Incandescently Furious
10/16/20 - We contemplate a VC-backed startup for women who need to scream into pillows. A brief discussion of the Supreme Court nomination of the latest Judge Who Must Not Be Named. Fortunately, Rebecca Traister's work on the political power of women's anger is always timely, as we revisit our 2018 interview with her (and the unfortunately still-relevant fury of the Kavanaugh nomination).
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister is on sale now.
Go deeper with books by and about these incredible angry feminists:
Flo Kennedy: her public access show archive
Vivian Gornick: all of her books
Rosa Parks: At the Dark End of the Street
Anita Hill: Strange Justice
Rose Schneiderman: her 1911 speech at the Metropolitan Opera House after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
TRANSCRIPT: INCANDESCENTLY ANGRY
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman. Ugh!
Aminatou: [Laughs]
[Theme Song]
Aminatou: Sorry I am laughing because that was me two seconds ago. [Laughs]
Ann: Could we just grunt at each other for an hour? Is that today's episode?
Aminatou: Honestly that would be such a good episode. I'm so shocked that there's not some bullshit lady empowerment activity that is literally just that where it's like "Just come scream for an hour, $700 a month."
Ann: Oh my god, our pillow screaming startup? [Laughter] Like we send you a noise-canceling pillow to scream into.
Aminatou: Called Ugh.
Ann: Yeah it's called Ugh. [Laughs]
Aminatou: For everyone listening we are raising money for the family and friends round so please feel free to Venmo us. [Laughs] This is the billion dollar idea we have, Ugh!
Ann: I love it. For all the people who think that podcasting is lucrative we're going to be like no, actually that was just the springboard to our feminine rage startup.
Aminatou: Oh my god. I am genuinely shocked this does not exist, like truly some run by fortune magazine. Meghan Markle is also headlining that conference but in a private room you can just scream into a pillow.
Ann: Right, the Most Outraged Women Conference. [Laughter]
Aminatou: Ann I feel like there's something for the road map now. Wow, I'm energized for the first time in days. Thank you.
Ann: I feel better too. You know, weirdly I know I'm not screaming full-throatedly but there is something about naming it that honestly just feels good. [Sighs] What are you angry about this week?
(2:05)
Aminatou: Ahh! Yo, what am I not upset about Ann? Like what am I not fucking upset about?
Ann: Right.
Aminatou: I had to fix my own shower this week which let me tell you that is disgusting and gross. I am so over the pandemic. But I did it because YouTube videos are the shit. I am so outraged at the sham Supreme Court nomination circus that is happening. This woman is so bananas, the process is stupid, and I just hate political theatre so much and that's what I'm mad about. I am just so upset that we are treated like children in a process that literally determines how we live our lives. I am so furious.
Ann: I know, me too. And I am also mad at Democrats here right? In the sense that I understand that they have made a choice that they are going to make this all about the Affordable Care Act and healthcare by that definition which is obviously something that I want. I want accessible healthcare for everyone in this country. That is like a thing, correct, yes, I agree with you. But making that this kind of like the theme of their end of the political theatre? I'm so angry at yes we're going to play ball with this deeply unjust process because we have no other options. I'm just like what would someone without shame -- what would Mitch McConnell do in this situation? They would find a way to blow this up, you know that.
Aminatou: Well here's the thing about the compromise or the whatever we want to call it. I don't even care because here's the thing about the Judge Handmaiden: She's actually very qualified. I was like I can't knock her off on qualifications. That lady knows what she is doing. The job is stupid. She is perfect for the job. The thing that makes me really, really angry is that if there is some sort of tactic or strategy or whatever the people who actually represent us in Congress should just tell us. I'm like just tell us that this is the thing that you're doing and then that way we all know what's going on, otherwise you literally look like an idiot asking her like "Oh yeah, tell me about your children. Tell me about your law school grades. Tell me . . ." I'm like nobody cares. We're not fucking idiots.
Ann: Have you heard she's a mother of seven? Have you heard she's a mother of seven? Do you know two of those children are adopting?
Aminatou: Oh my god.
(4:28)
Ann: Have you heard she's a mother?
Aminatou: Well I'm going to tell you this about her adopted black children: that makes me deeply upset not because white people adopt black children, that happens, I'm rolling my eyes at that, but using that as a justification for her not being racially suspect is so irksome to me. It is so irksome to me. First of all the people who built this country and this government are white men who literally had black children. Use that knowledge to tell you everything you need to know about what it means when some white people have black children, like no. Again it just looks like this oversimplification and the treating everyone, like this is we're watching West Wing and some of us are in high school and some of us are in the West Wing. I just cannot handle it anymore. And yeah, so when I say that I'm angry I'm not disappointed or angry at Republicans. Those fools are always on-message and they do exactly what they say they're going to do. I was like nothing those people do surprises me at this point. I am just incandescently furious at the people who supposedly represent our best interests who do not communicate with us what is going on and also act like we're supposed to play this "There's two sides to everything and some people are good and some people are bad but we're just finding compromise." Life is not a Netflix television show about politics. This is so upsetting.
(5:55)
Ann: Yeah. And all of the details too about the way she will and won't comment on things and also just like, you know, the whole going back to your point about using her adopted children as a cover story for why she is going to be not blind to issues of race and racism, I think that is part of the language that was used. Did you catch that the word she used was cocooned to describe how her children are protected from racism in the wider world? The fact that . . .
Aminatou: Yeah. Can't wait until they're cocooned from a police officer stopping them on the street, tell me how that's going to work judge lady. Like what?
Ann: I know. She also stokes all of my teen rage at being raised conservative Catholic. Like there is something particular about both the kind of veneration of motherhood and family but also this narrow, narrow, hypocritical interpretation of defending life that hits me at this foundational level of teen outrage where I honestly have to turn it off because I'm like I'm going to turn into a pouty brat and can't be around people as an adult if I tap into this even further.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Ann: Like I am actually damaging my adult relationships when I go this deep into my conservative Catholic upbringing range. [Sighs]
Aminatou: I think -- I mean you're so right about feeling just regressive in how we're dealing with it because I notice we still haven't even said her name which is like deep CYG season three, like Ivanka's Dad feelings, you know?
Ann: [Laughs]
Aminatou: Where I'm like why are we being so childish?
Ann: I'm dying.
Aminatou: This is so ludicrous. It's so ludicrous. And at the same time, you know, the theatre is what makes me upset. I don't care that this woman has black children. Good for you, like Midwest, nice woman with eleventy-billion children, husband letting you run around and be like a career lady. That's all great. I do not care about that. I care about her record and the record is problematic, you know? I just wish that those were the issues that we focused on. So instead of talking about her two black children you can look directly into her record and see really recently she ruled on a racial discrimination case where she decided that someone essentially being called the N word at work by her supervisor did not constitute a hostile work environment from them. You know, and I was like great, tell me about raising your black children now. What? What is going on here? Ann I am so frustrated. I'm just ranting now and I want to stop the ranting because it is deeply unproductive. It is just so unproductive. It is infuriating but also these are the cards that we've been dealt. We knew there was a possibility that we would be here, you know? So at the same time I'm just mad at myself for being outraged and ranty like I'm on MSNBC when this was not a very clear possibility of this -- you know, of the 2016 election results. It's like yeah, elections have consequences I hear and now here we are.
(9:10)
Ann: I know that and at the same time I actually don't want to lose the feeling of rage that I feel right now because I don't want to enter a phase of acceptance where I'm like this is just the court we were always going to have and there was no other way for it to be because of the electoral college and because of all kinds of historic policies that make it harder for certain people to be heard than others and because of Citizens United and because of America being a corporate kleptocracy. You know what I mean? I just spin out so quickly. I want to stay focused on the rage I feel about this specific thing because I do want to feel outraged at like the broader picture of what is wrong and what led us here and at the same time I also recognize that you're right, this is not sustainable. It was in some ways predictable. And so what do we do with the rage is the question that I'm interested in.
Aminatou: I don't know, Ann. All I know is as three-fifths of a person I am personally -- I'll let you know originalism is not for me.
Ann: Yeah, mm-hmm.
Aminatou: And there are so many things to be angry about at the same time and it seems the root cause of all of them is the same, you know? It's that the anger has to translate into sustainable change.
Ann: Well to that end it's interesting. So I think if you're listening to this you can sense that we are not confident in our ability to have a productive conversation right now. We are just raging. [Laughter]
Aminatou: Goodbye, see you on the Internet. See you later. Checked out.
Ann: And so we're going to do our favorite move on this show which is to kick it to someone who has really been thinking about these issues in a thoughtful way and is bringing us a perspective that is outside the two of us that we need and want to hear right now.
Aminatou: Ugh, so to that end our dear friend Rebecca Traister is back on the show with an interview that some of you have already heard where we talk about the political ramifications of anger.
Ann: Yeah, so this is a conversation from 2018 which is the year that Rebecca's book Good and Mad was published and we thought it was timely because it was also right around the time we were all feeling rage at the last round of Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh -- I'm going to say the name -- and she had wise words for us then and we wanted to listen to them again now in 2020.
[Interview Starts]
(11:40)
Aminatou: Hi Rebecca Traister.
Rebecca: Hi Amina.
Aminatou: Thanks for coming back on Call Your Girlfriend.
Rebecca: I couldn't be happier to be on Call Your Girlfriend again.
Aminatou: You have a book out, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. I have to tell you I read it twice now.
Rebecca: You've read this book twice?
Aminatou: I've read this book twice because remember you sent me the manuscript?
Rebecca: No, no, no. I know you read it very early.
Aminatou: But I can't tell you how just cathartic it left me. I definitely put it down and I was mad all over again but also just really galvanized for change. Can you tell me about why you wanted to write Good and Mad?
Rebecca: Well I'm really pleased to hear that when you stopped it you were both mad but energetic. I think that's the idea. It's not a book that's intended to make you mad; it's a book that's intended to take your anger seriously and recognize in it its potential for political and social change.
Aminatou: Right. It's not a self-help book.
Rebecca: No.
Aminatou: It's not some sort of like psychology of why women are angry book.
Rebecca: Right, and it's not trying to gen up anger where there wasn't any.
Aminatou: Oh, there's plenty of anger. We don't need to gen any more up. [Laughs]
Rebecca: Right. It's definitely more -- because feeling the anger that bubbled up in the wake of the 2016 election, and it wasn't as simple as like "We elected Donald Trump." I've been angry about the possibility that we were going to elect Donald Trump for a long time preceding November of 2016. How I felt like I couldn't be as angry as I was inside, like it was going to go badly for me if I expressed the intensity of how angry I'd been in advance of that election, that anger wouldn't have been heard or really taken seriously or would've been seen as performed or like about some kind of Hillary fan girl thing when in fact it was anger . . .
Aminatou: A Hillary acolyte. [Laughs]
Rebecca: Yes. Yeah, yeah. Part of what I wanted to begin to explore was like wait, I think a lot of people felt fury and anger from a lot of different directions but just the open expression of that anger is so profoundly discouraged one way or another, especially coming from women, that I wanted to sort of make sense of now it was all bubbling forth. And we've seen that the past two years has been a period in which there has been a lot of anger coming from women, and so I was sort of struggling to make sense of that. Like what are the limits put on the expression of fury from women? How is it discouraged? How is it treated? How is it heard? And what forces are we dealing with when we feel fury at injustice and fury at inequality? And what are the various points at which we are mocked or discouraged from expressing that fury? Or simply when we do express it why is that rage not taken seriously politically when in fact -- and this gets to some of the meat of the book -- women's rage has been at the heart and a catalytic, crucial element at the heart of nearly every transformative social movement this country has ever been through?
(14:40)
Aminatou: Right, and I think that's the thing that I was most struck by, right? Is that also at its heart this book is a love letter to feminists. Like you chronicle so many women whose history is either not taught at school or is taught wrongly.
Rebecca: Right.
Aminatou: I think about Flo Kennedy which everybody should know more about and you write really beautifully about in this book. I think about Rosa Parks whose, you know, entire story is taught in schools as if she's some sort of meek lamb and really being angry is one of the core motivations to the work that she did. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that, about how not knowing the true history of a lot of the women's movement throughout -- throughout generations is part of why our anger is so . . . is quelled.
Rebecca: And I think it's not accidental that we're not taught the history, right? It's not accidental that we're not taught the history or where we are taught it we are taught it in a way that obscures where anger was and what that anger did. So Rosa Parks is probably the most obvious example and I do write about her in the book. When I was taught about Rosa Parks in an elementary school in the 1980s, and I think this extended well before and well after this, I was taught about Rosa Parks as an exhausted stoic who was demurely dressed and just didn't want to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery in 1955 because she was tired.
Aminatou: She was so tired.
(16:10)
Rebecca: She was so tired. Now let's preface this by saying yeah, she probably was tired. She was also sick and tired and livid about racial inequality in this country and she was a lifelong fiery, furious activist and organizer who worked as an investigator for the NAACP, who investigated rape claims made by white women against black men that were often used to justify lynching and racial violence against black populations in the Jim Crow south. She also investigated the rape of black women by white men including Recy Taylor's rape. She was trained in political resistance. Sitting on that bus was a political act. So this history has recently been popularized and I recommend Daniel McGuire's At the Dark End of the Street. We've just in the past couple of years begun to get this clearer view of Rosa Parks and what motivated her, but what we have to remember is this obscuring of the anger and intention and energy and deliberate expression of political resistance that undergirded Rosa Parks' choice to not give up her seat, the way that all of that stuff was hidden behind this version of her that was just super-tired and very demure, was done on purpose within the movement at the time. Right? There had been other women. Pauli Murray had refused to give up a seat on a train going . . .
Aminatou: Before Rosa Parks.
Rebecca: Years before, and in fact she'd been arrested for it. Claudette Colvin had refused to give up a seat and it had not provoked the boycott of the bus, right? Rosa Parks was chosen in part because she could be cast persuasively as non-threatening and the very movement that she helped to kickstart worked to not highlight the active and energetic dissent that she was participating in, the way her anger had helped to motivate her, and there was critique within that movement. A lot of the women who were in the civil rights movement alongside Rosa Parks were angry at the time at the way her role was minimized and sort of used in this one way that was performative, suffering, stoic femininity.
Aminatou: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca: And not political intention, energy, and anger, right? Within the movement at the time there was anger at the March on Washington that Rosa Parks wasn't -- no women were actually offered speaking roles even though they were the organizers. They had brought . . .
Aminatou: They were the ones that had brought everyone to come to Washington.
Rebecca: Right. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Gloria Richardson, Pauli Murray, Dorothy Height. All of these women were angry about that at the time, right? Angela Davis has gone on to critique the way that Rosa Parks was held up as part of the narrative of the civil rights movement as somebody who was sort of almost passive.
Aminatou: Like this meek grandma.
Rebecca: Right.
Aminatou: Who is a respectable person.
Rebecca: A seamstress, like there's nothing threatening about the way she was presented, when in fact her politics were always the politics of threat and dissent. She was working to upend power structures. We were never taught that. So that was sort of -- that's a starting point that I think a lot of people are familiar with and it can extend to all these other movements too. Because the thing about Rosa Parks is at least we know who she is, right?
Aminatou: Right.
Rebecca: But when we think about the labor movement for example when are we ever taught about the fact that some of the very first walkouts of what would become a labor movement over the course of centuries were staged by young women workers in the lull textile mills in New England in the 1830s? Those young women formed a union and held walkouts because of the terrible conditions that they were laboring under. They borrowed the rhetoric of the American Revolution. Those were kind of the seeds of the labor movement. 80 years later in 1909 it's women garment industry workers. Clara Lemlich who is . . .
Aminatou: Who was 23 at the time.
(20:00)
Rebecca: Yes, and she's the person who calls for the great uprising of 1909 which is 20,000 workers in shirt-waist manufacturers, and shirt-waist was the kind of shirt that was worn at the time by shop girls, and the working conditions in these shirt-waist factories were incredibly dangerous. I mean in addition to being terribly low-paid and economically abusive conditions for often very young women, women who were using their wages to support families, many of them immigrant families in New York's lower east side, but also terribly dangerous conditions. Flammable material everywhere, doors locked to keep the workers inside, no bathroom breaks permitted.
Aminatou: Everything you know as a labor win.
Rebecca: Right.
Aminatou: It was catalyzed by the work of these women.
Rebecca: In part the work of these women, they understood and were livid about the conditions in which they were being told they had to have their only opportunity to make wages and find some degree of economic security which of course was not particularly economically-secure. Clara Lemlich advocates for this strike. 20,000 shirt-waist workers go on strike. They actually reach deals with all but a couple of the shirt-waist factories. One of the shirt-waist factories that does not come to terms with the strikers is the Triangle shirt-waist factory and of course in March 1911 it burns and kills 146 workers inside, nearly all of them women, most of them young, unmarried women. The doors were locked. There's material everywhere that's incredibly flammable. The blaze is so bad that many of the women are incinerated and many of them jump to their deaths outside on the sidewalk.
In the days after that there's a memorial service for the dead at the Metropolitan Opera House and Rose Schneiderman who is an activist and an organizer, Rose Schneiderman is at the Metropolitan Opera House and she gives one of the fieriest political speeches that I've ever read calling -- saying to the mourners who are there "I can't look to you for solidarity. Women have been burned alive for years in this city and none of you have ever done anything to change it." Rose Schneiderman goes on alongside Francis Perkins and Al Smith to write some of the workplace safety regulations that are still in place today. So as you say when we look at what we -- some of the assumptions we make about what work . . . and it was pretty bare minimum, but what work places are forced to do to keep workers safe, a lot of . . .
Aminatou: Right. Points of egress, windows, breaks, weekends.
Rebecca: Right, right.
Aminatou: Things that we take for granted.
(22:25)
Rebecca: A lot of those rules were written thanks to the movement that in part was catalyzed by these women who were livid at injustice, and yet we are -- our eyes are never trained to look at those women and understand their anger as crucial, political, patriotic, righteous, and fundamentally change-making and transformative.
Aminatou: Yeah. You know, one of the points that you made earlier and a thing that is really an undercurrent in reading this book that was really -- it was really eye-opening to me -- was how throughout all of these movements, anywhere from suffrage to temperance to the labor movements to the civil rights movement, everybody borrows from the language of the founding fathers and of the great American man revolutionary who fought England and claimed their dignity. And it was such an eye-opener for me to realize that yes, that is a kind of anger that publicly codes as dignified and righteous and glorious is what the founding fathers did, like that is revolution. And in that same vein those are all the same sentiments that are denied to other people who are fighting for their rights, like anybody who is close to the margins. That was really eye-opening for me to read about and really realize that, you know, this has been going on since time immemorial. There is a kind of person that is allowed to be angry and fight the king and be -- you know, and turn into a hero. And everybody else just kind of, you know, the assumption is you'll just take it. You'll just take the injustice that you're living with. And when I think about even in my own life the ways that I've been -- I've really repressed my anger -- it now sounds ludicrous. It's like you should be livid and furious at injustice every day of your life.
(24:22)
Rebecca: Every second of every day, yes. That's exactly right. But it is -- it's true, we are just taught . . . it's in our bones. The messages are sent to us everywhere in pop culture, in the books we read, the television, the political narratives around us, that first of all it's that fetishization of that rage of the founders. That's patriotism. That's righteous anger. That's our great American history of equality and liberty and individual freedom. And we are constantly asked to ignore the fact that in this fight for representation, for political representation, well the founders' vision is one that replicates the inequities that they rebelled against. It does not enfranchise anybody but white men, white property-owning men at first.
Aminatou: Yeah.
Rebecca: It leaves a massive population in this country enslaved, owned -- economically owned. It bars women and enslaved people from anything like economic, civic, political participation, full social participation. And those white men whose righteous rage we are constantly asked to celebrate and look to as a guiding force in our nation and its progress, those men are permitted to build all the institutions: the government, the courts, to make the laws, to build the businesses. And they're doing that not only while shutting out the majority population of their country from representation but while profiting from their labor. So we know -- right, and these things, this is stuff that we sort of know but the full picture of how fucked up this is, sometimes it takes a while to come into full focus. Of course enslaved people are doing the labor that is creating the wealth in the country that is growing in which the white men who are running it, they're creating, they're profiting. They're building the buildings; they're building the roads. They're doing it all on their own behalf.
(26:24)
Aminatou: You mean the institutions, and they're building nations . . .
Rebecca: On the labor of enslaved people and on the labor of women who are not enfranchised, who do not have any shot at economic equity. The women are doing the domestic work. They are taking care of the children. They are feeding the men. They are clothing the men. They are doing the work that enables the public and political participation of the white men who are profiting off of that without having any representation of their own. And so this is the story of the country for a really long time until those inequities are so baked into the institutions, the laws, how the highways are built, right, and around whose neighborhood they're built, and who the businesses profit, that even the transformative movements -- and they have been transformative, I don't want to undersell them -- we're still not anywhere near the kind of equality that is what the founders insisted on for themselves.
And so we have to ask why are their calls for that kind of equality the thing that we can obsess over politically without ever really looking at why those other voices, which take pains as you say, to mimic the language of the revolutionary rupture, right? The declaration of sentiments which is what is written in 1848 in Seneca Falls is a riff on the Declaration of Independence. Those lull mill workers used the language of their forefathers. MumBet, who is an enslaved woman in Massachusetts . . .
Aminatou: Who you write about in this book.
Rebecca: Who I write about in the book. MumBet is an enslaved woman who is abused horribly in the household in which she lives by the wife of the husband who is in fact involved in revolutionary politics in the 18th century. And she is hit with a fire implement by this woman. She is furious, and she's hearing the revolutionary rhetoric coming from the man who owns her and she hears it and she applies it to her own situation. And she says "I'm hearing you talk about liberation and equality and this is my condition." And she petitions for her own freedom. She finds a lawyer, and her case is instrumental to what will ultimately be the outlawing of slavery in Massachusetts in the 1780s, I think in 1783.
(28:30)
So there's the fury of a woman again using the anger -- the angry rhetoric of the revolution on her own behalf and it fundamentally altering the laws of her state, you know? But we are still trained all these centuries later to hear the anger of white men differently than the way we hear all kinds of other anger. And you can look at the 2016 election as a perfect example of this in that if you think about the three biggest candidates who we talk about in terms of how they communicated, and you have Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, and two of those candidates were lauded by political media and I think by many of us individually, whether we despise their politics or whether we love their politics, their success is attributed to their ability to channel anger. Now which two candidates really channeled anger beautifully?
Aminatou: Well according to the general public, you know, your president Donald Trump. And Vermont's president Bernie Sanders. [Laughter] It's so interesting because viscerally these are obviously things that I knew but to see it chronicled in this book, and it is really a historical timeline of women's anger which is both exhilarating and depressing and exhilarating all over again, to see that in the 2016 election the two men, they get to be angry and they get to promise people the world and call for revolution . . . the idea of a millionaire calling for revolution is laughable.
Rebecca: Right.
Aminatou: Thank you GOP. You know, it's like I remember so much in the -- was it in the 2008 election when Hillary Clinton got fed up enough that she emoted. I won't even say that she cried. I won't say that she . . .
(30:20)
Rebecca: Oh, that's the same weekend. There was one weekend where she actually emoted all over the place. It wasn't just the crying.
Aminatou: Yeah, you know, it was like is she crying? Her voice got an octave louder here. And the amount of analysis and scrutiny that went into that . . .
Rebecca: Oh yeah.
Aminatou: It was like well if she's crying she's playing the woman card. Oh, now she's a shrill woman and she's yelling. And just realizing that there is no range of female emotion that is actually acceptable in public . . .
Rebecca: Right.
Aminatou: Was something that was very instructive to a lot of us, you know? There is a very narrow catwalk that you can be on.
Rebecca: I'm so glad you bring up that 2008 instance of Hillary crying, which by the way, just for anybody who doesn't remember . . .
Aminatou: We're all doing ginormous bunny ears here.
Rebecca: Here's the thing, for anybody who doesn't remember who might be listening, she got congested. [Laughs] She welled up. There is not -- I have watched that thing a million times.
Aminatou: Played the woman card. [Laughs]
Rebecca: Not a drop of water fell just to be clear. But truly I remember I was a young reporter when this happened and a news alert came across my desk that said "Hillary breaks down and sobs." And I was like oh no! But then I looked and I'm like she didn't cry but she did get congested. The amount of -- what pundits said afterwards, because then she did an upset, okay? She was about to lose in New Hampshire. This is critical context.
Aminatou: She won because she cried.
Rebecca: She won because she cried which is what everyone including CNN said.
Aminatou: She won because she cried.
Rebecca: And they all sort of had this vision of a soggy sisterhood where we were all like "She's a human being and I love her!"
Aminatou: If somebody cries we will elect her to office one thousand percent.
Rebecca: Because that has happened so many times in the past. But I thought at the time, before I'd even begun to think about this anger thing, and there's a portion in my book here where I write at some length about how many of us cry when we're angry and it's so profoundly misunderstood.
(32:15)
Aminatou: Yeah, this is actually the point I was going to make is that I . . . this gave me an entire new relationship with tears. Like you know me, I'm an emotionally constipated person. It takes a while.
Rebecca: [Laughs]
Aminatou: And really reading through a couple of these incidents like, you know, the Barbara Mikulski incident that you talk about here and having a legislator get so fed up that they're borderline in tears. It really made me realize that part of that display of emotion comes from a deep-seeded frustration as opposed to from some sort of female manipulation tactic that you're trying to work on.
Rebecca: Well the way that we regard women's tears is also really interesting and there are a couple different angles to look at this from, because women's tears are broadly understood as a sign of vulnerability which is why when Hillary Clinton cries in New Hampshire . . .
Aminatou: She wins.
Rebecca: Everybody says she wins. I always believed -- and it was before I'd actually done any of this research about tears and anger and before I had really thought about it this way -- I always thought that the fact that she won and she won women in New Hampshire even though she was down like ten points in the polls the day before, and everybody was like "She cried and everybody loves weepy ladies so they voted for her." And I thought at the time that this reading was completely wrong, that actually women were incredibly furious, because she'd been -- like people had been dancing on her grave in the media for a week after she hadn't won Iowa. And I thought women were really mad and she was probably mad at some . . . and she was, that was also a weekend where she yelled at Chris Matthews which she never does.
So anyway, I thought at the time that whether she was crying because she was angry or whether what that provoked in a lot of women in New Hampshire was a kind of anger, that it might've been more about anger, because I knew at that point in some visceral way that tears were about anger. But tears are very palatable in women in part because they signal weakness, vulnerability, like not strength. And I think it's profoundly misunderstood that so often those tears are tears of absolute inexpressible fury.
Aminatou: Yeah.
(34:05)
Rebecca: And that's true whether you're crying at work because something shitty just happened. It's true maybe if you're crying in public. Male politicians, including Ronald Reagan -- look John Boehner just cried through his entire . . .
Aminatou: John Boehner cries all the -- he cried the entire time. Barack Obama cried in these ways that everybody always lauded him for.
Rebecca: Right. And you know the one guy who really paid for crying was Muskie in New Hampshire.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Rebecca: And you know why? He was crying on behalf of his wife. This is something that enrages me and people never point it out.
Aminatou: It's true, I never thought about that.
Rebecca: Because there'd been an attack on his wife and he was so mad about it that he cried and that's the one guy in politics -- and he had to drop out of the presidential primary in 1972 because he cried in New Hampshire.
Aminatou: On behalf of his wife.
Rebecca: And it was all these other men cry all the fucking time. They just are like "Well he's so sensitive and he cares a lot about America." But the guy who cried about his wife had to leave politics. Anyway, there's another dimension of tears that I don't want to talk about tears without getting to which is the white woman tears situation because it is also true that because tears from some women elicit certain kinds of positive responses including sympathy, an affirmation of them as fundamentally vulnerable in a way that might be appealing as opposed to invulnerable in a way that might be threatening, tears have been used historically -- and continue to be by white women -- as a means of leveraging sympathy in ways that often go down very negatively to non-white people.
And so the tears of white women, especially when in difficult conversations around race, or tears of white women that signal vulnerability when they are making claims about having in some way been impinged upon by non-white people, are actually used as a mechanism to garner not only sympathy but support and sometimes defense that often winds up being a defense against blackness or non-whiteness. And that's a huge range of examples whether you're talking about the woman who claims falsely that a 14-year-old boy made a pass at her at a store and that 14-year-old boy Emmett Till winds up beaten to death and left in a river in 1955, that's the tears of white women have often been used as a justification for racial violence.
(36:20)
But it's also true if you look at the way that some of the conversations were had around say the women's march where the very frank and angry conversations about racial inequity within feminism and within the women's movement that were aired I think very beneficially during the planning of the women's march . . .
Aminatou: Yeah.
Rebecca: One of the major stories about the women's march in the Times was the chronicle of the white woman who had been made -- because she had been made to feel unwelcome because . . .
Aminatou: Yeah, she wasn't coming anymore.
Rebecca: She wasn't coming anymore. That's . . . I mean and that's not tears tears, it didn't have her crying or anything, but it's a similar impulse of like I'm being damaged. I am somehow being victimized here. And because black women's tears aren't afforded the same kind of value and black women's suffering and vulnerability isn't -- and black women's lives are not accorded the same kind of value in this white patriarchal capitalist system it is white women's tears that are often the most able to be manipulated for political effect.
[Ads]
(40:00)
Aminatou: Well, you know, one amazing feat of social engineering that you've pulled is that your book is coming out at the same time as the Kavanaugh hearings in the news. [Laughter]
Rebecca: I've got to tell you the marketing department was on it.
Aminatou: I know. Simon and Schuster, they just make magic happen. So this is fascinating. 27 years ago, almost to the week I want to say, it's like very close, Clarence Thomas gets confirmed to be a Supreme Court justice. And if you don't know the story of Professor Anita Hill I suggest you read many books.
Rebecca: Many books. Start with Strange Justice.
Aminatou: Yes, Strange Justice is amazing. And I think about, you know, how that episode specifically, the Anita Hill moment in our politics, is in modern -- I would say in the modern imagination. Like I was very young when that happened but I was still very aware. That was a catalyzing force for the number of women that we have in Congress today. It is a very small number of women. Let's not get carried away here.
Rebecca: Right.
Aminatou: The 1992 year of the woman yielded like four people.
Rebecca: Four ladies. Four ladies in the Senate, which was doubling the number . . .
Aminatou: But it was ground-shifting.
Rebecca: It was ground-shifting. And by the way those four included Carol Moseley Braun who in 1992 was the first ever black woman elected to the United States Senate. That is horrifying and humiliating, and as we've probably talked about this on here before, the next black woman to be elected to the United States senate was . . .
Aminatou: Kamala Harris.
Rebecca: Kamala Harris who sat in this chair on this show not long ago.
Aminatou: Right, like decades later.
(41:40)
Rebecca: So right. Patty Murray who is still high in senate leadership, she's had a tremendous impact on the United States Senate. She was also elected in 1992. Barbara Boxer from California just recently retired. Actually it's Kamala Harris in Barbara Boxer's old seat. And that's not probably accidental, like you elect a woman and it's vastly more likely you might elect a woman next for that same seat.
Aminatou: Right.
Rebecca: And interestingly, and I don't even know how I feel about this right now, Dianne Feinstein was the fourth woman who was elected in 1992 and depending on who you're reading, and I'm still finding out more about this, her handling of this sexual assault claim made against Brett Kavanaugh is obviously crucial to how this story unfolds.
Aminatou: Right.
Rebecca: And there was a period where I thought that she'd handled it very badly. I now increasingly think maybe she did the right thing. I don't know what I think about that yet, but obviously this is part of what it means to have people come into government is they exert influence in many cases for years -- decades -- later.
Aminatou: Yeah. And we're also in this time where everybody keeps telling us there are more women who are running for office for this midterm than we've had ever probably, right? But it's also not lost on me that it takes like eight women to make that. [Laughter]
Rebecca: Right, right.
Aminatou: We have hundreds of women around the country who are running but it is also true that statistically it takes very little women to make a shift.
Rebecca: You know what's horrifying? Almost all the primaries are done. The jaw-dropping statistic is that amongst non-incumbent candidates going into the midterms -- I think this is probably just in House races -- amongst non-incumbent candidates on the Democratic side . . .
Aminatou: I'm going to scream. How many?
Rebecca: Women are 50%.
Aminatou: Wow, okay.
Rebecca: Okay, now . . .
Aminatou: How many people is that? 12 people? [Laughs]
Rebecca: No, no, no. It's not that. It's just that . . .
Aminatou: That's pretty good.
Rebecca: It's that should be the norm. The thing that's jaw-dropping is I've never seen a number near 50% before.
Aminatou: Yeah, you're like parity. Parity doesn't exist.
Rebecca: Parity. But amongst -- again it's not even amongst candidates. Amongst candidates it's more like 43%. Non-incumbent candidates, the new candidates, it's 50%. So those women aren't all going to win, right? In fact we need to sort of be prepared for the fact that if they don't then there's going to be a whole bunch of messages about "We can't take chances on these kinds of women."
(43:50)
Aminatou: Which is also a lie. You actually have to lose elections before you win. You know, I'm remembering this small-time senator Barack Obama for example.
Rebecca: Right, right.
Aminatou: Getting trounced in his first races.
Rebecca: Right.
Aminatou: Went on to do big things I hear.
Rebecca: Right. Yeah.
Aminatou: Yeah, in order to win you probably have to lose a couple times.
Rebecca: You do have to lose. You do have to lose a couple times.
Aminatou: But the stakes always feel higher. But, you know, it's like thinking about the panel of people who interrogated really Anita Hill, and I can't believe Orrin Hatch is still alive. Like that's wild.
Rebecca: Three of those guys. Grassley was on that committee, Hatch. Hatch was one of the worst.
Aminatou: Oh, he was one of the worst and he continues to be one of -- you know?
Rebecca: He's the one who started on the . . .
Aminatou: He's called Professor Ford -- keeps calling her lady. He doesn't refer to her by her credentials.
Rebecca: He said she's mixed up. And that also speaks to how long these guys have . . .
Aminatou: Have power.
Rebecca: Have power, right? And this is -- we're talking about a lifetime appointment.
Aminatou: 27 years ago. You know what I mean?
Rebecca: Yes.
Aminatou: These guys are all in their 80s.
Rebecca: Exactly, right.
Aminatou: They're all in their 80s. They were already in their 60s.
Rebecca: And they're relatively unchallenged. That's the thing. We quell dissent in part by quelling women's anger. So Hatch's characterization of Dr. Blasey Ford as a little mixed up, okay, make no mistake. What he is saying is he's calling her crazy. He's -- and I saw other Republican hysteria.
Aminatou: Hysteria and anger go hand in hand.
Rebecca: And in fact in the same hearings Ben Sass, a far younger disgusting man, referred to the protesters before we even got to the allegation of assault, there were really angry vocal protesters in those hearings. I was really moved by the energy and the willingness of women to scream even when everyone was telling us this is a done deal. This guy is going to sail through 100%, right? And those hearings, first of all you had Harris, Klobuchar, Booker, Blumenthal. Like a lot of the Democrats actually challenging him in ways that I was gratified by. But also you had the protestors. You had Linda Sarsour and Bob Bland who were two of the women's march co-founders as two of the first people to get up and scream. But then you had all of these other women dressed as handmaids in the senate office buildings and women standing up in the middle of the hearings screaming and a woman getting up and screaming about how if healthcare reform were overturned by the court, which it likely will be in the hands of the right-wing court, she will die. And what is -- I think it was Orrin Hatch who responds "Get this loud mouth out of here. We don't have to deal with this." So this is the idea that women's anger is something we don't have to listen to. We shouldn't . . . what he said is we shouldn't . . .
Aminatou: These women are hysterical.
(46:35)
Rebecca: And Ben Sass said it was performed hysterical. "Oh, for 30 years I've been hearing women scream that they're going to die. It's hysteria."
Aminatou: Women are dying!
Rebecca: Of course women are dying all over the world where abortion is not legal and they have died . . .
Aminatou: They've died here.
Rebecca: They have died here, they will die here again, and they will be imprisoned here when abortion is made illegal which it's quite likely will happen in coming years because we're going to have a court that's shaped by Donald Trump and by the party that elected him, supports him, and defends him. So make no mistake that when Hatch characterizes her as mixed up he is tapping into the ways that we marginalize and disregard women's challenge to authority, dissent, anything that impedes men's power by expressing fury or an unwillingness to accept their abuses of power. All of this is stuff that gets written off was crazy, hysterical, laughable. And Anita Hill was written off. They said that she had erotomania, like she was sexually obsessive.
Aminatou: And if you watch the footage . . .
Rebecca: Yes.
Aminatou: She is so cool, collected.
Rebecca: She's brilliant. She should've been on the Supreme Court. [Laughs]
Aminatou: Exactly, it's like brilliant. It is so wild to me that she can be characterized that way.
(47:24)
Rebecca: I was in tenth grade for the Hill hearings, and it's interesting, I actually watched them a weekend that I was at the farm in Maine where my mother grew up with my very Republican grandparents. And I was watching them in the context of being with people who thought she was lying. I believed her but it was such -- I was just by myself in my own head believing her. Had I been with my parents watching them it would've been very different because they believed Anita Hill, but my grandparents surely didn't.
And so my experience of originally watching those hearings was one of intense solitude, like in my own brain, that I was seeing as a whatever it was, 16-year-old, what I believed to be happening, and wondering am I right about this or is everyone around me right? Those hearings when I later -- certainly ten years or more later when I started to work as a feminist journalist and to think about politics sort of professionally and spend so much of my energy and time trying to tease out the stories and the history that I think got us here, and that's been a project that has changed for me over the years but that I've been doing for a lot of my career as a journalist, I have always thought that the Anita Hill hearings were the fulcrum of my adult lifetime's worth of history around women, race, gender, power, and politics.
And it's so strange to me, I wrote about -- my first book was about the 2008 election. I wrote about the Hill hearings when I wrote that book because they were critical. They proceed in 1992, the year of the women, when so many women were elected. It's also the year that Bill and Hillary Clinton came to the White House. I believe that Bill's own sexual power abuses derailed the feminist conversation around sexual harassment that had really come into the popular lexicon following the Hill hearings even though Thomas was confirmed to the court. It really altered the way we -- her testimony altered the way that we understood what sexual harassment was in the popular consciousness. It had been decided in 1986 by the Supreme Court that it was a form of sex discrimination that was barred under the Civil Rights Act, Article 7. But it wasn't until five years later with Hill's testimony that so much of America saw that we began to understand harassment as a behavior that did harm to women -- mostly women, not exclusively -- but largely to women as a class. Not just an individual quirky behavioral thing that happens in some offices.
(49:50)
But then that was derailed, and this has to do with the power of white men, which is not just as the bad guys but sometimes as the leaders of the party that you believe in. So many feminists wound up defending Bill Clinton against charges by Juanita Broaddrick, charges by many women who claimed that he had harassed or assaulted them, and then of course after the Starr Investigation when we learned that he'd had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky all kinds of feminists defended him. And the politics of why are very complicated and there's a very real thing of dependency. It had been 12 years of Reagan and Bush and there were a lot of feminists who were depending on the leader of the Democratic party who at that point was Bill Clinton to appoint the Supreme Court justices. He appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To, you know, pass the Family and Medical Leave Act, our very meager version of supporting anybody who needs to have a baby. If you work in a company that has more than 50 people and you've been there for more than a year sorry you won't be paid. Right. But yay!
Aminatou: Right.
Rebecca: So some of the fights within feminism around sex and the porn wars that had happened in the '80s that led a lot of feminists to be very invested in thinking about not wanting to cast Monica Lewinsky as a victim. All very complicated conversations but it derails the post-Anita Hill conversation around sexual harassment. You can draw a direct line between Clarence Thomas sitting on the Supreme Court and the decisions he's been a part of which by the way include decisions on sexual harassment law. But also the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the Citizens United decision. These things that paved the way for the growth of the Republican Party and the ultimate election of Donald Trump who's now nominated Brett Kavanaugh. The fury at Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton whose presidential campaigns were deeply complicated by, from a feminist perspective for a lot of reasons, including by residual anger about her husband's sexual misdeeds.
Aminatou: Yeah.
(51:50)
Rebecca: But the anger at her loss is part of what prompts this furious uprising that includes the MeToo movement that once again returns sexual harassment and assault to the public conversation and that I think probably gets us to a place where Dr. Blasey Ford winds up telling her story and we're hearing it differently than we would have. So Anita Hill is one of the most politically, socially defining nation-reshaping events of any of our lifetimes and so it is such a remarkable symmetry or narrative that this is where we are.
Aminatou: Yeah. And I hate that that's probably going to be true for Dr. Blasey Ford also, you know? For . . .
Rebecca: Yes.
Aminatou: For a different generation. I know that the book is not -- you know, it's not some sort of prescriptive "Here's what you should do. You should train more. You should . . ." Even though you've written about and you and I have talked about how we're sleeping the best we've ever slept.
Rebecca: Right.
Aminatou: And we're having the best sex of our lives and we're the angriest we've ever been so there is something about that.
Rebecca: Right.
Aminatou: But I was wondering if you could leave the CYG listener with one piece of advice whether it's political or personal or something to look forward to in these tumultuous times that we're living in?
Rebecca: So I guess I'm going to go with a piece of advice about anger but it's not the thing that's like "Get a great sex life by being openly angry."
Aminatou: [Laughs] But do, really.
(53:30)
Rebecca: Well if you can. I mean this is the thing, that path is open for certain people.
Aminatou: There's so much privilege.
Rebecca: And this is because the system is still designed to penalize women who express anger, and you and I are in positions. We're on a podcast. Your listeners care that we're angry and I think there's a chance that they're taking this conversation seriously, right? Do you know how remarkable that is that somebody wants to know why you and I are angry, right?
Aminatou: Oh, it feels like a fever dream.
Rebecca: It's a fever dream.
Aminatou: It's a feminist fever dream.
Rebecca: And that's true when I write my book for which I am literally paid and I have editors who want to know what I seriously think about anger. That experience that we have in that is so different from still the experience that so many women have if they are angry and they're penalized. They don't get the promotion. They don't get the raise. They get fired from their jobs. Their partners get livid at them for challenging them. If they're a woman of color and they get mad at being pulled over they take enormous physical risk in getting angry for being pulled over for no reason, right? There are costs and tolls placed on the expression of anger. And so I could not responsibly do that kind of lean into your anger. It's not an accident that I say lean into your anger.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Rebecca: But I can't do that individualized recommendation as like "Let it out, ladies!" The thing that I think is incumbent on us is we work to alter the way that women's anger is received, essentially to change the system. Now how do you do that when you're talking about forms of expression? The way we can individually start to alter not just ourselves but our system is to start listening for women's anger. It's to start listening to how we are taught and we have internalized the ways we write it off, because we do. I do. She's crazy. Okay, yeah, sure, but she's a little nuts, right? Or oh god, don't say it that way; it's too much. Like there are all kinds of responses that we don't even think about that we need to start listening for how the system in which we have been raised and in which many of us -- all of us -- participate in one way or another devalues women's fury.
(55:35)
And so that can start in any number of ways. Being curious about why other women are angry. Asking them why women -- why they're angry. And then when they tell you, even if some of it is at you, thinking about it, it doesn't mean self-flagellation or like performative uh, uh, uh, but actually considering the value of women's rage, other women's rage, and start listening for it. Start paying attention and doing the thing that you and I get when the people who are listening take it seriously when we tell them why we're angry. Start doing that for other women. Take their anger seriously. Listen for it. Ask questions about it. Think about what it means. I think that's my piece of advice which probably should've been pithier but that's what it is.
Aminatou: Perfect. I'm so happy we get to rage together. [Laughs]
Rebecca: I know, keeps me sane.
Aminatou: It does keep me sane. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger is out October 2nd wherever you buy books. Thanks so much for coming Rebecca. We'll have you every week if you will come back. [Laughter]
Rebecca: I will always come back.
Aminatou: Thanks.
[Interview Ends]
Aminatou: Ugh, Rebecca! Okay I feel better, I feel better, I feel better.
Ann: Yeah, it is true that feeling rage is good sometimes and also getting out of the rage spiral feels good too. I'm like smart people, yes, thank you. Thank you Rebecca. Thank you for your sadly perennially relevant work on women and rage. That is what I have to say to that. [Laughter]
Aminatou: Ugh! Good luck to Amy Coney Barrett. See you on the Internet and I'm going to take myself for a walk otherwise I am going to explode today.
Ann: I'm going to be putting together our fundraising slide deck for, ugh, the pillow screaming startup so I'll see you at the strategy meeting about how we're going to make a bajillion dollars from that idea.
Aminatou: Oh my god, we're going to raise a billion dollars. The first time women have raised a billion dollars for anything. Going to exit by next Friday. It's going to be great. [Laughs]
Ann: Okay I'm going to exit from this episode. [Laughs]
Aminatou: Oh my gosh, talk to you later. Bye boo.
Ann: Bye.
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf. Our producer is Jordan Bailey and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.