Heroics and Hysterics

"What's an angry woman to do?" Lauren K. Watel looks back at the anger that overcame her as a young wife and mother.

Alona Horkova/Getty Images

My first husband got a tenure-track teaching position, his only job offer, in a town called Normal. Even though I didn’t want to move to Normal, as his spouse and the mother of our infant child, without job prospects of my own, I saw that I had no choice. I was enraged, my guts in knots, heart thrashing away, surges of heat, an intense clenching, as if my body were all fists, and a roaring—silent, deafening—that rang through my bones. I grabbed the nearest object, an alarm clock/radio, pulled it out of the wall, and smashed it on the floor. As if trying to outrun an assailant, I tore out of the house, sobbing and speed-walking nearly six frenzied miles in my slippers before calling my best friend to pick me up.

Even though I didn’t want to move to Normal, as his spouse and the mother of our infant child, without job prospects of my own, I saw that I had no choice. I was enraged, my guts in knots, heart thrashing away, surges of heat, an intense clenching, as if my body were all fists, and a roaring—silent, deafening—that rang through my bones.

I lasted five months in Normal. A perfectly nice place, as it turned out, though I couldn’t wait to leave. Once, in a fit of rage turned against myself, I went into the bathroom before dinner and spontaneously hacked off all my hair. My anger didn’t start with Normal, nor did it stop when I left. It was there, always, residing deep in my interior, steaming and bubbling like the hot magma inside a volcano, waiting for the right conduit to erupt. And erupt it did, for reasons large and small, obvious and obscure. An offhand remark would set me off, a careless driver, a stressful election, a senseless death, and the rage would come roaring in, my body in its thrall. I fumed, I bristled, I quaked in my skin and dreamed of revenge. Anger made me burn things (photos, letters), pound things (pillows, the wall), rip up and break things. These episodes filled me with self-hatred, and I tried to discount them, forget them, and the anger would recede, only to simmer and steam until the next opening.

In Normal, with angrier hair.

At age 50 I found some writing I'd done a few years before, when I was first living alone in my just-emptied nest. Reading it for the first time, I began to fathom my anger. My own words revealed it to me: “They brought her in to look pretty and keep her mouth shut.” “God, I can’t stand all these tiny outstretched hands. What are they asking for? I haven’t a nickel, no change whatsoever, and if they think I’ll give them anything today, they’ve got another thing coming.” “Must she always have to beg? Of course, she must. He prefers her small, so she begs.” And this was just a small sampling of the rage bubbling up from inside me. Wow, I thought. I was out of control. I was alarmed, deeply embarrassed. Also kind of impressed, at the intensity of the feeling, its ferocity.

Seeing my anger on the page allowed me to sit with it, to study it and try to understand its origins. I realized that the demands of being a woman were breaking me. I’d been tasked with so many forms of care, from childcare to eldercare to household care, most of it squarely in the realm of the personal and therefore taken for granted and unremunerated. I’d been ceded management of the emotional realm and then, when I had feelings, dismissed as overemotional. I’d been praised above all for being a good mother and a good daughter, compliant and ever dependable. I’d been rewarded for sitting in the audience and discouraged from taking the stage. My entire life I’d been urged, in so many ways, to make the move to Normal, to be what everyone considered a normal female person—caring to a fault, moderate, sitting supportively in the wings. And I tried, how I tried. But living in that version of Normal, I felt invisible, overlooked, permanently consigned to the support team, a thankless role that took all my energies and left nothing for me. As a consequence, I’d let my own ambitions and aspirations languish, and my lifelong dream of publishing a book seemed beyond my reach.

My entire life I’d been urged, in so many ways, to make the move to Normal, to be what everyone considered a normal female person—caring to a fault, moderate, sitting supportively in the wings. And I tried, how I tried. But living in that version of Normal, I felt invisible, overlooked, permanently consigned to the support team, a thankless role that took all my energies and left nothing for me. As a consequence, I’d let my own ambitions and aspirations languish, and my lifelong dream of publishing a book seemed beyond my reach.

In short, I felt utterly powerless. No wonder I was angry. When my frustrations and agonies would finally roil to the surface, people reacted as if I were an erupting volcano—dangerous, threatening, capable of destroying everything in my path. It was the ultimate irony: my rage at feeling powerless was perceived by others, especially men, as powerful. A power not to be admired, however, but feared and therefore mocked and trivialized. When a male friend half-jokingly called me a “castrating shrew,” my boyfriend at the time quipped, “Oh, honey, you’re not a shrew.” Great, I wasn’t a castrating shrew, merely castrating.

Lauren K. Watel recently. Portrait by Ashley Kauschinger.

Why isn’t men’s anger seen as a detriment to their manhood? On the contrary, it’s considered impressive, an asset. As soon as a guy goes purple-faced and starts ranting, we clap for him and fund him and vote for him. Men’s rage seems heroic, like that of Achilles, inspiring canonical literary epics. Rage expressed by women, on the other hand, invariably comes across as hysterical, monstrous and terrifying, like that of Medea, a vengeful killer of her own children, inspiring a cautionary tale of female fury gone awry. When women speak out in anger regarding personal issues—the unequal burdens of care or the emotional load—and systemic issues—sexual violence or unequal pay—they’re deemed shrill, nasty. Castrating. As if women’s anger were always a deadly weapon, wielded in vengeance to separate a man from some precious body part, rather than a formidable tool for self-advocacy.

Characterizing women’s anger as grotesque, an affront to so-called normal womanhood, motivates a woman to hide any anger she feels, to repress it, so she can get back to looking pretty and keeping her mouth shut. Any power anger might give a woman is immediately demeaned and deflated, and she’s shamed back into powerlessness. But the anger doesn’t go away, does it? On the contrary, it simmers and roils inside you; eventually, it burns you alive. Chronic buried anger disempowers women even further, since it makes them doubt themselves, forces them to disavow perfectly reasonable feelings, and wears them down, impairing their mental and physical health, hampering their ability to take control of their lives and thrive.

Characterizing women’s anger as grotesque, an affront to so-called normal womanhood, motivates a woman to hide any anger she feels, to repress it, so she can get back to looking pretty and keeping her mouth shut. Any power anger might give a woman is immediately demeaned and deflated, and she’s shamed back into powerlessness. But the anger doesn’t go away, does it? On the contrary, it simmers and roils inside you; eventually, it burns you alive.

So what’s an angry woman to do? I, for one, had to learn not to bury my anger, to have the courage to feel it without shame, and to listen to what it was telling me. Feeling powerless had warped my sense of myself and trapped me in a cycle of enraged passivity; to combat these feelings, I had to find and embrace any power I could realistically claim. The power to say no to other people, for example, especially to solving their problems. “I don’t know” and “Google it,” have become my go-to responses to many requests. Also, the power to say yes to myself, to solving my own problems, especially publishing a book. At last I began to channel my ferocity into submitting my work, and the angry writing I’d done in my empty nest eventually became my first collection, BOOK of POTIONS (potion = poem + fiction), four decades in the making.

Order the book…

On the cover is a knife, a potent symbol of the anger that threatened to consume me. My anger, which I no longer fear, nor repress out of shame. The act of acknowledging my rage, and then making something of it, something powerful and strange to put out into the world, has made me feel significantly less angry and more empowered. I’ve finally moved to my own version of Normal, where readers, friends and strangers, people of every gender, respond to my anger not with fear and derision, but with recognition and sympathy.

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