Yes, I am an ANGRY FEMINIST!!!

As a feminist, how often are you accused of being “angry”? As if it is a bad thing?

For most of our lives, we are told anger is “unladylike,” “unbecoming,” “off-putting" all of which, of course, are warnings to not make men feel uncomfortable with our anger (also see black anger). Female anger is a taboo that is supposed to be kept quiet and subdued.

The fear of a woman’s anger is just one part of a larger fear of women breaking the normative bonds of social control, of shirking their duties as peacekeepers to put themselves first. To acknowledge this angry would be to ask why it exists and acknowledge that it is justified.

To be angry to unleash your inner power and inner emotions.

It is terrifying, particularly to men, and so throughout history women’s anger has been oppressed Angry women were tried and burned as witches and fitted with contraptions that literally silenced them. They were hidden away in sanitariums, medicated into submission, and gaslighted until they turned their anger inwards. Trying to imagine the possibilities that this oppression silenced: the books and music never written, the art never created, the inventions and discoveries never realised or appropriated by men: makes me overwhelmingly angry in its self.

The terrible irony of female anger is that the systems that have created and incited it are the same ones that demand that it be denied. Women are told in a million small ways that anger, along with other strong emotions, is an inappropriate response to things that by their definitions should provoke anger: discrimination, disenfranchisement, degradation, abuse.

We are told that the neutral detachment of “rational” and “objective” white men is the golden measure, and that outrage and anger undermine our ability to be heard and understood by those neutral, self-appointed judges.

It's time we stop viewing female anger as at it's best an inconvenience and at worst a threat to be silenced.

“I have a right to my anger,” stated Maxine Waters back in 1989, “and I don’t want anybody telling me I shouldn’t be, that it’s not nice to be, and that something’s wrong with me because I get angry.”

Women and other marginalised groups have a lot to be angry about. This anger can unite us, fuel us and bring us greater understanding of the world around.

Anger isn’t the only tool of feminist action, but right now it’s a crucial one. We need to be comfortable feeling it, expressing it and using it.