Rage Becomes Her
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3.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A conversation-shifting book urging 21st-century women to understand their anger, embrace its power, and use it as a tool for positive change
'How many women cry when angry because we've held it in for so long? How many discover that anger turned inward is depression? Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her will be good for women. After all, women have a lot to be angry about.' GLORIA STEINEM
Women are angry, and it isn't hard to figure out why. We are underpaid, overworked, thwarted and diminished. The assertive among us are labelled bitches, while the expressive among us are considered shrill. We are told to stand down when we have an opinion and to calm down when we are fired up. And when we somehow manage to put one high heel-battered foot in front of the other despite all of this, we're asked if it would kill us to smile.
We are mad as hell, and that's completely okay. Because contrary to the endless barrage of self-help rhetoric about anger management and letting go, the reality is that our rage is the most important resource we have as women, a force for creation rather than destruction, our sharpest tool against both personal and political oppression. Anger is not what gets in our way, it is our way. All we need to do is own it.
This is a pitch perfect, engaging, and accessible credo written by one of today’s most influential feminists. Analysing female anger as it relates to topics like self-worth, objectification, pain, care, fear, silence, and denial, Soraya illuminates how and why we repress our anger, revealing the harm that this causes, and helping us recognise the liberating power of owning our anger and marshalling it as a vital tool for positive change.
Just as Quiet brought about a new embrace of introversion, Rage Becomes Her will bring about an embrace of feminine anger that will leave women feeling liberated, inspired and connected to an entire universe of women who are no longer interested in making nice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this provocative analysis, journalist and activist Chemaly describes the many reasons women have to be angry. Though early instruction in gender conventions inures girls to objectification and teaches them to swallow their anger, Chemaly writes, the list of things "stressing us out and making us angry, sick, and tired" include the gender wage gap, the risks of pregnancy and "the immense social expectations of motherhood," pervasive sexual harassment and assault, and the normalization of pain and discomfort. Add to these the daily, constant stream of microaggressions like being interrupted, talked over, or perceived as less believable than men and the "fundamental bias" that they "are inherently less worth listening to." Chemaly offers statistics, studies, and convincing stories to justify this rage, but where phenomena like the #MeToo movement and the women's marches offer examples of turning collective anger into action, she dwells on the denial and backlash that occur when women try to identify or confront the "dense matrix of violence and discrimination" embedded in culture. She encourages women to cultivate "anger competence," or owning one's anger, with advice to develop self-awareness and finding a supportive community. 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.
Customer Reviews
Essential reading for every woman
I’m rarely so grateful; upon finishing a book, that the author wrote it.