Journalist Rebecca Traister is bringing the concepts first raised in her adult nonfiction books such as Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger and All the Single Ladies to a younger audience with her new YA edition, Angry Girls Will Get Us Through, adapted by Ruby Shamir. In a conversation with PW, Traister shared why it’s important for young women to understand their relationship to anger, how she harnesses anger in her own life, and how she suggests that others to do the same.
This book adapts your work for adults. Why did you feel it was important for this story to reach young women?
Part of my work is going around the country (and sometimes other countries) and talking about my books. And a lot of the places where I get invited to speak are college campuses, and sometimes high schools. I love talking to, and hearing from, young people about the issues I write about: anger, the history of this country and its relationship to gender and power, politics, and marriage patterns. Many of those young people told me that they were learning for the first time about a lot of this stuff, which resonated for me—even though I’m decades older than they are—because so much of what I write about I learned as an adult, doing research for books.
I began to think about how great it would be if some of the stuff I learned as an adult could be directed toward people who could learn it earlier. So much of what I write and think about are forces that shape the lives and attitudes of young people—cultural and political messaging around power, love, sex, bodies, and modes of expression. The idea of young people having the tools and historical context to better understand the messages they are sent every day is very appealing to me.
Anger is often an emotion that is frowned upon, especially in women and other marginalized groups. Why did you want to center anger as a throughline for political progress?
I don’t think you get political progress without anger at injustice and inequality. That does not mean that anger is the only driving emotion that gets us to a better place, but I do believe that people must feel furious dissatisfaction with the way things are in order to engage in a fight to make them better. When we’re taught to disguise or cover up our anger, which many women and gender nonconforming people are taught from the time they’re young, we’re being trained to quiet the voices that tell us that something is worth fighting for.
I also want to note that the argument of this book is not that anger operates in one political direction: those at the top of inequitable and oppressive power systems also feel and act out of anger, often punitive anger, when those systems are challenged or disrupted by those at the bottom and at the margins. It’s important to consider how anger works in both progressive and regressive, rebellious and oppressive ways. This book focuses on how anger is at the core of lots of forms of progressive social change, but I don’t want to give the impression that that is the only way in which anger shows up in politics. We’re living in a moment of violent angry backlash against social change and pressure right now.
How have you learned to adapt your anger? How do you hope this book helps readers take on that mindset?
I am lucky because my work as a political writer not only offers me an outlet for my anger, but sometimes it rewards it. Most people, especially women, aren’t offered that kind of acknowledgment, let alone affirmation, for their expressions of ire. I am mindful of the fact that there are social costs to expressing anger for lots of women. So, the biggest thing I hope that this book does is let people know that their anger at injustice is normal, healthy, and does not make them unattractive or bad or problematic.
The next step might be listening to the anger of the other people around you, taking their anger seriously as well. The communication between people who share frustrations at injustice is the first building block of organizing. There’s not one single way that people feel anger, express it, or channel it to change the world.
As women continue their battle for equal rights, what advice or lessons do you hope they take away from the movements that have paved the way and that you’ve mentioned in this book?
The first lesson is simply knowing that they are not alone. Right now, because young women and gender nonconformists are regularly sent messages that their anger is unattractive, or dangerous, or problematic, they work to quiet and disguise their frustrations. Suppressing or masking your emotions isn’t great emotionally, and it also creates a distortion of reality, because if enough people are pretending that they don’t feel anger, then their anger becomes invisible. Then all those people who are angry inside feel even more isolated. So I cannot state more ferociously that this is an illusion. The trick is to figure out ways to both communicate your own frustrations and also to listen for those signals from the people around you. Anger can definitely be an explosive force that divides people, and I don’t want to underplay that, but shared anger can also be a force that brings people together, creates community, and strengthens bonds; there can be fun and celebration in shared anger, and there can be comfort and resilience in it, too.
The historical aspect is about a different kind of connection: with the people who’ve been just as angry as we are, sometimes about the very same set of injustices, in the generations that have preceded ours, and whose anger isn’t always transmitted to us in our history textbooks . Finding out about those people isn’t just about learning a more complete and complex history, it’s about finding a different kind of solidarity, and also a comfort, in knowing that we are not alone.
Angry Girls Will Get Us Through by Rebecca Traister, adapted by Ruby Shamir. S&S, $17.99 ISBN 978-1-66594-335-2
