Rebecca Traister on Women’s Rage and the Kavanaugh Hearing

REBECCA TRAISTER: Yes. One of the things I point out in the book is that women’s anger isn’t always progressive, it isn’t always born out of a left politics. It is often anger that is deployed on behalf of a white patriarchy and on behalf of fundamentally conservative politics. One of the clearest examples of that is the crusade led by Phyllis Schlafly, and she was marshalling the anger of women who were furious about the disruptions of the second wave feminist movement of the 1970 and the way that is altered gender relationships and gendered power relationships.

And she took that anger and marshalled it to lead a crusade that ended with the defeat or the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. She succeeded in stopping the ratification of that constitutional amendment and dealt the women’s movement of the 1970s. Really, I think it’s biggest and most deboning symbolic defeat. So, we can’t — I don’t mean to suggest that every movement that women lead or is born of their anger is necessarily progressive rather than women’s anger can often be potent, and I don’t think we take it seriously enough as politically consequential.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And we clearly don’t celebrate it in terms of the way women are portrayed. I mean, you now, Rosa Parks, for instance, is always portray as a demure young woman. Yes, with a core — a woman with a core (INAUDIBLE) but very demure, her statute, the way she’s talked about. But you talk about her anger, and of course, go back all the way to the (INAUDIBLE) and the anger at not being allowed to vote. Women’s anger, sort of it raised from history, you write.

TRAISTER: It is. And you have to look on two levels. If you go back — in the United States, nearly every transformative social or political movement, abolition, suffrage, the Labor Movement, the Civil Rights, the Gay Rights Movement and, of course, the Women’s Movement, all have angry women at their starts. But those women, first of all, have often been erased from view as in the Labor Movement, which we think of as kind of White men’s movement, coal miners. But in fact, it was garment industry workers as early as the 1830s in Lowell, Massachusetts, young women organizing one of the first unions in the county. And then the garment industry workers in New York City in 1909 leading the big shirtwaist strikes.

In — within the Civil Rights Movement, there are women like Rosa Parks who are acknowledged as being catalytic but they are presented to us in somehow palatable forms that she was demure, stoic, exhausted. In fact, Rosa Parks was a lifelong furious political activist and a fighter against Jim Crow South. She was an investigator for the NAACP who investigated the gang rapes of White women — of Black women by White men and the accusations of sexual misconduct against Black men me by White women. Rosa Parks was unapologetic in many ways about her fury. And yet, in order for her to be digestible and celebrated, she was preseted to us as quiet, polite, within that same narrow range of expression that we deem OK and respectable and women that we were talking about with regard to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.