The need for Anger
and its ties to an early-modern feminist text
When I first moved to Alaska—a place my husband is from and wanted to return to—we both were starting new jobs in a new place. His new work took him to western Alaska for a month to do fieldwork. As a result, I started my new job in this new place with my dog, navigating Anchorage. Soon after we arrived, cities of boxes from the first home my husband and I had bought together in Oregon arrived, and I unpacked the tetris of our older life, trying to make it fit into the basement apartment we had been able to find ahead of the move. Needless to say, my introduction to Alaska was not a soft one. It had ragged edges. It asked me to dig up the roots I had in a job I had loved, to move north with the person I loved more.
As Kate Zambreno writes:
I am realizing you become a wife, despite the mutual attempt at an egalitarian partnership, once you agree to move for him. You are placed into the feminine role--you play the pawn. Once you let that tornado take you away into the self-abnegating state of wifedom. Which I did from the beginning, now almost a decade ago, quitting my job...so we could live in London and he could attend a graduate program.
I felt that realization. I had never resented being a wife before, but that summer, I could feel myself growing angry. Angry that because of internalized misogyny, my husband and I both never really questioned whose career we would follow, despite our beliefs in being equal partners. I wanted to move for him, to help him not feel homesick—but then I was the homesick one in a way I had never experienced—and I had lived abroad and in cities that were not my home previously with pangs, but nothing I couldn’t recover from. Alaska is a very distinct place—I’m still trying.
Our friends, a couple, visited us that first summer of our move, and I said something of my frustration, missing my old job and friends, of feeling so uprooted. The woman looked at me and asked “why are you so vitriolic?”
I’ve always been self-conscious and was taken aback—my anger was showing. I felt the shame of that judgment, of being vitriolic—like I had done something wrong. This woman moved for her husband and they seemed to find an equitable adjustment, so I suspect she wasn’t really thinking about the difference between California and Anchorage. But her question hit me hard—because I was feeling vitriolic. I was angry that Alaska was coming between my husband and me in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I was angry at myself for that—and at society.
My mom has asked me the same question at times. Once when I was working at the museum 60 hours a week, trying to please a boss who would repeatedly criticize a perceived lack of time spent at the museum, despite working each night at home until at least 11 pm—desperately clinging to be present in my 8-year-old son’s life, picking him up from after school care to be home and present at dinner and before bed. Having lunch with my parents felt like another demand in a hectic time, and I was angry about it—not at them, but at being in a situation of constant scarcity, of my professional commitment being questioned by a boss who held to manic, masculine ideals of what work looks like while being a woman. And in the same breath trying to have lunch with visiting parents, which meant time away from the office. While we waited for our water my mom asked: why are you so angry?
How can we not be angry—how can we go about life without feelings of anger towards history, toward the chasms in history that remain invisible, the raging exploitation of people and resources, inequalities, injustices—all of it.
I’m angry because there should be no reason today that a woman cannot work and be present for her own child. I’m angry that women are expected to still do it all. I’m angry because of how women’s rights in this country are disintegrating before our eyes the more attention gets called to it—and how rarely people in this state, let alone the country, seek to rectify the injustices of genocide and slavery that made this country what it is and now are screaming at school boards because they want to talk about it even less.
I have to believe that there is power in anger, given that it is so often cited as a dangerous emotion. Anger causes things to change. It’s a catalyst. I do see the downsides, and why so many aphorisms admonish us to let anger recede, to stay calm and carry on, to move forward from the past. But for me, my anger feels more like a fire that reminds me I am lit from within, that without it, we move to acceptance of standards that discriminate and oppress.
I want to be alive to the fire that tells me there is still so much fuel that needs to burn—to change it into another form of matter than what it is currently masquerading as: critical race theory opposition rhetoric needs to burn; ignorance of Indigenous genocide and oppression needs to burn; misogyny and patriarchy sure as hell needs to burn. All of it can feed something greener and more alive than what we have been handed in history and social structures as what we must ‘accept.’
My etymology text tells me that anger has roots in the 13th century, when as a verb it rooted from Old Norse, angra, “to grieve, vex, distress.” As a noun, its use dates slightly later—the mid-13th century—rooted from Old Norse angr—here given as “distress, grief, sorrow, affliction,” also citing a Proto-Germanic word angaz, meaning “tight, painfully constricted, painful.” Finally, it notes that Old Norse had “angr-luass,” meaning ‘free from care.’
The hint that anger arises out of grief, distress, sorrow, and affliction feels right—that anger is so much more than rage or wrath directed outward; it's about the grief of being hurt, oppressed, painfully constricted. And it’s the last meaning that gets at the crux of it—angre-lauss, free from care. Because that’s what anger feels like to me—it feels like care. Care for one’s self at times, but especially care for those in need of attention. I want to direct my anger towards change, to direct anger/care towards oppression, the constricting painfulness that society continues to inflict, the images of pressure and oppression we are told to face with a calm, polite, tone in order to say anything about it. Polite silence does not create change.
In one of those great ironies that only rediscovered history can provide, the first woman to have published a polemic proto-feminist work under her own name in early modern England was by a woman—named Jane Anger.
While some scholars suspect that her name was a penname—which many later women writers adopted when responding to misogynist texts—with fantastic names like Mary Tattlewell and Joane Hit-him-home (!)—there were several people with the surname Anger in England at the same time that Jane Anger wrote her feminist essay.
Jane Anger—Her Protection For Women is often framed within the querrelle des femmes—or otherwise known as “the woman question”—which began in the 1400s through the nineteenth century—arguably it has never stopped. It was common during the heights of the querelle des femmes (1400-1700) that men would publish arguments against the equality of women, maligning women’s traits and the reasons they could not be considered equal with men. Several women who witnessed these misogynist attacks refused to stay silent, writing their own defense in return. However, in Jane Anger’s case, it’s been difficult to track down the exact argument she may have been responding to—with the implication that hers is the first work by a woman to publish a full-length defense of her sex in English.
Jane Anger—Her Protection For Women was published in 1589—a time where it was rare for women to write let alone publish on non-religious themes, or to argue against the supremacy of men. Anger’s pamphlet also doesn’t shy from exhibiting specifically, well, her anger—one source writes that:
for the first time, her text brought a distinctive new voice to English writing, which emphasized the voice of female anger.
Anger wasn’t following the rules of staying silent, and she wasn’t following rules by politely arguing her case. She was anger personified as a woman. Another source writes that by doing so she
…transformed the idea of masculine models of composition to invent a female writing style to suit her enterprise.
Her work criticizes masculine rhetorical styles with their overemphasis on “manner” over “matter.” She repeatedly points out that men misinterpret women because male writers assume that women are incapable of entering the male sphere of print, writing:
their slanderous tongues are so short, that the time wherein they have lavished out their words freely hath been so long, and they know we cannot catch hold of them to pull them out, and they think we will not write to reprove their lying lips.
I love how her anger is placed front and center and doesn’t hold back, how she employs wit and humor, inviting laughter while also making fun of the men who hold themselves superior:
Fie on the falsehood of men, whose minds go oft a-madding and whose tongues cannot so soon be wagging but straight they fall a-railing. Was there ever any so abused, so slandered, so railed upon, or so wickedly handled undeservedly, as are we women? Will the gods permit it, the goddesses stay their punishing judgments, and we ourselves not pursue their undoings for such devilish practices? O Paul’s steeple and Charing Cross!
O Paul’s steeple and Charing Cross—a new exclamation for my vocabulary of vitriol and anger—from the mouth of Anger herself.
Even now writing about anger, I still have that reflex of worry—that I’ll be thought bitter, shrieky. But it’s the binaries that the world continues clinging to—as if by displaying anger, I somehow have given up the benefits that silence can, at times, bring. I want to find a way that allows feelings to exist without the policing of them that we’ve been taught to internalize. I refuse to push away a fire that can fuel me to question, to not accept practices and ways of being that feel so instinctively wrong, to hope for—and expect—something more.
Anger asks us to think critically—to cause change for others and for ourselves. As Kate Mann writes:
Silence is golden for the men who smother and intimidate women into not talking, or have them change their tune to maintain harmony. Silence isolates his victims; and it enables misogyny. So, let us break it.
In homage to Jane Anger: O Paul’s steeple and Charing Cross! Yes. Let us break it.
This is epic. Fantastic. My mother gets angry when I am not suffering in silence as she did. It's self-propelling! It's the perpetual motion machine!
Thanks for this essay! Anger has its uses...