A women's rights activist explores the way women have been indoctrinated to suppress their anger and encourages women to instead use their rage as a tool for positive social change.
Rage Becomes Her describes in aching detail so many rage-inducing struggles from the everyday lives of women that the anger seems nearly impossible to overcome. In the book’s final chapter, 'A Rage of Your Own,' Chemaly offers readers practical advice on what to do with all the anger women face due to all the issues discussed throughout the book. My favorite piece of advice from this chapter is to name and write about anger as a method of practicing self-awareness ... A necessary delve into a heated subject, Rage Becomes Her challenges the all-too-common perception of having an anger 'problem,' and works to demystify women's anger, transforming the difficult emotion into one that’s as coveted as happiness.
Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her [is] urgent, enlightening... well timed for this moment even as [it transcends] it, the kind of [account] often reviewed and discussed by women but that should certainly be read by men ... With Rage Becomes Her, Chemaly offers a relentless catalogue of the sources of female anger and the efforts to repress it.
Real anger, the kind that contorts the face and bends the body, still makes women as ugly as it ever did. But someone figured out there would be a market for books telling the kind of women who knitted pink hats for the Women’s March, posted a couple Facebook entries about their experience, and then went back to their cozy suburban lives that they were brave to do all of that ... another example of the classic publishing trend of market pandering, or else there is literally an algorithm that creates books like these, desperate to speak to a moment but not of a moment. Perhaps it simply lets writers enter in a topic and then spits out all of the studies, statistics, uplifting quotations, and anecdotes they could need to fill 300 pages ... [this book does not consider] the possibility, even for the length of a sentence fragment, that one thing making some women angry might have been the insistence by a certain segment of elite women leaders that Hillary Clinton was the feminist choice despite her having made the lives of an entirely other segment of women unlivable ... Chemaly would never guess that a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016. When a woman is angry in these tracts, she is Elizabeth Warren, not Marine Le Pen ... I wonder how long we’re going to have books like this for women, books in which we sing only a song of our own oppression and tell ourselves we are special and brave for having suffered for so long.
