Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

This book goes in the same category as One Person, No Vote for me. I knew a lot of the general principles, but not the details, the statistics, the true scope of the problem. This book delves deeply into the statistics, but, like One Person, No Vote, is still very readable. I like nonfiction - when the author's voice doesn't bore me to tears. I'm slowly building up a list of nonfiction authors who I enjoy - Mary Roach, Soraya Chemaly, Carol Anderson - interesting that they're all women.

Anyway.

Rage Becomes Her is about women's relationship with anger. How we tamp it down for the men around us, because being angry makes you a target. Having an opinion online usually means getting harassed, stalked, threatened, swatted. We fear to provoke violence, so we don't show our anger. And that's fucked up.

Rage Becomes Her is also about why we are so angry. The rampant sexism and violence against women, the pressures put on us as women, the lopsided assignation of unpaid and underpaid labor.

Rage Becomes Her is about how boys and girls are socialized in regards to anger - it's expected from boys, but girls are socialized not to show it, to be polite, to give way instead of saying NO. (I know I was brought up this way.)

Rage Becomes Her talks about the effect that anger has on our bodies. Did you know research shows that anger is “the single, most salient emotional contributor to pain”? Which leads into a very interesting passage:

Unaddressed anger affects our neurological, hormonal, adrenal, and vascular systems in ways that are still largely ignored in the treatment of pain. It's hard to overstate what this means in terms of women's health.

All over the world, women report much higher rates of both acute and chronic pain than men do. Of the more than one hundred million Americans who report living with daily pain, the vast majority are women. (A comprehensive study involving more than 85,000 respondents in seven developing and ten developed nations found that the prevalence of chronic pain conditions in men was 31 percent but in women it was 45 percent.) (Rage Becomes Her, p. 51)

4.5/5 Stars

An essential read for anyone who calls themself a feminist or a human. Chemaly hits hard and, while the book may be a bit scattered for some readers, speaks honestly and openly about women's rage and what makes them so filled with rage. This book made me angry in a good way and I want to read it again to get more out of it.