I did not exactly review this title, but I did include it in an essay about women and anger, along with a few other titles. I most appreciated that Traister made it a point to include multiple feminisms in her book; I also appreciated the research that showed that there are health benefits when women curse. I suspected this but now I feel particularly emboldened!

I absolutely loved this book. It read it recently and it was the perfect book to read in 2020. Rebecca Traister really nails the feelings of anger and the motivating factors of the emotion. I especially loved some of the historic details that I didn't know about so many women. I want to gift a copy of this to all of my activist friends!

I loved this book. I read the ebook and listened to the audio and found myself surprised at the amount of historical information given. I was previously a big fan of Rebecca Traister's and this only made me more so. Good and Mad certainly has its pitfalls (it already needs to be updated, given the constant news cycle), but has captured a precise moment in time that is sure to be remembered.

I did not finish this book. It was obviously well researched, but was not the book for me. The wording was extremely high brow and I was just not in a place where I could get in to it.

Loved this book - every woman needs this book. Well written, documented, and full of examples. Definitely recommend reading this book. - it has it all: history, feminism, intersectionality, how women are perceived when angry, what to do with all that anger, acceptance, and leaves you with the feeling you are not alone in your glorious, righteous anger.

I love Rebecca Traister! Her combination of historical background on women’s rage and its effective use in making change and her commentary on where we are now was fascinating, frustrating, and motivating ally once. Such an excellent read.

Good and Mad delves into the history of women's anger throughout history. Women have been given countless reasons through injustice, inequality, belittling, etc. to be angry. To add insult to injury, women are not even allowed to be angry. History shows that women's anger has been treated without the respect and validity afforded to men and their anger. Traister brings forth examples and shows her readers that their own ingrained biases, whether they identify as male or female.
Reading Traister's books has been enlightening. Good and Mad confirmed for me that the reflections and feelings I experience everyday are no less valid and justified because I lack the ability to put them into words. Traister puts into words the thoughts that so many women (and men) struggle to conceptualize and voice. Over the years I have shied away from political writings due to frustration and dearth of understanding. Traister has made politics approachable for me. Even if you do not agree with all of the viewpoints or political leanings, Traister leaves her readers better educated on any topic she tackles. I highly recommend Good and Mad, as well as all of Rebecca Traister's writings.

**I received an advanced reader's copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review**

Traister takes readers on a journey through the revolutionary and reactionary aspects of feminism. Interviewing several key feminist leaders of today, Traister breaks down the movement, identifying the underlying anger that has fueled this new wave of feminism.

While I could not fully identify with every argument in this book, this is still a good book to recommend to anyone wishing to know about historic feminist movements and the contemporary movements, especially Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. What I gained from this book was the power to look internally, to address my own issues of anger over slights and atrocities faced in my personal life.

Rebecca Traister is effin' great. As a woman who often finds herself "good and mad," I was fascinated by this book... which made me even more "good and mad!" Highly recommended reading for the current moment. Traister is one of our great female thinkers, and I'm so glad she's still innovating.

4 stars – A great look at the past two years of American political events and how the history of women's anger in America has evolved and led to our current cultural and political moment.

Chances are that if you’ve picked up Good and Mad, you are already there. That’s by design. Good and Mad is channeling liberal women’s anger into an exposition that’s meant to fuel an already blazing fire. Yes, if you are curious why women whose politics are left of center are primed for a fight, Rebecca Traister’s latest book will try to explain the revolution to you. But this sermon is a testimony for believers, those who already use a hashtag with the word “resistance.”

Good and Mad is for and of its time. Traister covers the intersection of feminism and politics for New York magazine, and this, her second book, in some ways reads like an extended magazine feature. The quotes peppered throughout from feminists past and present would fit right into social-justice Twitter.

The book opens on the 1972 Democratic National Convention, and radical feminist Florynce Kennedy yelling at the male television anchors to get their (expletive!) hands off her. The DNC was particularly controversial that year for feminists, who wanted a promise out of the Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern: make legal abortion a policy plank. (This is before Roe v. Wade.) The McGovern campaign is glad to have the support of Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and other prominent feminists, but once their backing is secured, they renege. They let anti-abortion activists have the floor. They ditch the feminists’ agenda. For this betrayal, Flo Kennedy pushes to the edges of the broadcast booth, demanding media attention in an outpouring of anger. These moments were filmed, and the ensuing documentary, Year of the Woman, disappeared for years, then reemerged, and Traister had picked up an assignment to write about it. “When, in 2015, I was assigned to write about it as a feminist journalist heading into the 2016 presidential election, I immediately understood what had made it so charged and dangerous, what had made it too much,” Traister writes in Good and Mad. “It was a celluloid time capsule, its wholly unfiltered view of women’s outrage, acute and strange to contemporary ears and eyes, trapped in amber.”

The images “felt retro,” she wrote, in that summer of 2016, when a female president could happen. Just a few months later, she writes, “I scrolled through images on my social media feeds and saw another cascade of wrath” during the Women’s March. It was just the latest resurgence of women’s anger.

This opening is one of many trips Good and Mad takes back in time to attempt to provide historical context for what’s happening now. But so many rage-inducing things are happening now that there’s a lot to cover. Her extended retrospective of the Trump candidacy and presidency captures that feeling of being inside of every tweet storm. This section of the book will have even the most avid news junkie saying in disbelief, “Oh right, then that happened, too.”

Capturing the mood of the moment is where Traister shines, and her point — that there’s always something to be downright pissed off about — feels constantly relevant in the context of the 24-hour news cycle. I read Good and Mad while pedaling on a stationary bike at the gym, when the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, then the hearings with Christine Blasey Ford, were always on one of the televisions in my line of sight. I found myself getting some of the best workouts I’d had reading this book on a bike ride to nowhere, and that experience does underline the book's cathartic effect.

However, some of Traister’s anecdotes from 19th-century suffragist history to the second-wave feminism of the 20th century feel cherry picked. She looks back to the antebellum era for failures of intersectionality, those moments when the movement for women voting didn’t support the movement for African-Americans getting the vote. The parallels are there — women of color who were involved in the Women’s March expressed concerns about whether white women were being inclusive — but it’s a compartmentalized view of history.

Later in Good and Mad, Traister zeroes in on white women who voted for Donald Trump, calling them complicit with their husbands and fathers, sons and brothers who have maintained patriarchal structures that have kept women out of power. But it’s too easy of an argument to make for a broad category of people. It ignores the complexities of the voting public and applies a stereotype to another group of women who were also clearly fed up and voted accordingly. Whether their anger counts, too, is an interesting question in feminist thought, and I would have liked to read what some of the intellectuals at the forefront of the current movement have to say about it. Instead, it’s given short shrift, as is conservative women’s anger. This isn’t the book to look to for a deep analysis of how Ann Coulter’s loud-and-proud brand of anger has made her career. Instead, this is a place to hone your talking points, hashtag resist.

Points of policy feminists have been fighting for all along (health care and child care, for example) also get short shrift in Good and Mad. But Traister is preaching to a choir that already knows this, and really, any nits a critic picks won’t matter to that choir, who will buy this book and love it. The left-leaning liberal public has voted, on this book and elsewhere. Just as the record number of women stepped into the halls of Congress this week.

If you're reading this in 2018, you just lived through the events described in the book's final chapters. But, do you know the history of women's movements before the Women's March a week after the election of the 45th president of the United States? Or how women's anger has fostered productive change? Or the horrific power moves and blatant horror that preceded the #metoo movement? This volume walks you through the heroes before us, the impact on women of different races and status, and how the movements are continuing. Sometimes when you're in the midst of history, you can lose sight of the view from 30,000 feet, the view from any place but your city, or the view given the long trajectory of change. This book is thorough yet easy to digest, compelling yet scholarly, emotional yet pragmatic. A must read for anyone who is wondering how we ensure that all people are treated as equals.

GOOD AND MAD by Rebecca Traister deals with "The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger" as noted in the subtitle. In fact, Traister, who also wrote All the Single Ladies, provides historical context and alludes to various cycles reflecting women's anger including 1920's suffragettes, 1970's ERA and today's Women's March and #MeToo movement. Throughout, she points to a double standard in terms of women's actions and attitudes as well as the tension between white women and women of color. Filled with quotes (like Sara Robinson saying, "Women's rage has been sublimated for so long that there's simply no frame for what happens when it finally comes to the surface"), Traister extensively documents how women are taught to suppress anger. Her work is highly relevant for our students and recent graduates; she summarizes work by a sociology professor at Oklahoma State University as follows: "about half of women in their late twenties who've experienced harassment start looking for a new job within two years of the incident. For those who've endured more serious harassment the figure is around 80 percent- and many opt to leave their chosen profession altogether: to start over, often in less male-dominated fields, which, of course, tend to be lower-paying." There's a hopeful note as she comments on the opportunity and necessity to be a catalyst for change, although "the process of change was going to be slow, hard and often circular." A surprisingly dense text, GOOD AND MAD received starred reviews from Booklist ("fiery tome"), Kirkus ("gripping call to action"), and Publishers Weekly.

The history of women’s anger and what it has wrought has been glossed over in history books and by the media. In this book, Traister talks about the important part women’s rage has played in the American labor movement, in the abolitionist movement, in the French revolution. And of COURSE women's anger has been stigmatized, considered hysterical, unhinged, strident, unattractive, unsexy. Sadness and depression tends to isolate people, but anger brings them out into the world so that they can find each other

Without anger, women wouldn't be allowed to vote or own property and our husbands would be allowed to rape us at will, or maybe we’d have burnt up in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory because our bosses were allowed to lock us in. Uncorked, it can smash the patriarchy. Women's anger will change the world. And it HAS changed the world. She gives a great look at the movement I'm part of right now. We created a blue wave election already, but we're only getting started. And we're not stopping. Along with a look at the past, the author gives a bit of a primer for the future with tips about how to stay intersectional, not to let ourselves get divided.

Traister speaks eloquently and engagingly, digs into things I'd never considered or noticed. This book opened my eyes in about a hundred ways, and I've already been a feminist for at least 30 years. This is the book we all need to read at this moment in time.

I know this is said about many books, but this is definitely a timely and important book for all readers of any gender. Traister examines not only how women's anger has been stifled and controlled over the years but also discusses the women themselves who have been overlooked or forgotten by modern audiences. She also looks at ways women's anger can keep patriarchal power structures in place to the detriment of the women themselves. While the overarching themes weren't really new to me, the book still does a good job of summing up how women's anger has been controlled, suppressed and vilified.

A side note: while I enjoyed her book All the Single Ladies, I thought at the time that it disproportionately focused on single white women and not as much on single women of color. Traister did a much better job in this book bringing awareness to the racial and gender struggles women of color face and the place of privilege white women have in society and how these inform how their anger is perceived.

Rebecca Traister's excellent book is both provocative and timely. Women are angry; i'm angry. She helps us identify that anger and suggests ways to channel it into action. We could all learn from that.

I'd originally planned on reading Good and Mad in one or two sittings, but, in the end, I had to read it in small digestible morsels over the course of weeks. Otherwise, my rage threatened to boil over...

I don't know why it surprised me, but reading Good and Mad made me so mad! It didn't make me angry at the book itself—this book should be required reading for any person looking to gain further insight into the #MeToo movement, as well as the evolution of fourth-wave feminism—but more at the fact that it had to be written in the first place.

It's 2018, and yet, (American) women continue to face sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, and beyond. (I put "American" in parentheses because that's what this book mainly focused on, even though—clearly—these things happen to women worldwide.) We continue to be gaslit (gaslighted?) regarding our anger, told that the injustices we've faced did not really happen to us at all. We've been told not to be angry, and instead to be happy that we have it so good.

Traister's historical approach to this topic was very informative. While the largest portion of the book was devoted to the most recent eruption(s) of women's rage in politics and other industries in the U.S. (c. 2016 to the present), there were many points throughout the book in which Traister discussed women's rage in the past, starting with the suffragettes and moving into second-wave feminism of the '60s, and eventually covering the '90s, with particular focus on Anita Hill. This was helpful for me, for while I've tried to educate myself over the last decade or so in feminist history, there is still so much for me to learn.

Importantly, Traister addresses how women of color receive the brunt of the backlash against being angry, and how white women often tone down their anger in order to get ahead, at the expense of the rights of women of color. Traister also writes about how the so-called Stonewall Riots ("so-called" because those who started them did so as an act of civil disobedience and not as riots) were sparked by the anger of transwomen and lesbians, many of whom were people of color, something that is often erased when white men today tell the story.

Still, the main thing I got out of this book wasn't the history, or the examination of how and why women continue to be mad today, or what actions we should take next to eradicate sexism, it was the fact that I'm not alone in my anger. This may seem like a superficial thing to get out of a book. I mean, of course I'm not alone; all women have experienced, or will experience, discrimination and inequality at some point in their lives. But reading about other women's experiences in this book still helped me to realize that my feelings and experiences are valid.

With every turn of this page, I found myself pausing to clap and shout "YES!" to every quote made by a woman. This book is the ultimate hype woman and will make any reader pumped up about all the possibilities of what women are bound to do under this revived women's movement.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I read this the week of the Kavanaugh Circus and lord did I need it. Thank you, Ms. Traister, for this. Thank you.

Let me tell you how I started reading Good and Mad from Rebecca Traister. I was watching Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I was also on Twitter, because I wanted to experience this momentous hearing with other people, even though I was on my recliner recovering from surgery.

Chris Hayes started tweeting about this book with Ezra Klein. They were both reading advance copies, and felt it was incredibly relevant to Dr. Ford’s behavior versus Judge Kavanaugh’s. At the time, I also had an advance copy on my ebook shelf. But I had planned to read a few other books first. (Following a first in, first read policy.) Since I too was struck by the different emotional reactions of these two people, I had to start this book that same day.

“… in resisting and dissenting today, we are playing our parts in a story with long, righteous, proud roots.”
(p. 247, print copy)

Good and Mad is positively stupendous. Not because it makes me happy to read about the systemic and ongoing subjugation of women. But because it makes me ecstatic to see that other women are just as angry as I am. And that they’re doing something about it.

Traister discusses women’s anger in the context of history, from suffragists to the Equal Rights Amendment movement. Throughout the book, she connects these historic events back to today. I appreciate the long view this gives readers, because fighting systemic oppression is always a long view.

Another key element of Good and Mad, is the intersectional aspects of women’s anger. Traister tells the stories of women of color from Mamie Till to Carol Moseley Braun to Patrisse Khan-Cullors. The stories of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who after the historic Stonewall Inn raid and riots went on to found gay and trans support organizations. Cisgender, straight, white women are late to the protest, activist party.

“Of course, there is also the reality that when women do explode with rage, even if the effect is to catalyze a social movement, their anger will never be recorded, never noted, never recalled or understood as nation-reshaping. The fact that we can often only register the fury of white men as heroic is so established that it would verge on the comical if it weren’t so deeply tragic.”
(p. 88, print copy)

A 2018 book about women’s anger would be incomplete without discussion of the #metoo movement. Traister explains where the hashtag began. Hint: it wasn’t with the Hollywood folks calling out Harvey Weinstein. Instead, it was first used by Tarana Burke, “ … a lifelong advocate for the rights and health of women of color, who had first coined the term “me too” precisely because she wanted to let women, “particularly young women of color, know that they are not alone.”” (p. 191, print copy)

Sexual harassment, assault, and abuse are a crucial part of this history of anger. Traister lays out women’s experiences, as well as the opposing viewpoints from other women and, of course, men. Be prepared for both depressing and inspiring moments. The difficult parts are essential to understanding how women have reaching our current boiling point, so hang in there.

As she did in the stellar Big Girls Don't Cry, Traister also talks about the conundrum of women’s political anger. When you hear a female politician or public figure, does she speak in only measured tones? And when she doesn’t, what is the reaction from colleagues or media? You know the answer. When women express their anger or displeasure, or challenge men with force and strategy they’re vilified.

Gatherings of protesters, which have lately included many women, are portrayed as mobs without control. It’s an exaggeration or an outright lie because the minority feels out of control. And yet, these actions—speaking out and protesting—have given many women focus and hope.

My conclusions
Good and Mad made me think long and hard about my own experiences, especially about what I’ve “swept under carpet” because I didn’t want to make someone angry or truly be angry myself. I’m thinking about all the times when laughing and trying to be “the cool girl” was the only option I thought I had. It breaks my heart for that younger me.

I’m also one of those cisgender, white, hetero women channeling my anger into political activism. Like women Traister mentions, it makes me feel better. Plus, I want to actively work at leaving a better world for my grandchildren.

There is more depth to this book than a blog post can begin to review. I’d like to buy it for all of my good girlfriends. More importantly, I’d like to discuss it with them and with the men in my life. It’s not hyperbole to say this will be a pre-eminent book about women’s history for decades to come.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster, and the author for the opportunity to read the advanced readers copy of this book in exchange for this honest review.