Good and Mad

Journalist Rebecca Traister argues that women's anger has been one of the most powerful yet consistently unacknowledged drivers of social and political change in the United States. Drawing on American history, contemporary reporting, and her own experiences, she traces how women's fury has ignited movements from abolition to suffrage to #metoo, the movement exposing widespread sexual harassment and abuse, while examining the cultural mechanisms that have worked to suppress, discredit, and erase that fury.

In a preface reflecting on events since the book's original 2018 publication, Traister discusses the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the federal ruling that had protected abortion rights since 1973. She frames the intervening years as a lesson in what longtime activists, especially Black, brown, and Indigenous women, have always known: The fight does not end with any single victory or defeat. Traister describes watching newly activated women, many of them comparatively privileged white women, become paralyzed by despair after Brett Kavanaugh's 2018 Supreme Court confirmation. She identifies this paralysis, and the process of learning to move through it, as a crucial dimension of sustained political engagement.

The introduction establishes the book's central thesis through a sharp contrast. Traister opens with an anecdote about a female television host who was lectured for looking "angry" on air, while a male colleague's similar outburst was celebrated as the spark of the Tea Party movement. She then recounts footage from the 1972 Democratic National Convention in which Black feminist lawyer Florynce Kennedy cursed at white male network news crews who refused to cover women's participation. Traister connects these moments across decades, arguing that men's public anger is understood as stirring and patriotic while women's is heard as shrill and irrational. She clarifies that the book is not a psychological exploration of anger but an examination of the relationship between women's anger and American politics, with examples spanning the Parisian women who marched on Versailles in 1789 to Rosa Parks's antirape activism.

Part I traces the suppression and reemergence of women's political fury. Traister describes how the Reagan-era backlash of the 1980s muffled feminist anger: Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly's campaign defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional guarantee of gender equality; popular culture depicted liberated women as monsters; and the word "feminist" became toxic. She identifies Anita Hill's 1991 testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, in which Hill described sexual harassment before an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, as a pivotal eruption. The committee's dismissive treatment of Hill provoked a wave of women to run for office, resulting in the 1992 "Year of the Woman," when record numbers of women, including Patty Murray and Carol Moseley Braun, won congressional seats. Traister examines how the Tea Party channeled right-wing women's anger in ways that reinforced white patriarchal power, how Occupy Wall Street was dominated by men despite its egalitarian aims, and how the founding of #BlackLivesMatter in 2013, a movement against state violence toward Black Americans created by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi, consciously centered women's and queer leadership.

Traister argues that the myth of achieved equality set the stage for Donald Trump's 2016 victory. She details how the press treated Trump's openly misogynistic and racist campaign as equivalent to Hillary Clinton's ordinary political flaws, and how the assurance that sexism could not determine an election discouraged the mobilization that might have defeated Trump. His victory shattered the illusion, and women's rage poured out: The Women's March on January 21, 2017, became the largest single-day political protest in American history. Subsequent waves followed, including airport protests against the Muslim travel ban, massive phone campaigns to Congress, and the explosion of #metoo after the New York Times reported on decades of sexual predation by powerful film producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017.

Part II examines how women's anger is policed, punished, and forced into disguise. Traister anchors this section in Congresswoman Barbara Lee's experience of having a hard-won bipartisan amendment stripped by the House Speaker, then being congratulated by colleagues for not showing her rage. This response enraged Lee further because it revealed how little her peers understood the racial and gendered pressures constraining her. Traister traces a history of silencing devices from the brank, a sixteenth-century metal muzzle used on defiant women, to contemporary media depictions of powerful women coded as ugly and unnatural. She describes how angry women are routinely labeled "unhinged" or "hysterical," a conflation of anger with mental illness applied with particular force to Black women.

Through extensive examples, Traister catalogs the strategies women have used to make their anger palatable: invoking divine authority, as temperance crusader Carrie Nation claimed God directed her saloon-smashing; adopting maternal framing, as labor organizer Mary Harris Jones became "Mother Jones"; expressing fury through tears or humor; and deploying profanity. She profiles Florynce Kennedy, known as Flo, as a model of undisguised anger whose exuberant rage inspired others even as it occasionally terrified allies.

Traister examines how racial divisions among women have been both genuine and strategically exploited. She traces the nineteenth-century rupture between the suffrage and abolition movements, when suffrage leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony turned to racist rhetoric after the vote was extended to Black men but not to women, a split that delayed suffrage by decades. She argues that white patriarchal power preserves itself by offering white women proximal advantages, through marriage and economic dependency, that incentivize their support of white male dominance and divide them from nonwhite women.

Part III focuses on the #metoo reckoning. Traister recounts her own early encounter with Weinstein, who screamed at her and physically attacked her colleague in 2000, and describes the systemic protections that shielded him for decades. She explores why women find it structurally difficult to sustain anger toward men who are also their bosses, mentors, and political allies. She traces how Democratic women senators faced an impossible position when allegations surfaced against Senator Al Franken: Failure to condemn him enabled Republican defenses of Senate candidate Roy Moore, who also faced allegations, but calling for Franken's resignation brought accusations of betrayal. Traister argues that the behaviors encompassed by #metoo share a common root in professional discrimination, referencing Lin Farley's 1975 coining of the term "sexual harassment" and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's framework establishing it as a form of sex discrimination. She introduces philosopher Kate Manne's concept of "himpathy," the disproportionate sympathy extended to powerful men, and argues that calls for "civility" almost always benefit oppressors.

Part IV turns to the political energy generated by women's anger. Traister argues that anger does not need to be "transformed" into action because it is already a productive force: a communicative tool, a mode of connection, and a catalyst for innovation. She traces a lineage from suffragists pioneering mixed-audience public lectures to contemporary organizations like the Sister District Project, which matches volunteers with competitive districts, and Spread the Vote, which helps voters obtain identification. Record numbers of women ran for office in 2018, supported by organizations such as EMILY's List, which helps elect pro-choice Democratic women, and Higher Heights, which supports Black women candidates. Traister documents how shared anger creates community among newly activated women while noting tensions with longtime activists of color who caution that white women must learn to follow rather than lead.

Traister concludes by rejecting the notion that anger is bad for women, quoting suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton's assertion that "if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do" (286). She traces a lineage of seemingly futile efforts that bore long-delayed fruit: Shirley Chisholm's 1972 presidential campaign drew Barbara Lee into politics; Lee championed repeal of the Hyde Amendment, a ban on federal funding for most abortions, which entered Clinton's platform; Clinton's loss spurred tens of thousands of women into electoral politics. Rather than advising individual women to simply express their fury, Traister calls for changing the systems that penalize women's anger and urges readers to sustain their rage across the inevitable cycles of victory and defeat.