Something’s snapped. After the 2016 presidential election, women nationwide wanted to make a scene. We flooded streets in protest. We filled out ballots. Whispers gave way to battle cries. We didn’t do it for “attention.” We did it for progress. In “Fired Up,” ELLE.com explores women’s rage—and what comes next.
Have you noticed yourself getting annoyed more easily? Are you pissed off right now? What is the last thing that made you feel furious?
Was it Hillary Clinton’s loss? Was it white supremacists marching across college campuses? Was it the dozens of women publicly sharing stories of workplace sexual assault and harassment? Was it unchecked gun violence in schools claiming more young lives?
If it seems like American women are angrier than ever before, it’s because they are.
This is one of the findings of a recent survey ELLE.com conducted in partnership with SurveyMonkey. To gain a better understanding of the unique contours of women’s anger ELLE.com polled a national sample of 5,101 adults, including 2,663 women. The results offer a unique glimpse into this new American emotional landscape and help us understand what it means for our collective future.
What came into sharp relief was this: Democratic women, in particular, have begun to embrace and express anger in empowering ways that may have meaningful political results. They believe that white men still run the country (66% of Democratic women agree with this statement), while only 37% of men agree. They believe that the #MeToo movement will lead to meaningful change (62% of all women polled, including Republican and Independents), compared to only a fraction of men (31%).
Who Is Angry?
Our survey found that 53% of all respondents feel angry about current events and the news more often than last year. The effect is particularly pronounced for women, 57% of whom are experiencing more anger this year than last, and even more so for Democratic women, 76% of whom are riled up.
Following the 2016 elections, many commentators pointed to the significant gap between black and white women. Much has been made of the 50 percentage point gap between black and white women voters in the 2016 presidential race; 93% of black women voters cast ballots for Hillary Clinton, while only 43% of white women voters did. This is consistent with decades of election results: Women vote according to their partisan identification (overwhelmingly Democratic for black women and somewhat Republican for white women). But Clinton’s defeat caused many to notice and report these results clearly for the first time.
We are interested in how this political and media environment might reveal itself in different patterns of anger expression among black and white women. Far fewer African American women responded to the survey, meaning we must be careful when drawing conclusions, but a couple of key findings stand out with confidence:
FINDING #1
There is no meaningful difference between black and white women in reports of elevated anger this year as compared to last year, so the data flies in the face of the persistent stereotype of the angry black woman.
FINDING #2
The survey does contain important data about the political nature of American anger. For women who identify themselves as Democrats or leaning toward the Democratic Party, increased anger is far and away the norm. Three-quarters (76%) of Democratic women find themselves getting angry more often this year than last.
Taken together, these findings suggest women’s anger is connected to the political world, not to some innate characteristic of their racial identity.
Why Are We Angry?
Substantial majorities of men and women feel bombarded with infuriating news—69% of men and 74% of women encounter news at least once a day or more that makes them feel angry.
The effect is heightened for white women: 79% report rage-fueling news encounters at least daily, and while a majority of black women feel the same, a smaller percentage are as bothered compared to their white peers (69% to 79%). It is clear the media environment is highly antagonistic for the 83% of women identified with the Democratic Party who get angry at the news at least once a day.
It is not just news as a general phenomenon, but specific stories and topics which tend to stoke Americans temper. We asked respondents, “What one thing makes you most angry these days?” The results are consistent across many groups: “Donald Trump,” “gun control,” “fake news,” and “school shootings” topped this list. Both gun control and school shootings had heightened salience because this survey was conducted in late February, as the news cycle was dominated by the tragedy of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida.
How Do We Cope?
For the most part, Americans choose not to stifle their anger. Men are more likely than women (24% compared to 16%) to keep anger to themselves, but most respondents talk it out with friends, partners or colleagues.
But is this a good thing?
Psychologists affirm that discussing negative feelings is far superior to suppressing or ignoring them, but when our fury is provoked by politics, conversations within our intimate circles may actually worsen the problem. Unfortunately, Americans tend to avoid political conversations across differenceof opinion.
As a result, it is possible that “talking it out” generates echo chambers of antagonism rather than giving us new perspectives, producing genuine understanding of difference, and lessening anger through broadening worldview. (Remember that during the 2016 election Russian operatives used social media to stoke preexisting American ethnic, racial, and political divisions by amplifying distrust and prejudice through false online identities.)
There was a small but clear partisan difference in how women responded to the question of how other people should behave when they are angry about the state of our political climate. Nearly a quarter (23%) of Republican and Republican‐leaning women think people should “keep their feelings to themselves,” compared with 17% of politically independent and just 7% of Democrat or Democrat‐leaning women. Given that Republicans currently enjoy a governing majority, it appears that GOP women are less interested in hearing the indignation of others.
What Is Broken?
Americans are diagnosing what is wrong in America in drastically different ways.
When we asked if white men, as a whole, have historically run the country and still do, a substantial majority of Democratic women (66%) agreed. About half of all women (48%) agreed that white men are the historic and continued controllers of the nation. However, the vast majority of men did not see it this way, with only 37% of men in agreement with the statement. Nearly the same pattern emerged when we asked if there is a wide-scale effort to limit reproductive health choices for women.
The responses to these two questions show that women who identify with the Democratic Party perceive a very different set of structural barriers than their fellow Americans. Race and gender analysis are central to how Democratic women identify the problems facing the country, and they are largely isolated in this analysis of continued race and gender inequity.
These are the kind of perceptual differences which can make a woman leave even a casual conversation seething with the sense of being entirely misunderstood.
Anger Into Action
Let’s pause for a thought experiment. Imagine that tomorrow you are going to attend a rally, a march, or protest. You have stayed up late putting the finishing touches on the massive sign you plan to carry. What does it say? Do you craft a single powerful word from letters big and bold? RESIST. ENOUGH. FREEDOM. Does your banner insist “Black Lives Matter” or assert “All Lives Matter”? Does it demand we “Build the Wall” or that we “Dump Trump”? Do you make your point with irony and humor or opt for clearly discernible rage?
We asked our respondents to tell us what their protest sign would look like, and the results were wide-ranging. Some penned imaginary signs declaring a love of God or love of country. Some staked out positions on abortion, immigration, gun control, and healthcare. But many imagined themselves as human billboards of discontent. "F— Trump!" "F— the Media." "F— all of you!" And, perhaps most succinctly, "I am ANGRY."
Whatever the message on their imaginary signs, our respondents offered a genuine sign of transforming outrage into action by reporting a stunning level of political activity on behalf of women’s issues during the past year.
In contrast, when asked what kinds of political actions they had taken on behalf of women, the majority of men did not report meaningful engagement.
Left and left-leaning women are the group leading the charge of political action. 78% of these women reported that they voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. And these are the women most assaulted and angered by the current political news. But rather than being paralyzed by this defeat or by their anger, Democratic women are significantly more politically active on behalf of women’s issues than any other group of our respondents. 72% of Democratic-identified women voted on women’s issues. A majority signed petitions and nearly half expressed their views on social media. Over one-third donated money, contacted public officials, and boycotted products. They were also far more likely than any other group to march, put up political signage, and help register other women to vote.
During the 2016 election, American experiences of depression and anxiety became so alarming that mental health professionals used the term Post-Election Stress Disorder, to capture the distressed responses to an onslaught of triggering and traumatizing news. For Democratic women, the cuts were even deeper, as Trump ascended to the White House despite multiple accusations of sexual assault. “We are experiencing not just the pain of political defeat but the grief of mourning something that feels irrevocably lost,” wrote Meghan O’Rourke for The New Yorker. This hardly seemed the dawn of a new era of empowerment, equity, and engagement.
Then the political landscape began to shift. Sadness has increasingly given way to anger. In many ways, Hillary Clinton’s political success relied on her performance as the consummate good girl, capable of effectively suppressing her anger. For nearly three decades she was applauded for her for stoic endurance, rewarded for flashes of authentic emotional vulnerability, and swiftly punished for any indignation. Improbable as it may have seemed in November 2016, Clinton’s defeat has catalyzed public expressions of rage, particularly among women who previously felt constrained from openly expressing anger.
This has been most expressly manifested in the revelations of workplace sexual harassment and assault. These stories dominated headlines for months and the women who have come forward to tell their stories have framed their decision to do so with the language of being angry and fed up with inequity. Yet this anger has not dampened optimism among women respondents, who believe we may have reached a national turning point. By a 2‐to‐1 ratio, women believe the #MeToo movement will lead to meaningful change and resent the idea that it is fleeting (62% to 31%). Only a third of men agree.
Not only has the #MeToo movement made women more optimistic, but it has also made them more vocal: 1 in 10 women told us they shared their own #MeToo story on social media in recent months and 41% of women say they are now more likely to report sexual misconduct that happens in their workplaces.
What Is Next?
As we speed toward the 2018 midterms, the question we have to ask now is whether this rage will be productive or whether it will prove divisive and paralyzing. Women voters, furious about the Senate confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, elected a record number of women in Congress back in 1992. Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House after voters, indignant about President Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, gave Democrats a Congressional majority in the 2006 midterms. And economic discontent and racial resentment are regularly offered as explanations for the 2016 presidential election.
Scholars are not sure precisely how anger affects American elections, but it may motivate voters to show up to the polls in higher numbers. Research shows that negative political campaigns can leave Americans more cynical, stressed, and less likely to vote.
This is the genius of Edith Childs, a local NAACP staffer from Greenwood, South Carolina. It was Childs' signature chant—“Fired Up, Ready to Go!”—that gave then-presidential candidate Barack Obama renewed energy while on the campaign trail in 2008, and became the campaign's first slogan. There is no better recipe for political engagement than anger about the status quo connected to political optimism.
Our survey details the anger Democratic women feel. There is evidence that these women may be not just angry, but also, Fired Up and Ready to Go. The Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration is likely the largest single-day demonstration in recorded U.S. history; Doug Jones was elected to the Senate in Alabama, the first Democrat to win that seat in 25 years, thanks in large part to high voter turnout among black women; and the 2017 elections see over 20 women sworn into various state and local offices because Democratic women ran and voted in record numbers.
Let us end with the wisdom of a departed elder, the essayist, autobiographer, and poet, Maya Angelou. During a 2006 interview she said of anger, “You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.”
Design by Mia Feitel | Animation by Choz Belen
