Kick ass, ladies!

How could I not thrill to Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger? I've been an angry woman for decades. This doesn't show much in my daily interactions: I like my anger better when efficacious rather than expressive. But it's there -- and I know I'm not alone. So Rebecca Traister's catalogue and exposé of our contemporary fury is satisfying.

It's also smart, professional, and deeply researched. She's delved into the history, both of women who embodied their rage as feminist theorists in the 1960s and 70s, and of political insurgents subjected to patriarchal disdain like Susan B. Anthony, Shirley Chisholm, and Barbara Lee. She's attempted the work that any white woman must to describe the complications lived by women of color struggling amidst both male entitlement and white supremacy as well as US late-capitalism and a host of other isms. In her coverage of our reaction to the 2016 election of a classic male pig and the subsequent #MeToo explosion, she offers journalism that should serve as "a rough first draft of history" -- if that history is not buried as so much of women's experience has been.

And her particular observations are acute, if not necessarily original. She digs into the media's enthusiasm for reporting conflicts within and about the Women's March over political direction and legitimacy, pointing out that it is the nature to social movements to dispute their differences and learn from the process. But when it comes to women, there's always more:

The highlighting of dissent over accomplishment is a way to undermine a movement, and it has everything to do with the structural reality of gender inequality. The women's movement is a movement not of an oppressed minority, but of a subjugated majority. Majorities, by the very nature of their scale, are bound to include groups with varying -- and warring -- priorities and goals. ... The cheapest way to weaken and undermine a mass movement is to use its differences to divide it, and thus maintain power over it.

(That's also worth remembering next time you see the media proclaiming "Democrats in Disarray." Democrats/liberals/even the resigned-but-cautiously-hopeful also are a majority of everybody; we just don't know how to turn our majority into power. Yet.)

But -- you guessed that "but" was coming, didn't you? -- Traister's Mad also disappointed me. The deep, awful insight which insurgent women cannot escape is that we live with, and often desire to be intimate with, and even to love, men whose social condition is to have power over us. To be a woman is to experience from infancy the imperative to constrain our own development so as to protect male entitlement. We've recently seen on national TV what it looks like when a man fears he might be blocked from what he knows are his just desserts by a woman calling him out. Brett Kavanaugh is no aberration; he's just an entitled upper-class white guy. (The Blassey Ford/Kavanaugh hearing came after the book's publication. Traister certainly nailed that episode.)

Yet there are quite a few contemporary U.S. women who have managed to organize lives far less dependent on men than hardly any women who came before. There were the middle class women of the author's mother's generation who left empty marriages from the 1970s onward because they found they could, even if just barely, support themselves and children. We are a different sort of society for this leap into the unknown. There are the emerging "Single Ladies" whose hopes and discontents Traister has chronicled.

But (I have to ask because this is my kind) where in all this history of rage are the lesbians? Are we not also women?

Not in Mad. We don't appear anywhere, though I know that some of her interviewees identify as lesbians. What's with that omission?

I suspect this is because of an inconvenient truth this author chose not to wrangle with as it might detract from her truths. Her newly rediscovered mentor Andrea Dworkin bluntly stated the dilemma in Right-wing Women:

Lesbianism is a transgression of rules, an affront; but its prohibition is not a basic constituent part of sex oppression and its expression does not substantively breach or transform sex oppression.

I think that's a truth, though partial. We lesbians throw off male expectations, but unless we actively identify with and participate in the struggle of all women for self-definition -- for liberation for all -- our mere existence doesn't intrinsically contribute much.

Now in truth, if you look around at much of the leadership of resistance to patriarchy (and white supremacy, and economic exploitation, and our cruel authoritarian POTUS), we lesbians are indeed everywhere. But there is nothing automatic about that. My instinct is that most women-loving women won't settle solely a chance to have legal marriage and some recognition that we can be parents -- but that's not a certainty. And I can see why Traister might not want to blunder about in that complex discussion.

Quibbles aside, this is an important book. It came out before the 2018 midterms in which women, "newly engaged suburban activists," helped turn rage into a Blue Wave. Can we stay mad watching the GOP threaten our bodily autonomy and everyone's lives? I promise to try.