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.
The [book's] result is both relentless and revelatory ... Chemaly deftly balances these statistics with grim stories to illustrate them, so that the cumulative effect of reading her book is not merely to legitimize women’s anger but to render it astonishing that we are not even angrier.
Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger is part cultural analysis and part call to arms. Chemaly...writes with clear-eyed conviction. Using an arresting combination of personal anecdotes, interviews and heavily researched data, Chemaly argues that women should reclaim their anger. She acknowledges that this process varies between women of different races, namely the ways in which white women can weaponize their privilege ... Nevertheless, women have historically been forced to undertake immense emotional labor that comes at the expense of their mental, emotional and physical health. For Chemaly, a liberated woman is one who can freely find strength in her rage.
The author documents in great detail what causes women to experience anger ... Such analysis offers a timely, politically charged account of what it means to be an American woman today ... Rejecting any call for 'anger management,' Chemaly concludes by recommending ten ways women can develop what she calls 'anger competence,' so as to harness anger as a tool for change. For feminists, sociologists, and politically involved readers.
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 ... Written with energy and conviction, these celebrations of the galvanic possibilities of anger make for galvanizing reading.
Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her is...a work of great spirit and verve even when she’s dealing with difficult subjects ... If you’re a woman, you may start reading Rage Becomes Her...thinking you’re only medium-angry about stuff. By the end, your catalog of outrage will be bursting at the seams. (There’s still a tax on tampons? Really?) There are days when we feel punished just for being women. Boldness, distilled from our anger and laced with a sense of humor, is the only solution. Forward march.
The examples and statistics Chemaly cites are enough to get one’s blood boiling, but, as she notes, anger isn’t intrinsically bad so long as it’s not repressed. She points out that the 2016 election has spurred many women to seek political office themselves. Chemaly finishes with a helpful list of suggestions for channeling that anger into something positive, including letting go of 'niceness' and trusting other women. An essential and timely read.
In this powerful essay collection, Chemaly draws on interviews, research, and personal experience to examine why patriarchal Western cultures continue to demand that women silence their rage, much of which is well-earned ... Intelligent and keenly observed, this is a bracingly liberating call for the right of women to own their anger and use it to benefit a society 'at risk for authoritarianism.' Important, timely, necessary reading.
In this provocative analysis, journalist and activist Chemaly describes the many reasons women have to be angry ... Calling for a 'wise anger' that can dismantle pervasive sexism and create a fundamentally democratic society, the book makes a persuasive case that angry women can achieve, not vengeance, but change.
