Good and Mad, the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, by Rebecca Traister. Simon and Schuster. 2018.

Did you watch Dr. Blasey Ford testify about being sexually assaulted in high school? The moment I saw that long arc of mostly male faces sitting in judgment, I began crying and cursing, yelling “fuckers, bastards, assholes.” My rage astonished me. I saw the fear in her face, her rapid shallow breathing, and worse, her anxiety to please, to make sure she didn’t offend or inconvenience anyone. “Will that work for you?” she asked. “If that will be helpful…” she offered. And as her testimony dragged on, in a show trial with a foregone conclusion, I sat furious, and was relieved when her ordeal was over.

Rebecca Traister’s book on the political potential of women’s anger was written at white heat in four months, and released before the toxic farce of the Kavanaugh hearing. But as I read it after the hearing, it rang true.

 

Good and Mad focuses on women’s political fervor following the election of Donald Trump: the 2017 Women’s March, the #MeToo movement, and the explosive growth in women running for office, the great majority of them Democrats. It also gives us history. Traister analyzes the role of women’s anger in the long fight for suffrage, and the racist anger of white suffragists when black men won the franchise first. She discusses the Second Wave women’s movement of the 1960’s and 70’s, and black women’s anger as their leadership  was ignored by both their allies and the media.

Traister, a feminist journalist, has thought long and hard about how white males, 31% of the US population, can rule the rest of us through deep individual alliances and divide and conquer tactics.

        images:Min An at Pexels.com                     steemit.com

 

The alliances were personal.The suffragists were sisters, wives, mothers of the middle and upper class men who ruled and shaped their world. To turn against them took enormous courage, and many of these women paid a steep price for their rebellion. In the second wave of feminism, women in consciousness raising groups understood and began to reject the terms of their marriages, and many marriages did not survive.

 

image:acravan.blogspot.com

The alliances were also professional. During the second wave, newly-hatched feminists, mostly middle class, mostly white, began to succeed professionally in the world shaped by men. Grudgingly or whole-heartedly they accepted the ways of that world: job comes first, family a distant second; sexual harassment is just boys being boys.

In the early 70’s, as a single mother and newly-hatched lawyer, I was thrilled to be working at an excellent legal aid program. We were united in our zeal to help the poor and oppressed, and the two male directors were smart, supportive, even nurturing. But I spent my years there feeling guilty – inadequate as a mother, inadequate as a lawyer. When I cobbled together a proposal for part-time duties, the directors said “There’s no such thing as a part-time lawyer.” At an annual retreat, some of the men organized a wet T-shirt contest for the young secretaries. We women lawyers were outraged, but it didn’t matter.

we were young and fighting for justice in the 70’s

Despite the media focus on bra burning and glass ceilings, second wave feminism was not merely theater, nor only focused on professional white women. Many of us worked on issues of domestic violence, child care, sexual assault, welfare programs. click  And middle-class white women did not invent feminist activism.

Black women have been a consistent revolutionary force in progressive movements. Over and over they take the lead, and then are shoved aside, by black men, by white women. Unlike the media and many white feminists, Traister recognizes their power, and turns to them for examples of courage, expressions of anger.

She quotes Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of Anger,” about black women responding to racism in the second wave of feminism: “[E]very woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions … which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy, serving progress and change.”

 

Audre Lorde  image:spelman.edu

 

Traister tells of Shirley Chisolm in 1972 running for the Democratic presidential nomination, ignored by the media, betrayed by McGovern. In public she was cool, but behind closed doors she cried, according to Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who said she was ‘very sensitive, very hurt, and very angry.’

 

Shirley Chisholm image:rockfordha.org

Florynce Kennedy, the flamboyant black feminist lawyer, wasn’t cool in public. When television reporters ignored Chisolm, and tried to calm down Kennedy, she threatened, “The next son of a bitch that touches a woman is going to get kicked in the balls.” I remember Flo Kennedy, who died in 2000. I was thrilled by her speech to a gathering of women law students in 1973. That may be why, when my father and brother mocked me: “Look at the radical feminist cooking breakfast for her baby boy,” I answered angrily, “Somebody’s going to get kicked in the balls,” and they fled the kitchen.

 

image: amazon.com

Congresswoman Maxine Waters is famously angry, and doesn’t hesitate to call for Trump’s impeachment, a call which is quickly distorted by Trump’s supporters into a call for assassination. Not just Trump, not just Fox News, but even Democratic leaders have chastised her. When she encouraged people to harass Trump’s cabinet members wherever they run into them, Chuck Schumer said it was ‘un-American,’ and Nancy Pelosi called it ‘unacceptable.’

 

Maxine Waters  image: huffingtonpost.com

 

Traister says white women rely on black women to express their anger for them. “In some ways, the cultural caricature of neck-snapping, side eye-casting black female censure becomes easily embraceable precisely because it is disconnected from…power, because its relationship to the threat of actual disruption of white male authority can be understood as inherently comical. Black women’s relative distance, from both white supremacy and patriarchal advantage, makes it easier…to applaud their toughness, precisely because it is so far removed from being a true threat to white male domination.”

This post-Trump uprising of women surely contains unconscious white racism and black rage. But Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter, says there never has been a movement that wasn’t messy with internal issues. “The question for us is, are we prepared to be the first movement in history that learns how to work through that anger? To not get rid of it, not suppress it, but learn how to get through it together…”

 

Alicia Garza  image:theguardian.com

 

Traister: “The post-2016 movement offers a chance for many white women to be awakened to the many reasons they should be angry. But…the opportunity is not simply to be angry on their own behalf, but also at the injustices faced by other women…who experience those injustices in part thanks to the very mechanisms that protect and enrich those white women.”

We are at the beginning of a new wave of angry women. Traister is repeatedly asked, ‘Is it a movement, or a moment?’ and she answers: “…[M]ovements are made up of moments, strung out over months, years, decades. They become discernible as movements – are made to look smooth, contiguous, coherent – only after they have made a substantive difference.”

At the 2017 Women’s March, I wore my old buttons from the 1970’s. I have been to many marches; they are both tedious and inspiring, exhausting and invigorating. To me, Traister’s book brings encouragement, hope, and maybe even a little bit of activist energy. I believe in the generative power of our anger; there is a difference between fire that rages uncontrolled and fire you use as a tool. Do I want a world of yelling? No. But I believe first you holler. Then you strategize. Then you act.