Rebecca Traister Is Happy to Be Mad

Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: The New Yorker Radio Hour
Episode: Rebecca Traister Is Happy to Be Mad
Date: October 5, 2018
Host: David Remnick
Guest: Rebecca Traister

This episode examines the central role of anger—particularly women’s anger—in political and social change, through the lens of Rebecca Traister’s book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. The conversation spans current events such as the Kavanaugh hearings and the #MeToo movement, the history of women’s activism, and the complex intersections of race, gender, and power. Traister and Remnick delve into the personal and collective importance of expressing anger, what it reveals about American society, and how it can be harnessed to push for justice.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Kavanaugh Hearings and the Visibility of Women’s Anger

• Setting the stage: The conversation occurs on the day of the Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testimonies.
• Cultural Insight: Traister draws a direct line between the anger seen in current protest (notably the elevator confrontation with Senator Jeff Flake) and the themes of her book, explaining how these moments reveal deep fractures in American society surrounding gender, power, and legitimacy.
  • “We are getting a very full and detailed view of cultures around wealth, white, fundamentally patriarchal power centers... where people are teenagers, the prep school.” (Rebecca Traister, 01:39)

The Legitimacy and Utility of Women’s Anger

• Personal Motivation: Traister explains that writing her book originated from her own emotional confusion and search for professional purpose following the 2016 election.
• Finding Focus: A pivotal moment came during a walk with her husband, who suggested that her palpable anger could itself be the subject of her work:
  • “I just can't think straight, Darius. I'm so mad. And he was like, well, maybe that's what your work is.” (Rebecca Traister, 06:25)
  • “It was the first feeling of, like, clarity and lightness in my head that I'd had at that point in two months.” (Rebecca Traister, 07:07)

The Racial Dynamics of Anger and Activism

• Historical Context: Traister underscores the foundational, often overlooked, activism and thought leadership of Black women, citing figures such as Shirley Chisholm, Florence Kennedy, Rosa Parks, and Mamie Till.
• Intellectual Legacy: She highlights Pauli Murray's critical but under-credited intellectual contributions:
  • “Pauli Murray was credited by both Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the intellectual work she did laying out the framework for racial and gendered inequity in this country...” (Rebecca Traister, 07:58)
• The Racialization of Emotional Expression: Traister points out that while tears are often interpreted as vulnerability for white women, they do not carry the same sympathy when shed by women of color:
  • “The vision of the traditionally vulnerable femininity that garners sympathy or empathy is very often the suffering white woman. The crying black woman doesn't have that same kind of imaginative hold.” (Rebecca Traister, 11:46)
  • White women’s tears have a history of justifying racial violence, which complicates discussions around vulnerability and anger.

Anger in the Workplace and Emotional Coding

• Personal Story: Traister narrates an experience at the New York Observer where tears prompted by fury were perceived by male colleagues as mere sadness, not anger.
  • “They don't know you're furious. They think you're sad and will be pleased because they got to you.” (Advice from a manager to Rebecca Traister, 09:39)
• Gendered Emotional Norms: The discussion exposes how women are discouraged from expressing rage directly due to social penalties, leading to coded behaviors like crying.

The Challenge of Male Learning in the MeToo Era

• Men’s Awakening: Remnick and Traister share personal and observed experiences of men being shocked by the ubiquity and violence revealed by #MeToo, leading to confusion and defensiveness.
• Traister’s Nuanced Sympathies: While acknowledging her anger at men and patriarchy, Traister expresses empathy for men struggling to adapt to new standards:
  • “We are changing rules partway through the game... There are some people who are caught in the middle who entered the world with one set of expectations... that's no longer acceptable. That has a cost. It has a toll. And I do feel for those guys. That doesn't mean that I don't think the process is necessary.” (Rebecca Traister, 15:00)
• Women’s Conflict: Traister stresses that fervent proponents of the MeToo movement themselves feel conflicted and reluctant to assume the role of judges or executioners.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Anger’s Power:
  “This book is in large measure about anger, the legitimacy of anger, the deployment of anger historically toward good.”
  — David Remnick, 03:51

• On the Role of White Women and Race in Feminism:
  “I was acutely aware of my identity as a white woman, the degree to which my work has been blinkered by my whiteness, my work on feminism, the degree to which I have been pushed to be better, to think more clearly about race and class. That's been a big part of my evolution as a writer.”
  — Rebecca Traister, 04:10

• On Difficult Change:
  “It asks of us to complicate those incredibly intimate relationships... We are changing rules partway through the game. That's what this process is asking us to do... I do feel for those guys. That doesn't mean that I don't think the process is necessary.”
  — Rebecca Traister, 15:00

• On the Misinterpretation of Women’s Anger:
  “They don't know you're furious. They think you're sad and will be pleased because they got to you.”
  — Anonymous manager to Rebecca Traister, 09:39

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:10 – 01:38: Introduction; contextualizing Kavanaugh hearings and the cultural moment.
• 01:39 – 03:18: Traister on narratives of privilege, invisibility of power abuses, and “boys will be boys”.
• 03:51 – 04:10: Remnick and Traister discuss the book’s focus on the legitimacy and utility of anger.
• 06:25 – 07:07: Traister recounts the personal revelation that drove her book’s focus.
• 07:20 – 09:17: The historical centrality of Black women’s anger and activism.
• 09:39 – 10:39: Story from the New York Observer about crying as coded anger.
• 10:34 – 11:42: Discussion of how gender and race shape emotional expression.
• 12:37 – 13:17: Men’s awakening to the realities of harassment/assault (#MeToo).
• 15:00 – 16:02: Traister’s empathy for men adapting to changed expectations and women’s inner conflict.

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Tone, Style, and Final Thoughts

David Remnick’s calm, probing style draws out Rebecca Traister’s passionate yet reflective voice. The conversation is earnest, direct, and at times confessional—Traister speaks openly about her own evolution, discomfort, and the messy realities underlying social change. The episode is candid about intersections of gender and race and doesn’t sermonize or offer easy solutions, instead emphasizing the legitimacy of anger as a transformative social force.

The episode closes with mutual appreciation and a restatement of the importance of Traister’s book in helping men and women alike better understand this charged moment in American life.

Transcript

[A]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

[B]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you watch the video of two protesters with Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator during the Kavanaugh hearings, if you saw them confront him with so much anger at the way women have been treated for so long, the way they said to a U.S. senator, don't look away from me, look at me and tell me it doesn't matter. If you look at the way Flake changed his position afterwards, it's all becoming clear that something absolutely remarkable is taking place in America right now. This is very much the subject of Rebecca Traister's new book, Good and the Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. The book combines a kind of history of women's uprisings with an analysis of the MeToo movement. Traister has written for New York Magazine, Elle, the New York Times and the Washington Post. And her last book was called all the Single Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. Rebecca Traister and I spoke on the very day that Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh both testified about her sexual assault allegations. Rebecca, there's no way to avoid this. We are talking now just hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee has done its questioning. There was a very specific story being told by Professor Ford as well as Ms. Ram and others, and a very particular milieu as well. What did the specifics tell you the.

[C]

Specifics of their stories? Yeah, well, we are getting a very full and detailed view of cultures around wealth, white, fundamentally patriarchal power centers that begin in, you know, when people are teenagers, the prep school. Deborah Ramirez's story, which was about how she was an outsider to this very elite, fratty hard drinking, badly behaved, relatively repercussion free social circle of extremely wealthy, privileged white men who were all on paths toward immense power.

[B]

And the narrative of it was when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible. Boys will be boys, right?

[C]

Who amongst us has not, right? And that's again, that's about the sort of invisibility of certain kinds of power abuses I write about in the book. And something that I've become kind of obsessed with in thinking both about how, for example, a Black Lives Matter movement has been talked about in a mainstream press and then watching the same kinds of things around the MeToo movement, it's helped me to understand a little bit about how when power is abused in the direction that is sort of natural. The more powerful do something bad or harmful or even violent to the less powerful. It's sort of invisible, right? Oh, oh, he was a drunk boy. Of course he did this. Like what young man? What 17 year old, healthy young man with a sex drive and a keg like wouldn't. Hasn't behaved that way. It's like indiscernible as harm in some way.

[B]

In your book Good and Mad, you write very early in the book. I am a white woman who has been angry in my life and my work, occasionally on my own behalf, but more often about politics, about inequity and the grotesque unfairness of the world and this country, how it was built and who it still excludes and systematically diminished. And then you're off to the races. This book is in large measure about anger, the legitimacy of anger, the deployment of anger historically toward good.

[C]

What set you off on was an attempt to get my thoughts clear. After the election, I was.

[B]

Did that take some doing?

[C]

Oh God, yes. I didn't know. I was wrestling with what my job was. I was wrestling with what my work was.

[B]

How do you mean?

[C]

I was very muddy about what the story was that I needed to tell. I have to say that I haven't talked about this before and there's a degree to which I was deeply obsessed by the question of the white women. I was acutely aware of my identity as a white woman, the degree to which my work has been blinkered by my whiteness, my work on feminism, the degree to which I have been pushed to be better, to think more clearly about race and class. That's been a big part of my evolution as a writer. And there was something that had happened right before the election. I'd been on part of a podcast with a bunch of women and one of them had said about the white young white men who was like the classic Bernie supporter. Like she had said something like, where are you guys out there trying to persuade people to vote for Hillary because it's your guys. It's white men who are not voting for her. Where are the left white guys? Go get your boys. Right? That was the phrase that she'd used. Go get your boys. Right. And it was not a surprise to me that white women had voted for Donald Trump. But I was acutely aware of this demographic and I felt some responsibility. And I'm very sympathetic to the argument, which is like, leave them be. It is not worth the investment in trying to persuade white women to be on our side. There's A woman in my book, Jess Morales, who says she worked on the Hillary campaign, and she was like, look, this was about persuading white women to not be Phyllis Schlafly. And that has never, ever worked. They're always gonna be Phyllis Schlafly. Right. I understand and have sympathy with. With that. Like, just let them rot. Right? They want to support a system that fundamentally oppresses them and that oppresses other people. Great. But I felt some. That that phrase, go get your boys was echoing in my own head. And I think that I. Part of what I wanted to do was also think about white women and what impulses and messages are at work on white women. And I felt like it was my responsibility to examine race from the perspective of whiteness in conjunction with looking at gender and then the anger. So I was feeling that, but I wasn't sure how to do it right. And that was the question about my work. How do I do that? What do I do? What is my job? What's the story here? But everything was so clouded. And I was on a walk with my husband between Christmas and New Year's of that year, since 2016 and 2017, and I was trying to explain to him the despair I was feeling about, like, not knowing what my role was supposed to be. What was my work gonna be professionally? Professionally, yeah. And I said, I just can't think straight, Darius. I'm so mad. And he was like, well, maybe that's what your work is. And I said, what do you mean? And he goes, well, maybe that's what you need to write about, is anger. And as soon as he said it, he's not a writer. It was just something he was responding to. And what. But suddenly, in that exchange, I'm not exaggerating when I said it was the first feeling of, like, clarity and lightness in my head that I'd had at that point in two months.

[B]

It is interesting that the. A lot of the exemplars of constructive anger in the book historically are black women. Shirley Chisholm, Florence Kennedy, who I remember well, watching on public access television for hours in her great hats, Rosa Parks, and of course, the mother of Emmett Till. That's not by any coincidence. That's not by accident.

[C]

No, not at all. Women of color have often been not only the leading activist organizers and the people who first gave voice and form to a lot of the transformative social and political movements that have reshaped America. They also often have done the thinking. I mean, Pauli Murray, who's somebody I write about in this book, Pauli Murray was credited by both Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the intellectual work she did laying out the framework for racial and gendered inequity in this country and laying the groundwork for the laws that would ultimately wind up protecting and trying to ameliorate the kind of gendered and racial inequality that she was trying to address. She's so very rarely credited as this leader.

[B]

And Florence Kennedy. I hadn't heard the name Florence Kennedy in years. I mean, she's very much of the generation of Gloria Steinem or a little even older.

[C]

She was her speaking. She and Gloria Steinem were speaking partners constantly on the road. Yes.

[B]

Right. Tell us a little bit about Florence Kennedy.

[C]

So Florence Kennedy was a black feminist lawyer. She was outrageous for her time, but I think she would be outrageous now.

[B]

I think so.

[C]

In her demeanor and her willingness to be vocally, profanely, unapologetically and joyfully pissed off about everything she was pissed off about. And there was a lot of it. She was mad about racism, she was mad about sexism, and she wasn't gonna play nice at all.

[B]

Now, you wrote about a time when you were. You were working in a male dominated office and you found yourself in tears. You were angry and you were crying. Until you write eight chilly hard ass manager. Those are in quotes. A woman pulled you into a stairway and said to you, they don't know you're furious. They think you're sad and will be pleased because they got to you. Where were you working? What was going on.

[C]

Was at the New York Observer. I've never talked about this with the woman who said it. And I don't know if she even remembers. And to be honest, I don't remember what I was angry about. I mean, I can take guesses. But the thing that was astounding to me is that this is a person who had always intimidated me because she wasn't. There was nothing outwardly emotional, no sense that she was paying close attention to the experiences of the people. She was just. She was an incredibly efficient, incredibly talented manager of people and of copy. And the fact that she saw in sort of what was a split second something that I wouldn't have been able to describe. As soon as she said it, I was like, I am furious. Of course I'm furious. Of course I'm crying because I'm furious. I think that's such a common experience.

[B]

For women, which is to express what outwardly seems the sadness. But inside is rage.

[C]

Yes, it's hammered home to us so often that our rage is fundamentally inexpressible. Because if we express it, we will not be heard. We will not be taken seriously. We'll be seen as, you know, crazy, unhinged, ball busting, unattractive, invalid, marginal. Like it will go badly for us if we express our anger directly. And I think that I write about this in the book, that one of the tactics that so many of us turn to, we cry, which is a fundamentally more acceptable mode of emotion for women. It is in part because of what that manager said. To me, it will be understood as vulnerability, which is more acceptable in women. To me right now, that's especially true for white women. By the way, there's a racial dynamic in terms of crying as being something that can elicit sympathy. And that sympathy is very much more likely to accrue to a crying woman if she is white.

[B]

What are you saying? What is a woman of color more likely to do?

[C]

Well, women of color have written about this very beautifully, that the vision of the traditionally vulnerable femininity that garners sympathy or empathy is very often the suffering white woman. The crying black woman doesn't have that same kind of imaginative hold. And more than that, white women's tears have often been used to cover for instances of racism. I mean, it's the vision of the suffering white woman, and the need to protect her has often been the COVID for lynching, for, you know, for racialized racist violence. So I just want to, you know, when we talk about the tears of women being something that makes them vulnerable, that is a dynamic that applies, especially if you are a white woman.

[B]

I really do hope men read this book in great numbers as well as women. And for me, there was an especially affecting moment that I'm going to touch on. Your husband comes to you. It's just as the MeToo movement is really exploding and he says, I'm shocked. The profusion of it, the violence of it, the horror of so many stories that we've heard about in the last year about sexual harassment and sexual assault. It was all shocking to him, shocking to me. And he's coming to you in some way for what you call feminist absolution. So what's to be learned here? What can you tell him? And really, by extension, what can you tell me?

[C]

Well, I think that this. My hope is that this is a moment of education and readjustment of the view of a full human experience for a lot of men who have just not seen the. Have not realized how common, how ubiquitous, how every day these kinds of experiences Are.

[B]

Aren't all men blinker to some degree? Sure.

[C]

This is part of opening eyes. Men are learning something about the experience of not being men in the world that they've been blind to.

[B]

Yet much of the learning comes out in terms of defensiveness or.

[C]

For some. For some. And it's a process. And I don't. I don't. I'm actually.

[B]

You worry about, you know, thinking about, oh, my God, in high school, maybe I said something terrible. I made a bad joke in the office. That's what you're.

[C]

All of that for all of my anger. And it's. And this is an angry book that I've written, and I am very angry at men. And I talk about the complexities of. The tricks of a women's movement or a feminist movement is that it asks you to identify as your oppressor a group of people who are your intimates, your loved ones, the men you share beds with and families with, and who are your brothers and your fathers and your sons and your friends. It asks of us to complicate those incredibly intimate relationships that are often loving and that are often based in need and dependence on the men on whom we rely. I really do feel for the men for whom this is difficult. We are changing rules partway through the game. That's what this process is asking us to do. That is hard, but there's no other way to do it. We don't get to just start fresh with a generation starting now. Right. If you actually want to change the way that the power structures work and the abuses that they permit, and you want to say, actually, we don't want to have those abuses anymore. We want to make them. Them no longer acceptable, that is gonna mean that there are some people who are caught in the middle who entered the world with one set of expectations and one set of assumptions about how they could behave and are being told halfway through that that's no longer acceptable. And that is really. That has a cost. It has a toll. And I do feel for those guys. That doesn't mean that I don't think the process is necessary. And I stand behind it. And I don't think I'm alone in this. Most of the people that I know who are fervent proponents of the MeToo movement and of this difficult, painful process are incredibly conflicted about it, too. We don't want to be the police who determine if somebody should lose their job or not lose their job. And a lot of the anti MeToo stuff says, oh, it lacks nuance and it's just a bunch of executioners. No, everybody I know who is behind this movement, you know, most intensely and fervently feels incredible conflict. And so I feel tremendous sympathy for the guys, too.

[B]

The book, and it's a remarkable one, is good and Mad. Rebecca Traister, thanks so much.

[C]

Thanks so much for having me, David.

[B]

Rebecca Traister's new book is called Good and the Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. I'm David Remnick and that's our podcast for today. I want to thank you for joining us. I hope you'll tune in for our next episode.

[A]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Toon Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. Our team includes Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Kalalea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah, Sarah Nix and Stephen Valentino, with help from Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.