Rage is a response. Like a flame that whips itself from smoke to spark to a raging inferno, it clouds my vision and wells in my eyes. It’s the clench in my jaw and the terminal tension in my shoulders. With a taut smile fixed on my mug, though, it’s hardly recognisable – anger in women seldom is. But the thing that fuses rage with fire is that it can swallow us, or, when mobilised, aid our survival.
Data from global research firm Gallup, collated from over 150 countries across a decade, tells us that women are only getting angrier. And as Jennifer Cox, a London-based psychotherapist and founder of Women Are Mad, explains, this anger in women is chronically misunderstood.
“This is the ‘hysteria’ of the modern age,” she says. “Albeit, it’s highly camouflaged.”
In her work, however, Cox sees firsthand how ignoring these feelings when they arise, quashing them down like a secret, only does further damage.
“Anger is energy,” she says. “It finds a way of seeping out.”
For many of us, tracing our anger is like searching for salt in the ocean. It’s so richly laced in how we move through the world that it can’t always be discerned. As Cox explains, it’s something we’re destined to grapple with.
“The problem begins before we’re born, with all the projections that are heaped onto what a ‘girl’ should be,” she says. “Then we learn to be the polite little girl, we learn to care, we learn to prioritise others, and we learn to be quiet and kind.”
In adulthood, the onus of being a woman sees us confounded – we realise, slowly and relentlessly, that we’ve been sold a lie.
“We are told that we can ‘have it all’, but the reality is very different,” says Cox. “The expectation, and the pressure on us to be everything, is immense.”
It’s enough to make us very, very angry. But we don’t typically call it anger, she explains.
“We don’t have any vocabulary for naming it. Instead, we jump to label ourselves ‘sick’ in some way.”
Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her, explains how our anger seeds from this grievance. But it’s a vehicle for our emotions that, as quickly as we can catch it, is conditioned out of women.
“Anger is the language of injustice,” says Chemaly. “We teach girls to divert and suppress their anger, socialising it out of them as a mode of expression.
“Women are taught to just give, give everything, take care of everybody. Take care of the people around them, and anticipate what they want. Sometimes people don’t even know what women are doing because women are just doing it.”
MISS-DIAGNOSIS
Though mental health awareness has seen significant strides in the last decade, studies – including a recent survey by digital healthcare app Livi that found 57 percent of women reported being wrongly diagnosed by doctors – still point to a concerning rise in women’s issues being misdiagnosed. As Cox notes, strained and under-resourced healthcare systems built on systemic prejudices mean women often do not receive the care they truly need.
“In many countries, if you go to a General Practitioner with low mood, you have ten minutes for your feelings to be heard. And the GP is powerless to do much beyond prescribing anti-depressants or maybe beta-blockers for anxiety,” Cox explains. “No one is asking at a deeper level, what’s actually going on here? Why are women so angry, and how is this unexpressed anger impacting their health?
“It’s so much more convenient for society that we blame women, label them and make them feel that they’re broken rather than try to fix the deep systemic issues that have gotten us here,” she continues.
Despite taking on roles as caretakers for others, women themselves aren’t always armed with the tools to recognise their own needs.
“Women in most cultures will not say they’re angry; they’ll just say they’re sad. Because that’s acceptable,” states Chemaly. “We don’t mind a sad woman, and we don’t mind a sick woman. So if we can say she’s sad, or we can pathologise her anger, then we do. But the minute she’s angry, there’s friction because it goes against how we expect women to conduct themselves.”
Maternal Instincts
With our roles in society still so shaped by maternal expectations, anger can reach a fever pitch when we realise the impossible nature of modern motherhood.
“We’re allowed to be angry as mothers, but we’re not allowed to be angry about being mothers,” argues Chemaly. Celia, 33, knew being a mother wasn’t going to be easy, but she never knew how loud she could yell before raising her children.
“While I was unknowingly going through postpartum, I would see friends and family, and the questions were always something along the lines of, ‘You must be so happy?’” she remembers. “But they weren’t really questions, more expectations. How could I not be? I had two beautiful, healthy babies in my arms. But most days, I found myself wanting to scream and run into traffic.”
What usually comes out of this anger, though, is the sense of shame that we’re not doing things right, that we’re the problem.
“You’re supposed to want to soak it all up and love every minute of it because it doesn’t last long. But the littlest thing would trigger a wave of rage that felt unstoppable,” says Celia. “You’re not sleeping, eating, or doing anything else that brings you joy. And this thing you just want to love refuses to accept anything you do. In those moments, it doesn’t matter how much comfort you get from your spouse; you feel crazy and alone because this is all supposed to come naturally to you.”
“It’s impossible to put into words, but even though I would die for my family, some days I just had nothing left to give but my own anger,” she adds.
ANGER MANAGEMENT
In dealing with this internal fire, Chemaly insists that ‘anger management’ as we’ve come to know it, is not a productive way out of the woods.
“We know that from lots of studies, children are already associating anger with the face of an angry man yelling or punching walls by the time they’re four,” she says.
It’s the binary of aggression and reaction that we’ve come to recognise anger as. Because of this, Chemaly says “the predominant approach to anger management is how to avoid explosive rage like that. That’s not helpful.”
Traditional anger management doesn’t always account for the nuanced ways anger is experienced by those who have not been encouraged to express it outwardly.
“For minority people, for women, generally, we aren’t allowed to express anger that way,” explains Chemaly. “Instead, we’re managing anger all the time… For us, anger management is more of a question of: how do you liberate the anger in a healthy way? How do you stop suppressing it? How do you stop allowing its diversions to make their way through your body in very harmful and painful ways?”
The tendency to stew in it all, box it up, and swallow those feelings doesn’t get us anywhere, either. Because, as Chemaly notes, anger is “self-defeating”. Unlike love, where if you love something, it grows, anger wants to be extinguished.
“You don’t get angry so that you get more angry. You get angry so that your anger goes away,” explains Chemaly. “And we can only do that when we validate it.”
Cox echoes the importance of talking about anger.
“By creating a vocabulary around our repressed rage, we begin to release it,” she says. “Calling anger what it is and finding ways to name it and express it, gives us an opportunity to free ourselves from the harm it’s doing us.”
ANGER AS NEED
One of the greatest lessons Chemaly’s work can point us towards is not to run away from, or try to ‘fix’ anger, but to reframe it and see its purpose. When we experience anger or any of its other faces, we’re ultimately seeing a deep need come to its tipping point. It’s why the author notes it as a “social emotion” and why it’s so affecting. After all, anger is not just internal; it can be palpable in the air between us. And because it’s so relational in nature, it can be a potent cultivator of intimacy.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, anger requires someone else to do something for us,” she notes.
We get angry at our partners, at our parents, friends, coworkers or children. In this way, anger can offer us a deeper understanding of what we need from others and ourselves.
“You can’t really have intimacy unless you can express anger. If you can’t express anger, that means you don’t trust the person you’re with to accept you, to care for you, to change whatever needs to be changed,” she says.
When we don’t feel safe to share our anger, expecting it just to dissipate, we risk fostering resentment, something much more difficult to unload.
When asked if the end goal was the eradication of anger, Chemalay disagrees.
“We evolved to have anger. It’s a warning system. In a utopia, people would just understand anger more as a need and less as violence.”
BLAZING NEW PATHS
Where we see this power in full force is in the ways women have utilised anger in activism.
In June 1981, Audre Lorde gave the keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Connecticut.
“My response to injustice is anger. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of anger will teach you nothing, also,” she said. “Anger is loaded with information and energy…Most women have not developed the tools for facing that anger constructively.”
Realising that other people are angry, too, is where we see this rage engender social movements. We light the proverbial fire, and, more often than not, it’s how we’ve been able to enact transformative changes in the world – none of which could ever occur by remaining diligently polite. After all, there’s a reason the ‘angry feminist’ is such a prolific trope. From bra-burning to marches, women in history have fought with a burning rage for equal pay, better work, rights to their bodies, and ends to sexual violence and abuse at work and at home. The list could go on. And as Cox notes, “The global backslide in our basic rights is increasing exponentially,” and yet, we’re still being sold the dream of ‘having it all’ when really, for women, that means ‘doing it all’. It’s no wonder we’re furious. But through the smoke of our blistering rage, there is hope that we may blaze a new path.
Rage can swell in us like an untethered flame – its wrath causing destruction in its wake if not cared for, and this buildup of smoke and system oppression does well to fog our perspective. But like fire, it can transform the world around us. When we’re misunderstood in this anger, where we’re left to feel lonely and isolated, these primal senses scorch us. But as we navigate systems that seem rigged against us, coming together to share and harness that anger might just set us free.
THIS FEATURE IS PUBLISHED IN THE 7TH EDITION OF GRAZIA MIDDLE EAST. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE.
