The Power of Women’s Anger

Post Author: Rev. Ashley Updegraff

In her 2021 book, Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown, a researcher and author, explores 87 of the emotions that make up the human experience. She engaged in this massive undertaking because, in her research, it became abundantly clear that humans suffer from an inability to name their feelings. In fact, in a study she conducted over 5 years, interviewing over 7000 people, the average number of emotions participants could name was…three. Yes, three. Happy, Sad, and Angry. And yet, Brown claims that “the ability to name [an] emotion or experience is essential to being able to process it in a productive and healing manner.” 

If we need to be able to name our emotions in order to process them in a helpful way, but we can only name three emotions, we’re not going to get very far in exploring our interior lives. And as women, we’re at an additional disadvantage, as anger is an emotion we’ve been conditioned to repress and reject. 

It’s true. Women have been conditioned, over centuries and from birth, to deny or avoid anger as a legitimate emotion. Soraya Chemaly, in her book Rage Becomes Her, outlines some of the ways this happens: from the time we are infants, fussiness in a male baby is considered anger, but fussiness in a female baby is considered sadness. Parents talk to their boys about anger more than they talk to their girls about anger. By preschool, children already associate anger with masculine faces, and know that it is okay for boys to be angry, but not for girls to feel the same.  Throughout adolescence, girls continue to receive messaging that teaches them that their anger puts their physical safety at risk, ruins relationships, and makes them ugly. 

And yet anger is a powerful emotion. It solves problems, deepens relationships, and sparks change. If it is unacceptable or inappropriate for women to tap into this important emotion, we are missing out. 

Women’s anger is a powerful tool in our personal, relational, and societal lives.

As women, we need to understand that our anger is a gift from God. God created us to feel emotions as part of our lived experience, and anger is one of those emotions. If God created us and called us good, then our anger is included in that. Our anger is part of how we are created in God’s image. The Bible is full of examples of God–and Jesus–getting angry at injustice, greed, and humans who refuse to care for one another. If God gets angry, and we are made in God’s image, our anger isn’t problematic, it’s a gift from our Creator. 

Our anger also serves as a mirror. It’s a tool to help us see what we need and what we value. It cues us when those needs are going unmet, and when those values are being threatened. When we feel anger–in the tensing of our jaw, the clenching of our stomach, the flushing of our face–our body and our mind and our spirit is telling us something. If we don’t acknowledge that messaging, or explore it, we’ll never know ourselves fully. And we won’t be able to enter into relationships fully, either. 

Despite what you might think, anger moves people toward each other. It’s an approach emotion, which means that it desires connection and communication. Anger indicates that something is not right, and it wants to experience resolution. Certainly, there are unhealthy ways to express anger–ways that jeopardize relationships instead of strengthening them. But when anger can be communicated clearly and respectfully, and people can work through the root cause of the emotion–relationships deepen. 

The same is true with our relationship with God. Just as women have been conditioned to believe that anger is an unacceptable emotion, Christians have been conditioned to believe it is wrong to feel anger, especially anger toward God. And yet, if we want to come before God with all of who we are–with all our fears, desires, hopes, and needs–we need to bring our anger before God, too. 

Scripture provides beautiful examples of this throughout its pages, but particularly in the Psalms, many of which are Psalms of lament: poems and songs and prayers where anger toward others and anger toward God are acknowledged and spoken out loud. Take Psalm 58, for example. In it, David decries his enemies in angry and intense language. He says “the wicked backslide from the womb; liars go astray from birth…God, break their teeth out of their mouths!…Let them dissolve like water flowing away…the righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done, when they wash their feet in the blood of the wicked.”(Psalm 58: 2, 6-7, 10, CEB) 

If David can give voice to his desire to wash his feet in the blood of his enemies, we can be honest with God about our anger, too. Our relationship with God, like our relationships with others, will deepen when we wrestle with our anger honestly and explore the entire range of our emotions together. 

Anger–especially anger modeled after God and Jesus’s own–can be a powerful catalyst for change. Anger, and in particular, women’s anger, has been at the heart of most of the movements for change in America’s history. Women were leading the way in the labor movement, the temperance movement, and the suffrage movement. Women have mobilized as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and women founded the Black Lives Matter movement. When we perceive injustice, and experience a threat to the values we hold dear, our anger prompts us to work for change and righteousness. 

And women have a lot to be angry about. We continue to be paid less than men for similar work, hold fewer top-level positions in the workplace, and experience institutional subordination. We contribute the majority of unpaid domestic labor, experience the majority of domestic violence, and suffer from depression and anxiety at higher rates than men. Our voices aren’t taken as seriously by doctors and other medical professionals, and it takes longer for our pain to be recognized and treated. 

Instead of expressing this anger–instead of communicating it openly and authentically–we have taken our conditioning seriously, stuffing our anger down and opting for the tears of sadness or the fake smile of apathy instead. This way of dealing with our anger (by not dealing with our anger) is making us sick. In an article for Time magazine, author and psychologist Maytal Eyal states that “women account for almost 80% of autoimmune disease cases. They are at a higher risk of suffering from chronic pain, insomnia, fibromyalgia, long COVID, irritable bowel syndrome, and migraines, and are twice as likely as men to die after a heart attack…it seems that the very virtues our culture rewards in women–agreeability, extreme selflessness, and suppression of anger–may predispose us to chronic illness and disease.” 

It’s time to flip the script. It’s time to own our anger as a gift from God, a mirror to know ourselves better, a tool for deepening relationships, and a catalyst for change. It’s time to acknowledge the power our anger holds for righting wrongs and speaking out on behalf of others. It’s time to claim our anger as a spiritual tool in creating a more just world for all God’s children.