In 2014, Rebecca Traister wrote a column for the New Republic motivated by one thing: sheer rage. “I didn’t bother to dress it up,” she says via Zoom from her home in northern New England. “I didn’t bother to make it funny. I didn’t bother to make it polite or witty or snarky or anything that might disguise how pissed off I was.”

The piece, which went viral, was spurred by a conversation she had on Twitter about an Esquire article that reduced women to their looks, but Traister also expressed a deep-seated anger as she wrote about recent examples of systemic misogyny and racism—anti-choice activists testifying against a bill banning restrictions on abortion rights, a Black woman whose child was unjustly put into foster care.

Traister’s not alone; as she argues in her newest work, Angry Girls Will Get Us Through (Simon & Schuster, Feb. 17), women have been enraged throughout U.S. history—and their fury has ignited progressive movements, from suffrage to workers’ rights to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. But women’s wrath has often been misunderstood or actively erased: Rosa Parks’ courageous choice not to give up her bus seat, born of simmering rage at the discrimination she’d long endured, has been flattened into the image of a gentle, quietly exhausted woman; Hillary Clinton’s fervent speeches on the 2016 campaign trail were couched as bitter, shrill, and tense, while fellow candidate Bernie Sanders’ anger was seen as authentic, righteous, even charismatic.

The new book, adapted by Ruby Shamir, draws from Traister’s adult works: Big Girls Don’t Cry, an incisive look at the 2008 presidential election, seen through the lens of gender; All the Single Ladies, an exploration of the ways unmarried women are transforming U.S. culture; and Good and Mad, which examines women’s anger as a tool for sociopolitical change.

Good and Mad was published in October 2018, during an “explosive period,” says Traister—nearly halfway through Donald Trump’s first administration and, coincidentally, just days after Christine Blasey Ford testified during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearing. The year before, millions across the globe had participated in Women’s March demonstrations to voice their opposition to Trump, and in the fall of 2018, an unprecedented number of women ran for—and ultimately won—public office. “I wrote it in a fever, in about four months,” says Traister. “Part of my goal was to capture that moment, to bottle it up and say, This is what it was like.”

Her latest book posed a greater challenge. Traister often lectures at colleges and high schools, and she believed that the research she’d done for Good and Mad could be reworked for an even younger audience. But she didn’t initially think that the material from Big Girls Don’t Cry or All the Single Ladies would fit. That was Shamir’s idea. “She saw that it was all part of the same story.” Once Traister started re-examining her previous work through the lens of anger as a political force, she could “see how that ran through my entire book about unmarried women, even though I would never have thought of anger being an organizing principle there.”

Adapting the work involved some cutting (in particular, the profanity that features heavily in Traister’s adult work); she also did some additional reporting, covering the 2024 presidential election, for instance. Toughest of all was presenting potentially disturbing material in ways appropriate for a young audience. “So much of what women and gender-nonconforming people have been angry about over the centuries in this country has been brutal, terrifying [sexual] violence and degradation, and it’s important that young people begin to understand that, but you also don’t want to overwhelm them.”

Traister wants young people to have a richer sense of history than she did as a child. “There [were] all kinds of history that had not been taught that I wound up learning through my work as a researcher and a writer.…The image of the union man is very often a white man; we’re not often taught about the Black washerwomen in Atlanta [striking for higher wages], or about the young immigrant women in the [early 1900s] striking against dangerous and unjust conditions in the garment manufacturing industry in New York, nor about the women who, in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911, changed the direction of their careers to fight for workplace safety regulations.”

Like Good and Mad, Traister’s new book ends by exhorting readers to stay angry—an apt conclusion for a book released during another Trump presidency, one marked by misogynistic rhetoric and attacks on marginalized groups. But she emphasizes that there are many reasons to be enraged—and politically active—that have nothing to do with the current administration. The Black Lives Matter movement began in 2012, when Barack Obama was president. “And [the] last year under Biden, we saw one of the biggest waves of student protest in this country’s history around Israel and Gaza.” Traister adds, “The sources of anger are deep and structural, and they may become intensified under certain administrations. But they’re not [dependent upon] whoever’s in the White House.”

Traister also wants to dispel the belief that anger is synonymous with divisiveness. “We too rarely acknowledge that anger is a binding force as much as it is a dividing force,” she notes. “People say, ‘I want to let go of the anger.’ Well, when you’re angry at something that is wrong in the world and you have an opportunity [to fight back], whether that’s through protest, whether it’s through doing work to change policy, whether it’s simply reading history together and learning that you’re not alone in being angry about these inequities…it connects you.”

Anger can also coexist with joy, Traister says. For the new book, she interviewed teen activists Daniel Trujillo and Libby Gonzalez, who in 2023 organized the Trans Youth Prom in Washington, D.C.—both a celebration of trans and nonbinary people and a rebuke to the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation introduced that year. “There can be joy and communion in working to make the world better than it was.”

Although many associate progressive anger with a kind of finger-wagging humorlessness, Traister believes that activism can be funny; she writes about the feminists who, clad in Mickey Mouse ears and animal masks, belligerently confronted male journalists on the floor of the 1972 Democratic National Convention, calling them out for their refusal to cover women’s issues. “All kinds of activism has been wacky and fun and performative and involved music and singing and coming together, sometimes in…worship, sometimes to celebrate, sometimes to mourn losses together.”

Admittedly, it’s hard to find reasons to celebrate now, but Traister cautions readers against writing off the current era as a time of conservative backlash; real life is far messier than history books make it out to be. “A mistake that comfortable progressives make…is they think that a victory like Roe is the end of a story,” she says. “That’s not how it works. Look at the history of abolition, Reconstruction, Jim Crow. If you are fighting to extract rights, protections, equality, and liberty from a system that does not want to give you any of those things, that system is always going to try to claw them back. By the same token, when you lose, that is not the end of the story.”

Traister adds, “There is never a stop and a start, and the people who want to tell you that things operate in neat waves…those are people who want to contain the fundamentally uncontainable impulses in this country—to fight to make it better than it has been in the past.” 

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.

CORRECTION: An earlier verison of the story misstated when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire occurred.