Best-selling author, activist and mother of 4- and 7-year-old girls, Rebecca Traister has been called "the most brilliant voice on feminism in this country." Unsurprisingly, she is also an expert on women's anger and how it has shaped history and continues to foment change -- the subject of her latest book "Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger." We sat down to talk about how 2018 was such a galvanizing year for women athletes tapping into their rage, from Serena Williams to members of the U.S. gymnastics team, why all women need to embrace making people uncomfortable, how we can harness anger for social and psychological change, and how, when all else fails, sometimes you just need to go for a run in the park.
Allison Glock: What have you learned from speaking to women about anger that has surprised you?
Rebecca Traister: The level of hunger for networks between women. This real need to make sense of the moment and to do so with each other, to find each other, and also to talk and learn about the history. It's a yearning for context. The mainstream political media doesn't do a great job at letting us know our history or taking seriously the engagement of certain kinds of people.
AG: Like women, people of color...
RT: Yes. I'm meeting hundreds of people who are so eager to have this conversation and to know that their rage and fury and sadness, their fear and anxiety about what's going to happen, about the world, has some precedent and some consequence.
AG: Do people cry when they share how impotent they feel? I may or may not be talking about myself...
RT: Every night somebody cries. I see audience members holding hands, I see them start talking to each other. That's the best part. I will also say that the hunger for having a conversation about race and whiteness and white supremacy within the women's movement has been really striking to me. I didn't know if I was going to get pushback from white women readers about my desire to have this conversation, which can often lead to tremendous defensiveness. I haven't gotten that much defensiveness, not to say none, but the eagerness to have that conversation has surprised me. I assumed I would hear, "But wait, I'm a white woman and I'm progressive!" But I haven't. There is a yearning for connection, they're coming into this conversation.
AG: How is this book and tour different than your others?
RT: This is the first book I've ever written that I intended to be a tool. There are so many messages telling women in various ways that our anger is illegitimate, that it's inconsequential, that it's marginal, that it's silly, performed or threatening, disruptive, that it's going to provoke a backlash. But anger is what propels people off their couches.
AG: Why do you think it's so easy to dismiss and caricature women's anger? One recent example is what happened during the US Open with Serena Williams.
RT: My belief is that the dismissal, the vilification of women's dissent, is crucial to the maintenance of the power structure. The message is very clear: If you get angry on your own behalf -- even more when it's black women's dissent like Serena Williams' -- it's not going to be received warmly and you're going to pay. In Serena's case, so much of what Serena is angry about is shaped by gender and race and her place within tennis, this largely white sport that she has transformed, even as she has never been fully welcomed or treated as valid within it.
AG: You're talking about the context around her reaction at the Open.
RT: Yes. She's in this moment, in pursuit of this record, she is coming back from a year where she lost her seed because she had a baby, she's coming back after medical problems. And then the thing that she is initially called out on -- which is where my analysis of this starts, everyone who wants to argue with me that, "Well, she really did break the rules, with the breaking the racket," -- I'm like, no, no, this starts before that...
AG: ... with the cheating insinuation ...
RT: Yes! The initial call about getting coaching is one that delegitimizes. That's what she's mad about, that's what her fury is, this suggestion that she has cheated. And that is fury about the suggestion that her position on that court is somehow not earned, that she is getting some extra help, and she is so livid about that. And you cannot separate that from the racial dynamics, especially of her place within that sport and the degree to which she's been tested, the scrutiny of her outfits...
AG: The body critiques...
RT: The body critiques -- all of it has been tied to an effort to fundamentally delegitimize her. These are patterns that happen on every level, and too rarely do we connect the dots. The way in which black women's anger in particular has been fetishized and vilified in the United States, there is a very particular cartoon character of the angry black woman and a perception that black women's anger is more threatening. So as soon as Serena is provoked into becoming angry, she falls into a category that is overdetermined culturally and socially. She is a black woman who is angry in a public space and in a loud and unapologetic way. And then the lesson that is served up for everybody is she is docked a point, she is docked a game. It was a public billboard of what happens to you if you get angry for every rational reason in the world. That match was heartbreaking to me. And the most heartbreaking thing watching that night was that, after losing, Serena had to do the work of cleaning everything up.
AG: By comforting her opponent Naomi Osaka?
RT: Yes. Serena had to show the crowd how to treat her opponent, this young woman who had just beaten her, with the kind of respect that nobody has ever instructed crowds to treat her with. She had to make everybody feel better.
AG: Amy Schumer is choosing not to do Super Bowl ads this year in support of Colin Kaepernick. What are your thoughts on that?
RT: I think there are many entrances to voicing public objection. Do I think that it's going to change the NFL's attitude toward protest? Probably not. [Laughs] But I think it's better than not doing it. Part of the pressure of public protest is that you try to get other people to acknowledge what is broken and wrong in the thing that you're refusing to support.
AG: That calls to mind women's gymnastics, and how the culture of silence and deference around USA Gymnastics, of not calling out what was broken, allowed systemic sexual abuse to flourish for decades.
RT: Totally. I grew up watching gymnastics, and the lionization of the coach, Bela Karolyi. That same dynamic is true of the [Bill] Cosby accusers, it's true of the [Harvey] Weinstein accusers, it's true of the women on the Ford factory plant floor.
AG: Women have been eating their anger for a long-ass time. Why are more women speaking out now?
RT: The recognition that even the powerful within this broken system, women with money, whiteness, whatever, are not insulated from racism, misogyny. Oh, this happened to Gwyneth Paltrow? That's part of the revelation with Christine Blasey Ford. The degree to which you fit into an elite, white, middle-class, married, you-name-it demographic is not going to protect you from the ravages of patriarchy. Sometimes you have to tell people within the system they're working within how to get around it. And I don't denounce that because we live in systems and we have to get through our days. But in the end, we have to alter the systems. And that's a much harder task.
AG: Did you play sports?
RT: I played lacrosse.
AG: Were you competitive?
RT: [Shakes head] I liked throwing and catching the ball. Like, if you gave me a lacrosse stick and a ball and we played catch, I would totally do that. And there was one year, my junior year of high school, I had a great coach and a good team, and I enjoyed it. But I was not an athletic person. I've never been drawn to physical activity. It is only within the past year that I actually started running.
AG: Have you been transformed by exercise?
RT: I did it for sanity reasons, for my own head. And I am shocked to report that I really enjoy it. [Laughs] I run around Prospect Park in New York, and it makes me feel clearer. I am actually stunned by how good it makes me feel.
"Women keep their mouths shut because they don't want to be disruptive, they don't want to be written off, to be the skunk at the party." Rebecca Traister
AG: What do you want your daughters to learn from you?
RT: I want them to not only take their own anger seriously but listen and be curious about the anger of other people around them -- even if some of that anger is directed at them. And I want them to act on inequality. And I want them to do that whether or not they are directly affected by that inequality. I also want them to stop whining so much [laughs].
AG: Where do you go for light and escape?
RT: Cooking. It's the most relaxing thing I do. I remember last year, the day before Thanksgiving was at the height of #MeToo. Given the nature of my work, I was hearing from so many women every day, and it was just an extremely intense time. And I remember the absolute pure joy of spending the entire day before Thanksgiving making my pies, making my artichoke dip...
AG: Are you able to stop thinking about the news?
RT: I can stop watching, but it doesn't stop in my head. I actually just experienced that this weekend. I had been on the road for about a month, and it was the first two days I had where I didn't have work or events or have to write. And I did not look at the news for two days and both nights I had terrible nightmares.
AG: What's the question you get asked most often?
RT: "How should I express my anger differently?" Like, how can I be angry without having my boss or husband or friend get mad at me? I understand why people ask, because when you express a certain kind of anger it often will work to your detriment, depending on what kinds of power you have and don't have.
AG: So, what do you say?
RT: I say that I'm not offering any advice about how to express your anger. To the degree that I'm offering anything prescriptive, it's about listening to the anger of other people, listen for the patterns of how it is discouraged, marginalized and vilified, and whose anger is taken seriously and whose anger is not.
AG: Are you optimistic about the future?
RT: F--- no.
AG: But you just wrote an essay about staying hopeful...
RT: I sort of have to be hopeful; I think it is a tactical necessity. The people who have the power are getting a firmer and firmer grip on it and, in doing so, working to reverse the progress that has been made by generations of people who have less power but have worked as part of mass social movements to get us somewhere close to equal. That is a reality. And that is very daunting.
AG: I'm waiting for the hopeful part.
RT: If they weren't scared of the possibility of mass movements continuing to enact more change and alter who has power in this country, they wouldn't be doing this. And so I have to be optimistic about the power of the masses and the power of people who are driven by anger to keep fighting. These kinds of efforts have taken decades, centuries, lifetimes. Many people have died after giving their entire lives to trying to make the country better and not lived to see the victories that so much of their work helped make possible. And that to me is an inspiring driving force and puts the long project ahead of us in context.
AG: You believe anger works.
RT: Anger at inequality is politically powerful. We know that because it's our founding narrative. The explosive rupture from England was from anger at injustice and inequality, and it gave birth to the nation in which we live.
AG: But as we've discussed, the rules are very different for women.
RT: Women's fury is discounted and discouraged in a million ways. Those who don't have as much power are discouraged from voicing their resentments, frustrations or dissent because if they keep them in, they have less connective power. Women keep their mouths shut because they don't want to be disruptive, they don't want to be written off, to be the skunk at the party. But if you are silent, you can't form a connection or form a coalition and organize to change the thing that you're angry about. Exploding with anger is a connective force that brings people together, it shows you who else feels the same way you do.
AG: You advise women in your book to record their feelings, to never forget how their anger feels.
RT: Women's anger is always cast as the problematic factor, but I see it as one of the aspects of this political moment that has the most potential for progressive change in a future where all kinds of decks are stacked against us. If you are angry in a way that disrupts the way that power is supposed to work, if you push back at it, it is immediately discernible as chaotic, messy, because you've made people uncomfortable, nervous.
AG: And that's a good thing.
RT: A very good thing. You hear a lot of stories about how anger is unhealthy. You grind your teeth. You have high blood pressure. But that only happens when you don't let it out. Anger is often the only power women have. The power structure would very much like not to be disturbed. Disturb it.