Anger, she writes, “has rarely been acknowledged as righteous and patriotic when it has originated with women, though women have often taken pains to mimic or reference the language and sentiments of America’s founding while making their own angry demands for liberty, independence and equality.” Though their efforts obviously involved much more than feeling angry, Traister spotlights the one emotion that, she contends, often gets underplayed in public discussions of history’s female activists, including the ones we now hold up as heroes. What they all have in common is that at some point they found they could no longer tolerate the conditions under which they lived. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Frances Willard and Carrie Nation Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Florynce Kennedy, Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin, as well as many less famous women who were part of the abolition, suffrage, temperance, labor, civil rights and feminist movements. Revolutionary power is ascribed to many cultural and commercial products, but the journalist Rebecca Traister means the subtitle of her book “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger” in the old-fashioned sense: “This is about the specific nexus of women’s anger and American politics, about how the particular dissatisfactions and resentments of America’s women have often ignited movements for social change and progress.” In her rousing look at the political uses of this supposedly unfeminine emotion, Traister, a columnist for New York magazine and the author of two previous books on women and politics, cites the 18th-century slave Elizabeth Freeman, whose suit for freedom in the Massachusetts courts - based on the rhetoric of inalienable rights that she overheard being discussed by her owners - led to that state’s outlawing of slavery the girls working the Lowell mills, whose organized walkouts would inspire a larger labor movement Susan B. RAGE BECOMES HER The Power of Women’s Anger By Soraya Chemaly 392 pp. GOOD AND MAD The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger By Rebecca Traister 284 pp.
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