It was a funny coincidence that I completed a reading for my contemporary political thought class about female rage on the day the election results were announced. Like many other women in America on Nov. 6, I was grieving. I was grieving what could have been a historic day when I could have told my future daughters the joy I felt when the U.S. elected the first female president. After I had my moment of sadness, I couldn’t help but feel a wave of rage that felt so intense throughout my entire body. There was no other way to say it: I was just plain old angry at a million different things, but mostly angry that other people couldn’t understand why I was angry and never would.
I finally settled down to complete my homework for the day, and I read three essays about female rage for my class. I immediately felt seen and those women couldn’t have put it better into words what I was feeling. I was so intrigued by the work of the authors Barbara Deming, Audre Lorde and bell hooks and the way they articulated female rage. It got me thinking about why female anger is not taken seriously in society and how female rage has been the driving force of many successful social movements throughout history.
Since the beginning of time, women have been expected to be calm, docile and servient and those who acted differently were deemed “hysteric.” Women in the present day are still facing the effects of the term “female hysteria.”
Female hysteria was used as a term as early as Ancient Greece, it was an illness women were diagnosed with if men believed they were acting mad or crazy. They would treat hysteric women by institutionalizing and medicating them or performing unnecessary surgeries.
In the 1940s to 1960s in the U.S., women who were perceived as hysteric could be lobotomized, which is a surgery that removes the connection between the frontal lobe and thalamus of the brain. This surgery was completely unnecessary and left women disabled and unable to perform basic functions themselves.
Now, in the 21st century, female hysteria is not a medical diagnosis given to women anymore, but the stigma around female rage is still prevalent. One phrase men often threw out this past election was “women are too emotional to be good leaders.” Even if women are angry at a situation that makes sense to be angry at, their anger isn’t taken seriously and is perceived as irrational and crazy. Women have never been free from the term female hysteria; it has only morphed into us being called irrational.
While society still views female rage as a negative, it has been the driving force in four huge movements in the U.S. The women’s suffrage, civil rights, the second-wave and third-wave feminist movements all had the momentum of female rage. In the 1910s, the women’s suffrage movement began, the main goal was for women to gain the right to vote, but also to champion for more equality amongst the genders in society. These women were passionate about their cause, and they were angry at how little stake they had in politics even though they were citizens.
Anger is seen as negative, but anger is passion, and without passion these women wouldn’t have worked so hard to achieve their goals. The suffrage movement was ultimately successful; however, there was one group of women who were left out of the fight and forgotten.
Women of Color were shoved to the back even though they were also fighting for their right to vote. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Black women were an integral part of the movement and contributed heavily to its successes.
Even though Black women have been and still are such a huge part in facilitating change in our society, their anger is often more criticized than white women’s anger. There is also the stereotype of the “angry Black woman”; while all women’s anger is seen as irrational and emotional, Black women’s anger is seen as “scary and aggressive” additionally. This stereotype is harmful and depicts Black women as aggressive when they are not, and are feeling emotions just as anyone else is.
The second-wave feminist movement in the ’60s and ‘70s and the third-wave feminist movement in the ‘90s to the 2010s happened because women were angry at the same thing and could seek solace and confide with other angry women to create change. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Roe v. Wade (1973) both resulted from the efforts of the second-wave feminist movement.
The third-wave feminist movement which gained momentum after the #MeToo movement drew national attention to important issues such as sexual assault awareness and other gender inequalities. What all these movements have in common are angry women listening to other angry women and coming together to create change.
Learning about this history validated the anger I was feeling. Which was good since come Nov. 7, I was still angry. I view anger as a positive force because when people are angry it means they are unsatisfied with what is going on, and if more people voice their anger to show how unsatisfied they are, change will happen.
So instead of being silent about our anger because we are scared someone is going to call us crazy, we should voice it as much as we can. Instead of people telling us our anger is not productive, let us refer to the several movements fueled by female rage that were huge successes. We should gather in our collective anger about what is wrong and make it known to the world.