Two Southern belles on the run get catcalled one too many times by the same schlubby dude; they blow up his truck. A couple of rough-and-ready French chicks talk their way into an architect’s house...and point their Smith & Wessons at him. 'It’s clear to me,' one of them tells him affectionately, 'that you stand out from our past encounters.' Then she shoots him in the face. 'Get your fucking hands off me, goddamn it!' yells a leader of the National Women’s Political Caucus at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, addressing the member of the white-guy network-news crowd who is trying to restrain her as she rages over their failure to cover her group’s contributions ... Furious women make for good montage. It’s true that the examples above are angry for very different reasons and channel their anger in very different ways; it’s also true that the first two scenarios are fictional. Still, together they give you a glimpse of the kinds of pleasures and frustrations on offer for readers of Good and Mad, journalist Rebecca Traister’s reported manifesto on feminism after Trump.
Instead of a theory of male anger, we have a growing literature in essays and now books about female anger, a phenomenon in transition. Rebecca Traister’s new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, scrutinizes its causes, its repression, and its release in the last half-dozen years of feminist action, particularly in response to the treatment of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and in the remarkable power shift that women demanded in #MeToo.
Traister’s Good and Mad is an urgent, enlightening book that is well timed for this moment even as they transcend it, the kind of accounts often reviewed and discussed by women but that should certainly be read by men. Traister...focuses on the political history of female anger. She spans the suffrage movement to the 2016 election to, of course, the #MeToo wrath now upending the casting couch, the anchor chair, the editor’s desk and possibly even the highest bench in the land ... Anger is a catalytic force for activism and organizing, they argue, a demand for accountability, a statement of rights and assertion of worth. It is also a vital form of communication, Traister explains, a way for women to find one another and realize that their frustrations are shared.
In her rousing look at the political uses of this supposedly unfeminine emotion, Traister... cites the 18th-century slave Elizabeth Freeman, whose suit for freedom in the Massachusetts courts... led to that state’s outlawing of slavery... [and inspired] 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 ... 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.
And Traister is trying to do a lot in her 250 pages. She writes in the introduction that her goal is to explore '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.' But there's much more here than that. She also illustrates the many ways that American society shuns angry women, convincing them that their rage is impolite, unattractive, or even unhealthy. This point is made over and over, but it doesn't get repetitive or tiresome, so much as that it hammers home just how pervasive the phenomenon is ... In covering all that ground, she has done her research — the book is thick with citations of other books, as well as interviews with candidates, activists, and longtime politicians. ... [Traister's] essays are impressively crafted, and it's a testament to Traister's talent that it's easy to shrug and continue reading in the maelstrom of history she brings together. Even if you occasionally lose the thread, Traister excels at consistently throwing out insights that are so clean that they seem like you had them in your head in the first place.
Traister focusses on isolated episodes of anger among progressive women of various races, classes, and eras, while failing to adequately reckon with crucial differences among the circumstances that provoked their anger and the ways in which they chose to respond to it. But those aren’t superficial differences. They are critical distinctions that lead some angry women to be applauded while others are attacked, and that lead many rebellions to fail while only a few revolutions succeed ... This failure to parse politically inconvenient anger is, as Ogden Nash once put it, 'a notable feat / of one-way thinking on a two-way street.'”
Neither book considers 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 ... Neither book tells us what to do with our anger ... Nor does either Good and Mad or Rage Becomes Her come to terms with the often selfish and self-righteous nature of anger ... 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 ... Those good girls who want to sell books that insist women have the right to be angry right now ironically erase those of us who have been here, absolutely fucking incandescent, the whole time.
Rebecca Traister’s book is about the power of women’s anger. It is a historical look at women’s anger, the women who expressed it and those who paid the price for doing so. She writes of an anger that is 'hot, bubbling, wholly out of control.' It is a challenge to social constructs ... Traister’s book provides a blueprint for women to follow in acknowledging the legitimacy of their anger. Following in the footsteps of women from Boudica to Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Schroeder to Flo Kennedy and Tarana Burke, women are in good company. At the end of the book, Traister writes, 'Being mad is correct; being mad is American; being mad can be joyful and productive and connective. Don’t ever let them talk you out of being mad again.' Amen, sister!
Traister’s treatment of the election is less a detailed autopsy than a focused study of the percolation of women’s indignation, a building toward revolt. Not all the anger was between women and powerful men ... As Traister demonstrates, unresolved racial, ethnic, and class tensions transferred to the first women’s march, the largest single-day protest in American history ... readers see Traister genuinely wrestle with the idea that anger is a revolutionary force because it is destructive ... Good and Mad gives numerous historical examples of missed opportunities to either form or maintain bonds between white women and racial minorities in America ... As the title of Traister’s book suggests, being good or being mad is a false dilemma. If we want to usher in a post-Trump era, we have to be both.
To write about history as it’s happening, a political movement as it’s building, can be a tricky proposition. It assumes a certain blindness, and risks a superficiality that Traister has not wholly avoided. At times, reading her breakneck account of recent events simply felt like scrolling back through my own Twitter feed from the past two years ... Traister’s reporting feels most fresh in one of the book’s final chapters, when she lays out the contributions women activists, many of whom had never been politically active before, have made to resistance efforts against the Trump administration ... For longtime activists, or folks well versed in the movement and the various schisms within it, much of Good and Mad may be review material ... Like all emotions, anger is neutral. It isn’t good or bad ... To its detriment, Good and Mad does not fully acknowledge this distinction, or honor the nuanced emotional landscape activism can contain.
To enter the splendid core of ire and intelligence coursing through Rebecca Traister’s third book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, is to be sustained by its heat, invigorated, galvanized ... [Traister's] exploration of the #MeToo movement and sexual harassment — kicked off with her own experience of a violent Harvey Weinstein — is instantly canonical.
Traister’s point is provocative. Yet I can’t help feeling that her own urge to finally let loose leaves her resorting to analogous versions of outsourcing in her political analysis, deploying women of color as spigots of angry wisdom ... I wanted Traister to step in to say that identities are more complicated than this. For one thing, class distinctions exist (a subject she barely mentions), and blurring whiteness with the 1 percent substitutes venting for thinking. Reducing the world to oppressors versus oppressed—whether that means men versus women, or white women versus minority women—may play well on social-justice Twitter, but in book form, isn’t it an offline version of those useless angry GIFS? ... Letting a selection of angry voices be heard, as Traister does, makes for lively reading and in theory should galvanize a broader mission, yet the exclusion of other necessary voices leaves her with a disappointingly tepid feminist agenda ... Traister has wrestled still-unfolding history into an admirably rousing narrative, but the time might be ripe for a more explosive vision.
Traister’s conscientiously researched Good and Mad takes a...macro view of women’s rage ... Traister is especially astute in emphasizing the ways in which black women laid the cornerstones for women’s activism in this country ... Feminism forces certain complexities into the stream of our daily lives, and Traister has a great gift for articulating them.
Good and Mad is compelling because it feels so right now. In fact, I’d recommend reading it right now. Not because it is such a great book that you need to stop what you’re doing and pick it up immediately, but because it is so highly relevant to what’s currently happening in the U.S ... In Good and Mad, Rebecca Traister takes moments of rage that burn so blazingly hot they’re blinding and grounds them in history and analysis ... The book isn’t a plea to shy away from that anger, but rather a toolkit for what to do with it.
Her new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, is yet another example of Traister’s diligent reporting and thorough researching. The connections she makes between contemporary and historic events and figures are both unexpected and exciting, and also completely logical ... But perhaps the most mind-blowing thing about Good and Mad was that after reading this book, a manifesto by a far-left-leaning writer, I found I better understood my extreme-right-wing grandmother ... There is something powerful about understanding another woman’s anger, and also about channeling my own anger into a force for revolution. Good and Mad showed me the way.
[Good and Mad is] a carousel book, one whose subject keeps coming around, although in the current moment it seems the operator has left his post and it’s spinning faster than usual ... Traister chronicles other examples of what certainly seems to constitute a fresh and grand upswell of feminist fury, from the 'angry art' of novelists, comedians, essayists, and television writers to the tenacious activism of young women like Emma González ... Traister ends her book—which in the middle (and the beginning, come to think of it) is naturally a bit demoralizing, what with the recitation of two hundred years of women’s debasement, subjugation, and belittlement—with a paean to the positive value of righteous anger.
Citing fury as a driving force of her journalism career, the author, 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.' ... 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.
In this trenchant analysis, journalist Traister explores the 'nexus of women’s anger and American politics,' in which 'noncompliant, insistent, furious women have shaped our history and our present.' ... Traister argues forcefully that women are an 'oppressed majority in the United States,' kept subjugated partly by racial divisions among the group. Four sections consist of essays, each capturing a factor in the current social and political climate—the failure of the ERA; the role of women in the Tea Party; responses to Hillary Clinton’s presidential run; and the birth of the #MeToo movement. Traister closes with a reminder to women not to lose sight of their anger—even when things improve slightly and 'the urgency will fade... if you yourself are not experiencing' injustice or look away from it—because 'being mad is correct; being mad is American; being mad can be joyful and productive and connective.'
A #WhyIDidntReport post by a woman from my hometown, Carrollton, Texas, bowled me over. A bright, religious girl—the kind that plays Belle in the school musical, and did—described being so distraught by her assault at sixteen that she didn’t tell a single person, and immediately threw her clothes away in an alley dumpster. She described thinking that’s what sex was, and not even knowing—like many—that it was assault at the time. I knew her well when we were sixteen. I gave her rides. I probably drove past that dumpster a hundred times, and I had no idea. Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, takes this sickening information, digests it, and shouts through a megaphone what to do with it ... Reading the book, I am encouraged to make our feminist ancestors light up. I want to make them as proud, if not more, as I want to make our feminist grandchildren.
