Rebecca Traister discussed her latest book on the Daily Show with correspondent Jordan Klepper.
Angry Girls Will Get Us Through, published last month by Simon & Schuster, is an account of women’s activism in the United States, adapted for young readers by Ruby Shamir from Traister’s adult nonfiction. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “a brilliant overview of essential history.”
Introducing the book, Klepper noted that anger “can be a good thing.”
“There’s a lot of different things that anger can be, including political anger,” Traister said. “I would say that we live in a period in which a certain kind of political anger that is not good is radically shifting this country in a terrible way. That’s a punitive anger on behalf of an inequitable power system, and…a lot of angry white men who want to get back their power and are doing an enormous amount of destruction. This book is not about that.”
“Bummer!” Klepper joked. “How am I going to relate?”
“This book is about the women who have pissed those men off,” Traister said, to cheers from the studio audience. “This book is about angry women and girls and gender-nonconforming people who have been angry at inequity, at injustice. I would argue that that kind of anger is good, can be good. But also, one of the reasons I’m writing this book…is that anger has been underrecognized. We don’t get taught about it. It’s not appreciated.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
