Her latest book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, investigates the potential and complexity of women’s anger as a political and social tool – both historically, and in the reinvigorated contemporary women’s movement in the West. “I’d absorbed the message that open anger was needlessly overdramatic and unattractive - that it would be too much, really - and I had worked to accommodate these assumptions, tempering my fury in my writing,” she writes.Rebecca Traister is an American journalist, polemicist and New York Times bestselling author who writes at the intersection of feminism, politics and culture.

Traister sees echoes of that attitude in today’s uprising, in her view a welcome evolution from the glossy, nonconfrontational, celebrity-driven, cool-girl feminism of the early 21st century, one in which Traister acknowledges her own stylistic complicity. “The entire setup makes it easier for what you say to be portrayed as unreasonable.” One of Traister’s heroes is the late Florynce Kennedy, the lawyer, civil rights advocate and second-wave feminist who laced her activism with anger (“The next son of a bitch that touches a woman is gonna get kicked in the balls,” she warned male journalists at the 1972 Democratic National Convention) as well as biting humor (“Are you my alternative?” she would retort when men asked if she was a lesbian). “We envision our emotions battling our reason because, after all, that’s what we are usually taught,” Chemaly writes. That rage, both authors argue, is not only healthy but rational and productive. Chemaly, an activist with the Women’s Media Center, emphasizes the psychology and culture of female anger, mixing personal experience with reporting and academic research to show how that anger is deemed a transgression of gender norms, and how the pressure to dial it back - and not be labeled shrill or scolding or imperious or just plain crazy - only pisses women off further. She spans the suffrage movement to the 2016 election to, of course, the #MeToo wrath now upending the casting couch, the anchor chair, the editor’s desk and possibly even the highest bench in the land.

Traister, whose columns on gender and power earned her a National Magazine Award this year, focuses on the political history of female anger. Traister’s “Good and Mad” and Chemaly’s “Rage Becomes Her” are two urgent, enlightening books that I hope will be read together, works that are well timed for this moment even as they transcend it, the kind of accounts often reviewed and discussed by women but that should certainly be read by men.

Good and mad