Rebecca Traister's new book is Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.From the transcript of her CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria:
ZAKARIA: What I love about your book is you are telling us a kind of hidden history of the politics of the Western world, really. What you say is, ever since the French Revolution, every 50 years there has been something I certainly was not aware of, a kind of a moment or a movement of women's anger.--Marshal Zeringue
TRAISTER: Um-hmm. And a lot of them -- I think we often, to the degree that we have been taught of the political import of women's anger, it's been in the context of explicitly women's movements, the feminist movement of the 1970s, the suffrage movement in the United States and in England in the early 20th -- late 19th, early 20th century. And yet, in fact, women's anger has been catalytic in movements that we don't necessarily associate with women, for example, in the United States, the labor movement in this country.
In the 1830s it was young women working in the Lowell textile mills in New England who went on some of the -- staged some of the first walkouts, the first strikes, formed one of the first unions in this country. In the early 20th century, it was immigrant laborers like Clara Lemlich who called for the walkout of 20,000 shirtwaist manufacturing workers.
And -- and yet we don't think of the labor movement in this country as having been initiated by women, and yet it was. And so part of what I'm doing in this book is looking at how women's anger particularly anger at economic, racial, gender inequality, been actually been incredibly catalytic at the start of so many of the movements that have wound up transforming our laws, our institutions, our customs. And yet we've never been taught the story or given the view of women's anger as politically potent.
ZAKARIA: Now, you use the word "anger," which is -- which is, to me, interesting. Because there are so many of these issues you think of, and you look back and say, "How could it possibly be that women were largely not allowed to be doctors or lawyers?"
You know, there are all these inequalities; there are all these various ways in which women were suppressed. And you think, "Thank goodness they were overcome." Did it take anger, or was it possible -- you know, you -- are you, kind of, characterizing it correctly?
TRAISTER: Well, part of the project of this book is to seek out where there was anger and to question...[read on]