On Righteous Female Rage: Part II

A spring nonfiction primer

Tired, Ramon Casas i Carbó, 1900

After recovering from a long bout of early spring illness, I have finally come up with a list of non-fiction books about feminine rage. It took me a couple of weeks to decide on the final selections. While thinking about these books I realized the color wheel of rage has many hues. Anger makes you tired, jittery, sarcastic, broody. We met Gentileschi and Caravaggio in the first part of this series. Their paintings featured the loud dynamism and intensity of chiaroscuro depicting rage. As winter gave way to spring, my personal anger shifted from exuberant outbursts to listlessness. And the Catalan artist Ramon Casas i Carbó excels in the tired female phenotype.

The gallery of female ennui.

What were these women thinking? Can’t vote but corsets are mandatory? Did the Victorian male doctor just diagnose me with vapours?

Four books across the mood board on what makes us angry.

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Reading Virginia Woolf at the tender age of seven or eight was like entering Narnia. Who was this woman speaking my mind? Did everyone have a Woolf-Plath-Dickinson era in college or high school where you groan at the injustices of the world but still try to exude love for everything tender and fresh? Like you want to hug the freshly mowed grass while the barnhouse behind you burns wild?

Scribbling in the margins of a copy of A Room of One’s Own given by my aunt, I’d shake my head while comparing Woolf’s Oxbridge anecdotes with the veiled sexism in my life. I wanted to whack the Beadle and say, “Let her walk the turf, you curmudgeon!” Woolf was roasting the dark academia cult and its beginnings built by “an unending stream of gold and silver”, the foundation of the generational privilege closely guarded by men, that kept flowing even “when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come.” She hammered the notion of suffrage and agency in young girls like me. She tells us that Shakespeare had a sister who never wrote a word.

But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.

Woolf sculpted the formless clay of the anonymous woman behind the domestic drudgery. The little me dreamed of a desk and writing surrounded by cups of tea and a clutter of cats. I don’t have a cat. I live in a shared space, and my desk shows the challenges of real estate and house ownership that plague the millennials. Can’t tell you if I am tired or mad. But I write and I let Shakespeare’s sister live through me.

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In Antigone Rising, the classicist Helen Morales analyzes and repurposes Greek myths and their cultural transference in contemporary times concerning racism, sexism, gender fluidity, body image issues, and politics. I wrote an account of the book here with several interesting case studies. The 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee, for example, led a nonviolent movement bringing women of Christian and Muslim faith who refused sex to their husbands to broker peace talks among fighting factions thus ending the brutal Liberian civil war in 2003. She is called the Liberian Lysistrata after Aristophanes’ tale of women going on a sex strike to stop Greek city-states from warfare. Just like grief, rage has stages. Often anger is followed by resolve.

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Of all the recent books written about female biology and medical misogyny, Pain and Prejudice by Gabrielle Jackson is the most compact, democratic, and digestible with a smart section of notes and an index for every kind of reader. Gabrielle, the Guardian Australia correspondent, was diagnosed with endometriosis in 2001. This book is a culmination of long-term journalistic research on female bodies, diseases, and the lack of attention and research funding. You can breeze through this in one day and learn a lot about the sheer pigheadedness that surrounds medical science about conditions like endometriosis, PMDD, pelvic pain, psychological conditions, chronic pain, and hypochondria. The third chapter is a favorite because it is chock full of facts I know most people are ignorant of. Blame it on Hippocrates for sensationalizing the nature of the uterus that continues today.

Hysteria comes from the Greek word for the uterus, hystera.

In Plato’s dialogue, Timaeus, c. 360 BC, the womb is ‘voracious, predatory, appetitive, unstable, forever reducing the female into a frail and unstable creature’, according to Rousseau.

[In the 1800s] treatments for hysteria were dominated by bleeding (either by lancet, cupping or leeches), pills, nerve tonics, iron, arsenic, opiates and vomiting, as well as a change of scenery or bathing in sulphurous waters, such as at the resort town of Bath or in the many spas popping up all over Germany.

Pair this with the witty Chronically Candid Memes on Instagram curated by Kay and you are set for a rage party.

Honorary mention: Excited about Caroline Crampton’s new book A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria. The book features the painting Tired by Ramon Casas i Carbó which inspired me to write this essay.

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Finally, a book that I was hoping someone would write because being a member of this subversive community is a hard thing to do. Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood by Ruby Warrington is a bold book. It's not often that we get to hear about this topic in social circles. This one-of-a-kind book blends Warrington’s personal journey with the sociology and cultural history of reproductive choices and associated prejudices.

The decision or the process of deciding not to have kids is filled with self-doubt, shame, fear, and distress for many either self-generated or projected by peers and society. The Subreddit Childfree has a meagre 1.5 million members. Considering the world’s population, it’s a drop in the ocean. Writers and readers from English-speaking countries or those with access to English chat forums are represented in this sample.

In her book, Warrington skillfully cultivates a strong feeling of camaraderie and connection among individuals who have grappled with difficult choices regarding having children or not for whatever reason they might be. She empowers and emboldens readers to engage in open and honest discussions since there is a ginormous moral component rooted in religion associated with reproductive rights. Does a woman have the right to decide for herself? We know she cannot in many countries.

The spiritual descendants of Shakespeare’s sister are still angry and tired.

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Leave me comments about the various topics mentioned above written in non-English languages. I’d very much like to read them. I’ll be back with a new series next time. Ciao!