Throughout college, I had a small, three-part phone that, when chucked against the passenger side of my car or at the wall of my apartment, could easily be reassembled afterward. Of all the things I miss about them, the thing I miss the most is the ability to hurl one when I was mad. I often think about the days of solid, brick cellphones. Here, being angry is valid in and of itself. Rather than being a means to an end, anger is treated as a rational response in the collection’s 22 essays. Anger isn’t just anger it’s “righteous.” So it’s refreshing that in the essay collection Burn It Down: Women Write About Anger, edited by Lilly Dancyger, anger is given more room to breathe. While validating to see women’s anger taken seriously, there’s an overwhelming focus on anger as a catalyst-as a means to a specific, moral end. Women’s anger, despite the onslaught of terrible events that have taken place even in the face of it, is finally being recognized as a formidable force.īut there are limitations to this new framing of women’s rage as well. Books like Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her have sought to explore that fury, its limits and its potential. From the MeToo Movement to the Women’s March to the Kavanaugh hearings, women standing up and letting their rage manifest as action has been a recurring theme our culture.
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