Soraya Chemaly: Rage Becomes Her

Women are angry, and it isn’t hard to figure out why.

We are underpaid and overworked. Too sensitive, or not sensitive enough. Too dowdy or too made-up. Too big or too thin. Sluts or prudes. We are harassed, told we are asking for it, and asked if it would kill us to smile. Yes, yes it would.

Contrary to the rhetoric of popular “self-help” and an entire lifetime of being told otherwise, our rage is one of the most important resources we have, our sharpest tool against both personal and political oppression. We’ve been told for so long to bottle up our anger, letting it corrode our bodies and minds in ways we don’t even realize. Yet our anger is a vital instrument, our radar for injustice and a catalyst for change. On the flip side, the societal and cultural belittlement of our anger is a cunning way of limiting and controlling our power.

We are so often told to resist our rage or punished for justifiably expressing it, yet how many remarkable achievements in this world would never have gotten off the ground without the kernel of anger that fueled them? Rage Becomes Her makes the case that anger is not what gets in our way, it is our way, sparking a new understanding of one of our core emotions that will give women a liberating sense of why their anger matters and connect them to an entire universe of women no longer interested in making nice at all costs.

Following in the footsteps of classic feminist manifestos like The Feminine Mystique and Our Bodies, Ourselves, Rage Becomes Her is an eye-opening book for the twenty-first century woman: an engaging, accessible credo offering us the tools to re-understand our anger and harness its power to create lasting positive change.

Join us in the Rare Book Room as Soraya shares and signs her book with writer Samhita Mukhopadhyay!

Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion and media. She is the Director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project and organizer of the Safety and Free Speech Coalition, both of which aim to curb online abuse, increase media and tech diversity, and expand women’s freedom of expression. After occupying various leadership positions in corporate marketing and founding her own consulting firm, she returned to her writing and advocacy work full time. Her articles appear frequently in TIME, The Guardian, The Nation,Huffington Post and The Atlantic.

In 2013, Soraya won the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s (AEJMC)’s Donna Allen Award for Feminist Advocacy and the Secular Woman Feminist Activism Award. In 2014, she was named one of Elle Magazine’s 25 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter. She serves on the boards of several organizations dedicated to improving media diversity, including Women, Action and The Media; In this Together Media, No Bully, and the Women’s Media Center. She writes and speaks regularly about gender, media, tech, education, women’s rights, sexual violence and free speech. Learn more at @schemaly or womensmediacenter.com.