Eventually I was diagnosed with “stress,” which, in my case, meant my jaw muscles were in a near constant state of clenching. The doctors I consulted were full of speculations and even prescriptions, but none helped. It wasn’t until the day that my husband was seeking relief for a rare headache that I realized the exceptional day, for me, was one when I didn’t have a headache. I got used to this pain being the wallpaper of life.

Some days my face hurt so much when I woke up that I could barely move my jaw or facial muscles. It was there when I opened my eyes in the morning and there when I went to sleep at night. A prolific writer and speaker, her articles appear in Time, the Verge, The Guardian, The Nation, HuffPost, and The Atlantic.įollow Soraya Chemaly on Twitter at and learn more at had a headache that lasted for years. She is the Director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project, and an advocate for women’s freedom of expression and expanded civic and political engagement. Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion, and media. We are so often told to resist our rage or punished for justifiably expressing it, yet how many remarkable achievements in this world would never have gotten off the ground without the kernel of anger that fueled them? Rage Becomes Her makes the case that anger is not what gets in our way, it is our way, sparking a new understanding of one of our core emotions that will give women a liberating sense of why their anger matters and connect them to an entire universe of women no longer interested in making nice at all costs.įollowing in the footsteps of classic feminist manifestos like The Feminine Mystique and Our Bodies, Ourselves, Rage Becomes Her is an eye-opening book for the twenty-first century woman: an engaging, accessible credo offering us the tools to re-understand our anger and harness its power to create lasting positive change.

On the flip side, the societal and cultural belittlement of our anger is a cunning way of limiting and controlling our power. Yet our anger is a vital instrument, our radar for injustice and a catalyst for change. We’ve been told for so long to bottle up our anger, letting it corrode our bodies and minds in ways we don’t even realize. Yes, yes it would.Ĭontrary to the rhetoric of popular “self-help“ and an entire lifetime of being told otherwise, our rage is one of the most important resources we have, our sharpest tool against both personal and political oppression. We are harassed, told we are asking for it, and asked if it would kill us to smile. Women are angry, and it isn’t hard to figure out why. A transformative book, written by Soraya Chemaly, urges women to embrace their anger and harness it as a tool for lasting personal and societal change.

Rage becomes her review