04/15/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/1CnDQYFueY/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Mona Eltahawy was fifteen when she was sexually assaulted during hajj, and in her fifties when she was still being groped by strangers. Between those two points in her life, she was arrested by Egyptian riot police who broke both her arms and assaulted her while she was detained. When she writes that her anger saved her, she’s describing what it took to survive being attacked, and to keep surviving in a world where it kept happening. The anger was the force that said no, no further, and she absolutely meant it with the whole of her body.
Most of us have never been in situations where our rage had to save our lives. But we’ve been in situations where anger threatened something else we needed such as the relationship, or the sense of ourselves as reasonable, kind, likeable women. And so we learned the skill of not being angry, or at least not showing it, or at least converting it into something more acceptable before anyone noticed. The shrug that means "what can you do." By the time we're fifty or sixty, most of us have been doing this so long we've forgotten we're doing it at all.
Audre Lorde, the writer and activist, called anger "loaded with information and energy." It tells you when something is wrong and when you're being asked to accept something that shouldn't be acceptable. If you suppress the anger you lose both the information and the energy. The psychologist Harriet Lerner has written about how women's suppressed anger shows up as depression, anxiety or that flatness that gets called "low mood." The anger didn't go away -it went somewhere else.
There's a reason women's anger gets treated as dangerous. An angry woman is "hysterical," "difficult," or "too much." An angry man is "passionate" or "assertive" or just having a bad day. The double standard is so familiar it barely registers anymore so women do the policing themselves, pre-emptively smoothing their own edges before anyone else has to. The system runs more smoothly when we convert our legitimate grievances into manageable sadness. Sadness asks for comfort and anger asks for change. One of those is far easier to accommodate.
The difficult thing about finally letting yourself feel the anger is that it's rarely just about one thing. It's about all the times you didn't feel it or felt it and swallowed it and about the compromises that accumulated over years and the silences that seemed reasonable at the time. And some of that anger, if you're honest, is at yourself for going along and being reasonable. For not fighting harder when fighting might have made a difference. Eltahawy's anger was aimed at the men who attacked her but the anger most women have buried is messier and harder to aim.
What Lerner argues, and I think she's right about this, is that the goal isn't to stay in rage forever. The anger that saves you in crisis may need to become something else in order to remain useful. Undirected anger just churns and exhausts you without changing anything. The anger needs to find its voice, which means figuring out what it's actually about and what, if anything, can be done about it now. But you can't do that work if you've never let yourself feel the anger in the first place. You can't direct something you've spent forty years denying you had.
Eltahawy lists anger first among her "seven necessary sins" because it's the doorway. Before a woman can claim ambition or desire, she has to be able to feel when something is wrong and let that feeling have some force. The anger is what says I exist and you cannot simply move through me as if I weren't here. For women who have spent decades being accommodating and "low-maintenance," that recognition can feel dangerous because it threatens the architecture of a whole life built on not making a fuss.
Most of us are somewhere in the middle. We've felt the anger and the fear of what happens if we let it show and we’ve been the woman who smiled when she wanted to shout and the woman who finally did shout and then spent three days wondering if she'd ruined everything. The anger saved Eltahawy's life. For most of us the stakes aren’t as high but the pattern is the same. The question is whether you can let yourself feel it before it becomes something else entirely and it curdles into something you can't use.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
