The Making of an Angry Woman
On feminine rage and a history of lies
The unmaking isn’t what I expected. It’s better.
I recently discussed the unmaking (aka perimenopause) with a post-menopausal friend. So called the unmaking because every day I find new ways to deconstruct the person I patched together for everyone else. I’ve spent 47 years trying to create and maintain a thin, pretty, affable human when really the antisocial, feral, weird girl waited in the wings for her moment to break free.
This friend told me the single best thing to do was “lean into the rage.” My first thought was, “Easy. I love rage.” It’s been the most accessible emotion of my life, to be honest. I worked that idea around in my head for a long while and realized there is a difference between empty rage and useful rage.
Both needed, but I’ve only utilized one kind in my life.
Until now.
As an author, I don’t like writing about the pain of women’s history. The scold’s bridle, the sexual assault. Restrictive clothing, asylums for the overly sexed, the under-sexed, and the overly loud. Laws that kept women as property of husbands and fathers. While my stories include those horrors, I write women from a place of power. Desperate tales feed my empty rage. The powerful ones, my useful rage.
Growing up, I had a few women in my life. By that, I mean they were present, and very, very damaged. I turned inward and grew so quiet I could just disappear. And I did, through panic attacks and dissociation. Looking back, I think I felt if I shut off, they couldn’t use me. It was the only power move my little brain could fathom.
A spark of light came in the form of Eleanor Roosevelt.
When I read about her in high school, I saw a powerful yet quiet woman with intensely strong principles. She wasn’t glamorous or otherworldly, she was an ordinary woman who made extraordinary choices every day. The more they attacked her, the tougher she became.
Fuck that scold’s bridle. Gimme more Eleanor.
They don’t tell us stories of people like her. How she refused Secret Service and kept a loaded pistol in her beaded handbag. How she drove through a crowd of Klansmen to give a civil rights speech, despite the 25k bounty on her head. How she chaired the blueprint of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the UN and held all-women press conferences to prove the worth of woman reporters.
They don’t tell us because then we might find ourselves some of that useful rage. The kind that makes us care more about truth than making ourselves into the pretty, skinny shells the boys seem to like so much.
On a recent Threads post, I remarked on how I spent much of my twenties believing my worth was tied to male attention. The comments reminded me how deeply this has been a universal experience. Remember the articles in Cosmopolitan? They pushed a narrative that we exist solely to serve and please men.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee how we were inundated with a carefully scripted dialogue. Gossip magazines telling us how to land a guy and keep a guy. Commercials and ads reminding us to diet, because being fat was a fate worse than death. Media showing women as catty enemies, forcing us to choose a side. Billboards of bony models with the perfect sexy pout. Keep out those notions of women supporting each other and building a world that de-centers men.
Don’t let them see the glass up there or they might think they can break it.
With history lessons, they don’t highlight Elizabeth I because OMG, we can’t have them thinking life without marriage is a good idea.
They tell us about Albert Einstein but omit Mileva. We praise Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart but erase his sister Maria Anna. Nellie Bly and Rosalind Franklin should be household names. We remember Marilyn Monroe and Hedy Lamarr as gorgeous actresses but erase their brilliance (inventing early wi-fi and torpedo technology, anyone?). Selective messaging meant to dim any hope little girls were born with.
If we know our power, we will use it.
Because men write the history books, they decide whose stories live and die. A 2019 article by the Smithsonian examined history education in the US. Just 3% of our educational materials in K-12 focus on women’s contributions. Three-quarters of history books are written by men, and less than 10% of those authors write about women.
Carefully crafted messaging.
When we look beyond men upholding these traditions, we find women who keep them in power. Wives and mothers who do their dirty work and raise little, skinny, pretty women who carry on the tradition. A terrible game of telephone where the message somehow remains crystal clear that YOU ARE LESS IMPORTANT. I should know. I was raised by these women.
But then those little girls grow up. We fail and fall and crawl our way back to standing. We learn in the most frustrating ways as we slowly begin to see how much we’ve taken when we should have said no. And then we hit middle age. It happens at different times, but the evolution is a fairly universal experience. Our bodies change, our hair grays. We trade in tight jeans for comfort and stand up to bullies in a way we never thought possible. We see the lies for what they are. A thinly veiled muzzle meant to keep our worth tied up in men’s approval.
We center. We steady. We tighten important friendships and let others fall away. For the first time in our forty-some years, we stop caring what anyone thinks of us. And it leaves us with a giant “Oh shit” moment. If I found this freedom before, I could have set the damn world on fire.
I’ve found the most profound feminine rage in this realization. Useful rage. The kind that breaks cycles and raises fierce little beings.
This useful rage has allowed me to start this Substack. I write historical fiction. I have stories to tell about women’s power wrapped up in history and adventure and magic. I have ideas burning inside me whose embers first lit as a young girl, but the world doused water on them so many times they forgot they were fire.
Women amaze me. Historical women inspire me. I can now shout my stories without a shaking voice, without concern for triggering someone, without worry for how I am perceived.
The great unmaking of the angry woman leads to the little girl we once were who had dreams and big ideas. And thanks to perimenopause, I can hold that girl’s hand and say what she couldn’t.
And I’ll do it with those powerful historical women beside me, whispering, Let’s go.
If you want to support what I’m doing, please like, share, and check out my historical fiction books.
Years ago, while writing an assignment for a class, part of my research was reading a book of essays by cosmologists. I noticed that no women appeared in the book. I wondered, aren’t there women cosmologists? A brief search later, I discovered a treasure trove of women who’d made brilliant contributions. I’ve repeated that search on many occasions in other areas of study/research, and I keep uncovering incredible, powerful women who were basically erased. Often I wonder how my life might have been different had I known these women existed. The work to undo the damage has been long and is ongoing.
I will be 60 this year. My youngest child will be 21. When she was in elementary school I taught her that anyone who tells you who you're allowed to be friends with is not a friend and not trustworthy. I taught her to look for beauty in a person's behavior towards others and themselves, and that kindness saves lives. By the end of middle school, I had to teach her how to mask for her own safety. She had physically matured in ways that made her a target for sexual harassment. She is beautiful, although she has a hard time believing me when I tell her. She grew up being allowed to say "No" and to have boundaries. I did my best to raise her how I would have liked to be raised, in an emotionally and physically safe environment. My being an older parent helped a lot. I was 38 when she was born. When I went through menopause I had an epiphany. I woke up one morning, looked at the world and said "Fuck It!" In the process of raising my daughter, I had raised myself as well. I purged my shoes and my clothes of anything that I didn't love. I started purging my house of anything that didn't feel good. I changed my cooking to suit my needs. I basically centered myself in my life. Rage in action, I like that. When my husband called our marriage certificate "Ownership Papers", I purged him too. I'm not done yet, but I growing wild again.