Much of the book recounts fresh events, but Traister’s gift is to contextualize and synthesize superficially disparate eras and events, social injustices and private pains. It’s a virtuosic performance, elucidating women’s rage as a transformative political tool from 19th-century abolition and suffrage campaigns to summer 2018, connecting achievements of the mad women of feminism’s first and second waves to the present-day tide of women’s activism.ĭrawing on history, profiles, interviews and her own observations, Traister interweaves the reflections and insights of feminism’s old guard and current trailblazers alike, from Shirley Chisholm and Gloria Steinem to Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and #MeToo founder Tarana Burke, not to mention the initiatives of women working to affect local issues, fund and train women candidates or newly enter politics themselves. “Good and Mad” was composed in a matter of months, with incandescent urgency. In the early months after the 2016 election, Traister resolved to write about the explosion of women’s anger and activism, tracing it over a few years - until she recognized a need to capture this maybe-movement in something like real time, to ensure that none of its complicated fury would be lost to tepid retrospective accounts. To enter the splendid core of ire and intelligence coursing through Rebecca Traister’s third book, “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger,” is to be sustained by its heat, invigorated, galvanized.

Good and mad traister