Rebecca Traister: 'The left is hesitant to rally around angry women'
Rebecca Traister is angry. Why wouldn’t she be? She’s a progressive, feminist woman in Donald Trump’s America.
As a columnist-at-large for New York magazine, she’s a citizen witness to the male-only photo-ops in the White House that document the signing away of women’s rights; a chronicler to the living history of a president known as the “pussy grabber-in-chief”.
Known as an author for her New York Times bestseller All The Single Ladies – a history of “unmarried women and the rise of an independent nation” – Traister’s latest book is as cracking a read as its predecessor, but with added fire. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, which brings her to Australia in May, explores the righteous female fury that defines not only the present American moment but has powered her nation’s history.
Anger is “the supposedly unfeminine emotion”, according to a New York Times review of Traister’s book. Discouraged in women, downplayed, tone-policed and quelled as a means of patriarchal habit and coercive bourgeois custom, political female anger – as charted historically by Traister – is a weapon so paradigm-shattering to western social norms that no scene of its eruption can stay unchanged.
For Traister, women’s political rage is no chaotic emotion but a well
earned, rational response to structural oppression. And to survive these times, she says, it’s one we’ve got to harness.
“All around the world, we’re at a crux moment,” she tells the Guardian. The future, she posits, is a contest between a bold, empathetic and inclusive left, and the easy scapegoating and blame-shifting she describes as “the bribes of rightwing authoritarianism”.
Traister believes the polarisation demonstrated in America after the Trump ascendancy, and in Britain by Brexit, comes down to the divisive inequality of the neoliberal economic order, from which pageantries of hatred conveniently distract.
“One of the reasons there’s been no strong defence against it is because so many on the left have embraced a neoliberal, watered down version of liberal politics that tried to paper over some of the angriest parts of the social movements that occurred in the 20th century all over the world,” she says. “For years in the United States … Rosa Parks [was presented] as demure, exhausted, polite – she was undoubtedly all of those things but she was also livid, a lifelong fighter for social justice in the racist South.”
Female anger runs through all types of social movements too – not just feminism. “There’s a real fear of angry women, because angry women push for all sorts of forms of more inclusive government and social and economic structures,” Traister says. “Angry women are instrumental in labour movements around the world, and other disruptive left movements, like civil rights and integration. And so much of this rise … of white nationalism, xenophobia, racism and misogyny, all tied up together, is happening in response to the transformative power of movements engineered by women who were furious at various forms of injustice.”
America is in crisis, Traister says, “because many parties on the left were hesitant to rally around angry women and their politics. There was a milquetoast response – to hose it down, and make sure nobody got too exposed to this angry femininity.”
“[It was] a fantasy of winning support from people in an invisible centre,” she says, which made the broader left of politicians and activists “angsty about owning some of that angry social disruption.”
This is her critical point. “In some cases you have two generations of neoliberal policies and politicians, with no vociferous resistance coming from the left to the right. Instead, Democrats in the United States have insisted civility and politeness and kindness could somehow win the hearts of people who were coming for the left with spears and daggers.”
This is, she declares without reticence or apology, an “appeasement strategy”. Listening to her speak, and reading Good and Mad – as a woman, a feminist, a left-activist, a believer in justice – is not only to be convinced by the evidence of history that she’s right, but to revel in the sudden physical confidence and power of a righteous anger as it buds.
“I was livid that the Trump administration had enacted the family separation policy,” Traister says. “There were babies ripped from their mothers arms, children kept in cages. And [enraged] Americans were disrupting the meals and date nights of the politicians responsible for the policy – exactly appropriate to the horror of policies enacted on the border. [Congressional Democrat] Maxine Waters encouraged this, and her own party leadership rebuked her and said we have to be civil – we. Have to be civil.”
Traister does not mask her scorn. “Calls for civility are all to protect the civil power structure. Well,” she says, “fuck that.”
• Rebecca Traister is appearing at the Wheeler Centre on Tuesday 23 April and at Sydney writers’ festival on 1 & 2 May. Good and Mad is out now through Simon & Schuster