​​​​​​​Mad As Hell: The Power Of Women's Rage In 2018

IF YOU WAKE UP AT 7 A.M., YOULL PROBABLY START FEELING IT around 7:03, or at least as soon as you check your preferred news source.

- Stephanie Zacharek

You don’t have to be a woman to find something to be angry about. But if you are a woman, chances are you’re feeling so much rage that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to contain it all: A government that’s working hard to strip women of their reproductive rights, as well as limiting our access to basic health care. Work environments where men guilty of sexual abuse or harassment, or even possibly rape, can still gain power rather than lose it, even as women working in the tiers below struggle just to get by while likely making less money than their male peers do. A country where a resurgence of white supremacy proves that for many, black lives don’t matter. In 2018, no one needs to ask a woman, “Why are you so angry?” She’s an anomaly if she’s not.

It says something that not one, not two but three books dealing specifically with women’s anger are popping over the ridge of this embattled landscape this fall. Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (out now), Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (out now) and Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women and the Way Forward (Nov. 13) constitute a mini-revolution in themselves. Though each of these writers takes a markedly different approach, all three tackle the same core idea: channeled constructively, women’s anger is a potent tool for change.