Stay Angry: Rage As Resistance

I walk my dog around a beautiful neighborhood in southern Ashland, OR. Spikey Victorians interspersed by wide Craftsman and mid-century flat-roofed houses, a patchwork of the architectural history of this town. As I walk, I notice someone has painted “Stay Angry” on the sidewalk. A few more blocks, and there it is again: “Stay Angry”. All around this quiet, hilly, residential neighborhood, someone thinks it’s necessary to remind walkers to remember their rage. 

Reading Soraya Chemaly’s book Rage Becomes Her is an exercise in identification and self-questioning.

I found truth and myself in her book about how women’s anger is viewed in society.

Soraya argues, essentially, that women’s anger is dismissed and punished in society while men’s anger is seen as defining and a means of maintaining power. When women express anger, we lose control of a situation. When men express anger, they take control of a situation. Women’s anger has been called hysterical and out-of-control, meanwhile a man’s anger is feared and respected. Politicians like Elizabeth Warren are trying to end the stereotypes and return anger to a position of equality between the sexes. Warren expresses her anger, exemplifying the anonymous quote: “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention”. Warren’s expression of her anger at the way society and the government today is structured has earned her many a slap-down, dismissal and insult. People don’t like her because she is “too angry”. She, like so many women, is an angry woman in a world where women are not allowed to be angry.

These dynamics aren’t limited to public figures; they shape every woman’s daily life. We are taught, whether we are aware of the lessons or not, that we must not show anger. I will say that I think that Western society, the society I live within, is getting a bit better about the raising of boys and girls equally, but these stereotypes seem to be irretrievably ingrained. Women and minorities are a danger to the fabric of Western society that men, mostly white men, have constructed over millennia, and so we must be talked-down to, we must be “put in our place”, we can be shown anger and violence, but cannot reciprocate it because then we are labelled “out of control” and “hysterical”.

The word “hysterical” is derived from the Latin word “hystera” which means “uterus”. For many centuries, women’s bodies were woefully misunderstood. Uteri were given the ability to move around a woman's body at will, attaching to different organs, causing different emotional reactions. Most damning was when a uterus attached to a woman’s brain, causing hysteria and melancholia. Together, those ailments were called The Vapours. Everyday treatment for “The Vapours” consisted of holding something bitter smelling to the nose of the woman while a posy of flowers or some other sweet-smelling thing was applied to her vulva. It was thought in the Victorian age that the uterus was attracted to sweet smells and so would be repelled away from the brain by the bitter smelling thing and pulled towards the sweet-smelling thing. Other treatments for hysteria and melancholia in women were pelvic massages performed by doctors and institutionalization. This is what women got when expressing any feeling that surprised the men in their life. 

Today, we do not treat women who express their feelings this way, but as a society, we do our best to invalidate our experiences. This in itself inspires rage within me. Why must we fight so hard to be believed? Why must belief come after numerous other violations? Why must we take a man’s anger and why must we keep ours bottled up? 

I am an angry woman. I am angry for the women who have come before us who were beaten and dismissed and killed by men who were scared of their laughter and derision. I am angry for the women who are ignored, the minorities who are torn from their families, the people killed just trying to walk home.

I am angry because most of my life has been spent trying to ignore and repress my own anger. I am a person in a disabled body who has been experiencing chronic pain since I was a little girl, and who wasn’t believed when I told the grown-ups in my life. I was in pain - and still am - for years until someone took me a little bit seriously. Women and girls are liars. We manipulate. We are hysterical. Staying Angry for us means being polite, keeping quiet and disbelieving ourselves in order to stay alive. 

I have always found the quote “well behaved women rarely make history” misleading. For me, behaving well means being polite, not shouting, not turning to violence and using your words. The women that are often pictured above this quote, like Rosa Parks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Kamala Harris, were all very well-behaved - because they had to be. I understand, intellectually, that “well-behaved” means “fitting within societal norms”, but the women who have made history and palpable change are overwhelmingly the ones that don’t show emotion while doing it. We must be polite and speak reasonably to be taken seriously. 

The reminders on my walks with my dog to “Stay Angry” help me understand that I’m not alone, and that none of us are alone in our anger. We may not be able to express ourselves as fully, but we must stay angry so that we can remember what needs to be changed. Great change does not happen overnight. And for women, the act of making change can take decades. But through it all, we cannot forget our anger, and we cannot let go of the stories that make us angry.