• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Good and Mad The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger – review. H ow you feel about Rebecca Traister’s new book will depend, to a degree, on how you feel about anger. Personally, though furious as I am at both Brexit and the behaviour of Donald Trump, I think there’s a little too much of it around. Like most women, I fear male rage, for which reason I don’t exactly long to see my own sex indulging in even vaguely similar behaviour. Nor do I find anger particularly productive. Yes, it can power a newspaper column; carefully harnessed it will get people out on to the streets to march, too. But when it comes to deep thought – something we desperately need right now – it seems to me to be more of an impediment than a spur. This is not a thesis with which Traister, an American journalist, would agree. Good and Mad: the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger was written, she tells us, in just four months, an unusually profitable stretch during which her feminist fury helped her not only to complete her manuscript, but also to sleep more deeply, to communicate better with those she loves, and even to have “great sex”. Women, she believes, have for far too long disguised their anger, covering it with jokes or hiding it completely from view – and who can blame them? An angry woman isn’t justified. She is irrational, hormonal, out of control, incapable, crazy. But perhaps all this is about to change. Traister believes that Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and #MeToo, the movement that sprang up following the allegations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, have together released the genie from the bottle. Women are, with good reason, very angry – and they are finally letting it show. What precisely is her book about, though? It reads like a magazine article on speed, an unfocused and verbose combination of self-help (get organised! Get elected!) and social history (hey, those suffragettes really were angry). If she sometimes quotes Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem, she also deploys Gwyneth Paltrow’s wacky website, Goop, which has apparently helped to “stigmatise” anger by suggesting it is bad for the health, and Jennifer Melfi, the shrink in The Sopranos who once warned that anger turned inwards leads to depression. While the great set texts of second-wave feminism – Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics , say, or Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will – were the result of scholarship as well as distilled wrath, Good and Mad comes with no bibliography. Still, at least we now know that when Traister once tweeted a little Dworkin at her Twitter followers, the line “quickly earned 300 likes”. What makes all this the more dispiriting is that deep inside this book, some good and vital ideas are struggling to get out. After walking us through Trump’s election campaign, #MeToo, and the internecine wars that are forever likely to plague the feminist movement, Traister moves trepidatiously towards the way that many (white) women, having achieved some measure of “proximal” power thanks to the (white) men in their lives, will (wittingly or unwittingly) often seek to protect male power when it comes under attack. It is, she writes, extremely hard even now to get women to be cross at men. Most women have a man in their lives whom they love, and perhaps need, too, in practical ways as well as emotional ones. Nevertheless, as #MeToo has rolled like some vast boulder through our national conversations, it has begun to dawn on some women that our ire is more complicated than it may at first have seemed. It is turned outwards, towards our tormentors: the sexual harassers, the pussy grabbers, the rapists. But it also – there is simply no way around this – involves our friends, our families, our mentors, even our heroes. In other words, it involves ourselves. I think this is where Traister’s book should have begun, and I wish, even in her scramble to publish, that she’d dug deeper into this territory. There’s something outrageous, too, about the self-righteous manner in which she goes after those who have had the temerity to criticise aspects of #MeToo, women whom she seems to regard only as the useful idiots of men (this part of her book made me feel quite angry – though not, perhaps, in the way its author might have hoped). It’s possible both to support the broad aims of #MeToo and to worry about where it might be taking us – I would put myself in this category – and remaining silent in the matter of such anxieties isn’t going to help anyone in the long run. It isn’t beholden on us all to believe the same things (the same things as Traister), nor is it unsisterly to criticise some of what is being written and said, much of it in great haste. This moment really could change everything for women, which is why we must remain ever attentive, cool-headed, open-minded. Ideas are there to be interrogated, not simply swallowed like so much Kool-Aid. Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. Good and Mad : The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. Journalist Rebecca Traister’s New York Times bestselling exploration of the transformative power of female anger and its ability to transcend into a political movement is “a hopeful, maddening compendium of righteous feminine anger, and the good it can do when wielded efficiently—and collectively” ( Vanity Fair ). Long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women’s March, and before the #MeToo movement, women’s anger was not only politically catalytic— but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates its crucial role in women’s slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men. “Urgent, enlightened…realistic and compelling…Traister eloquently highlights the challenge of blaming not just forces and systems, but individuals” ( The Washington Post ). In Good and Mad , Traister tracks the history of female anger as political fuel—from suffragettes marching on the White House to office workers vacating their buildings after Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Traister explores women’s anger at both men and other women; anger between ideological allies and foes; the varied ways anger is received based on who’s expressing it; and the way women’s collective fury has become transformative political fuel. She deconstructs society’s (and the media’s) condemnation of female emotion (especially rage) and the impact of their resulting repercussions. Highlighting a double standard perpetuated against women by all sexes, and its disastrous, stultifying effect, Good and Mad is “perfectly timed and inspiring” ( People , Book of the Week). This “admirably rousing narrative” ( The Atlantic ) offers a glimpse into the galvanizing force of women’s collective anger, which, when harnessed, can change history. Good and Mad : Book summary and reviews of Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister. From Rebecca Traister, the New York Times bestselling author of All the Single Ladies comes a vital, incisive exploration into the transformative power of female anger and its ability to transcend into a political movement. In the year 2018, it seems as if women's anger has suddenly erupted into the public conversation. But long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women's March, and before the #MeToo movement, women's anger was not only politically catalytic—but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates the long history of bitter resentment that has enshrouded women's slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men.

Load more

  4

Copy Link