on the left, they were doing it in a way that specifically challenged patriarchal, male-dominated histories of movement-building. But in mainstream feminism, there was a different spirit. Hot fury--expressed through public acts of protest, mass movements to the streets, or defiant profanity bellowed loudly at the powerful--was simply not the main mode of feminist expression. And it's not that feminism itself was in remission. FEMINIST COOL What used to be called "the women's movement" had found energetic new life in the media in the first decades of the twenty-first century. After years of backlash, feminist journalists and bloggers had revived a conversation about gender, and many of us who participated in that conversation were angry--angry about sexism, and racism, and economic inequality, and how all of these injustices were woven together. But, perhaps anxious to differentiate ourselves from our spitting-mad forebears, many contemporary feminists (including me) had worked to make the expression of our frustrations sound agreeable, relatable, and inviting to others, including to the very men who might have a hand in oppressing us. The popular feminist site Feministing used the ironic image of a sexy mudflap girl flipping the bird as its mascot; young feminists traded in jokey signifiers of man-hating: mugs and T-shirts reading "I bathe in male tears" and "misandry." The hashtag #banmen conveyed frustration with bad men in a way that strenuously mocked the absurd notion that feminists hated all men. And while plenty of men's rights activists did not see these sentiments as funny or ironic, the exaggerations radiated reassurance: that a truly abrasive challenge to patriarchy wasn't a real political threat, rather the stuff of screen-printed punch lines. There was a heated movement to combat sexual assault on campus, and, in 2011 and 2012, a string of vibrant street protests, dubbed Slutwalks, in which women furiously objected to the victim-blaming to which they were so often subjected. The Slutwalks were, perhaps, the first sign that a more raw grade of feminist fury was about to erupt. But they too trafficked in a kind of winking, eroticized irony: the re-embrace of a degrading but sexualized word, the "I [heart] sluts" buttons, the marchers dressed in short skirts and garters; it was all in line with another aspect of revived feminism: its exuberant positivity about sex. "Sex positivity" was a theory that had sprung up in response to antiporn activists during ideological wars waged by another generation; it endorsed the idea that any kind of sexual behavior, from celibacy to kink, might bring women pleasure, and not on terms laid out by a misogynistic culture. In the hands of a new generation, however, it had become a kind of shorthand for boosterism, as opposed to a censor, of sex: all sex, as long as it was consensual. And it could sometimes feel as though the eagerness to express a feminist sexual appetite was a strategic attempt to obscure or distract from more unpleasant challenges to male power. So while plenty of writers weighed in powerfully on gendered and racial injustice, many were also penning essays defending a feminist prerogative to wear makeup and sky-high heels and scanty outfits. And that was fine; it just also sent a direct message: that when it came to clashing with male sexual expectation, this wave of feminism wasn't so spiky, wasn't so aggressively rigid and confrontational. New, mainstream feminism was funny, hip, enthusiastic about sex . . . and kind of cool. And, not for nothing, it worked! In the years leading up to 2016 feminism was becoming a bit trendy. There were all-women reboots of Ghostbusters and female Jedis and powerful female leads all over television--tough and complicated women created by Shonda Rhimes, feminist heroines like The Good Wife's Alicia, and the stoned, raunchy heroines of Broad City--whose stories exposed the limitations still put on women by the patriarchy. But a lot of the critique was at a remove--analytical and observed, not vulgar, not animal. Not angry. In 2013 Facebook mogul Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In, a book looking at the disadvantages still faced by women in the workplace; it focused largely on individual behavioral strategies to get around inequities, earning sharp, fair criticism for not focusing more on systemic overhaul. This incomplete but unapologetic expression of feminist complaint, from someone who had risen within the system, became a massive bestseller. The next year, Beyoncé performed at the MTV Video Music Awards, backed up by a recording of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk "We Should All Be Feminists": "We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.'" Then up came a giant bright sign, "FEMINIST," and Beyoncé, glittering like a disco ball, stood in front of it. It was pop culture, packaged and polished to a high gloss. But it was also a feminist assertion--all too prescient, as it would turn out--delivered by a woman of color, citing another woman of color, a crucial but powerful correction to the ways in which media had historically (and falsely) presented the project of women's liberation as having been led by white women. Here was a woman who had amassed enough power--had become, arguably, the most powerful person in pop music--to create her own narrative: she was not left at the margins to yell at media about what they were getting wrong or ignoring. Beyoncé had certainly made compromises with power structures; bell hooks had described her as "this super rich, very powerful black female" who had worked "in the service of imperialist, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." 14 But she also seemed to have delivered on the promise of what a new, less furious, less confrontational approach to feminism could achieve: broad, attractive appeal. And that was it, wasn't it? The loud angry battles waged by earlier generations of women had produced some dramatic results. An admittedly small number of women who had gained unprecedented power--within colleges and graduate schools, in business, in entertainment, in media, in politics--had begun to enjoy opportunity and power that had historically been denied. And if those women wanted to move forward, they couldn't afford to behave in the confrontational, angry ways that had marked a past approach to a fight for something closer to actual equality. Because that challenge, that fury, would designate them as outsiders, as marginal. To have climbed within the system was to agree not to tear it down, not to remind America too aggressively of its gender and racial inequities or distract from the cheery view of progress and empowerment. Anyone who wants power within a white male power structure has been asked to quell anything that sounds like wrath, to reassure that they come in cooperative peace and are not looking to mete out repercussion against those who have oppressed or subjugated them. Women signaling fury--by cursing, organizing, marching, yelling, threatening retribution--would have been marked as unstable forces, exactly what couldn't happen going into a 2016 election in which there seemed for the first time in American history to be a chance that the country would elect a woman and protect the legacy of the nation's first black president. As Hillary Clinton geared up to run for the presidency, the stakes were far too high for the kind of anger that had been so openly and defiantly expressed by the activists--in suffrage, abolition, civil rights, feminism--whose achievements had, ironically, made her candidacy possible. Female power was visible at the Video Music Awards, it was the COO of Facebook. It was in the Ghostbusters reboot and a slick, funny feminist media, and the inevitable presidential candidate. What was there to complain about? Any hint of truly angry, truly challenging feminist resentment behind a political movement would get written off as performed. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had already called it playing "the gender card," like it was a move in a game, a put-on. Authentic expressions of resistance--marches, hunger strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins--had been useful for getting attention, banging down doors, forcing women's way in. But the public antics and outpourings of vivid fury at an unequal system that had been useful in eras when women were so far from the inside would work against those who'd gotten inside, making them look and sound like outsiders once more. Excerpted from Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.