02/17/2026
We teach girls that their anger is a character flaw. What if it's actually their clearest form of intelligence?"While anger in girls and women is overwhelmingly portrayed as irrational," writes Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger, "it is, in fact, completely rational."The conditioning starts almost immediately. In one study Chemaly describes, newborns were dressed in gender-neutral clothing and researchers misled adults about their s*x. Parents were far more likely to describe babies they believed were boys as upset or angry. Babies they believed were girls? They called them "nice" and "happy." The same expression. Different label. Different permission.By the time girls are toddlers, they're given less leeway than boys for being "out of control." By elementary school, they've learned that showing anger puts their relationships at risk, that angry girls are unattractive, that the worst thing a girl can be called is a word that essentially means "angry woman." The anger doesn't go away. It goes underground — where it corrodes.Research confirms what many women intuitively know: women report feeling anger more frequently, more intensely, and for longer periods than men. And the triggers are telling. Men more often associate anger with feeling powerful. Women associate it with powerlessness. Women's anger is disproportionately activated by injustice, by discrimination, by the slow accumulation of double standards that contradict everything they were told as children about their abilities and their worth.As girls reach adolescence, this collision intensifies. They begin to see — and feel — the gap between the equality they were promised and the reality they inhabit. That gap produces anger. And the world responds by telling them that anger is the problem.It is not the problem. It is a signal."Girls learn to filter their existences through messages of powerlessness and cultural worthlessness," Chemaly writes. "They might be more inclined to depression because coming to terms with your own cultural marginalization and irrelevance is depressing."But what if we stopped treating girls' anger as something to fix, and started treating it as something to use?Actress and writer Mara Wilson explored this question in a 2018 essay for Elle magazine. Wilson's mother died when she was eight, and the grief ignited a rage that followed her through adolescence. Boys at school called her "crazy." Other girls didn't know what to do with her. She spent years furious at herself for being furious."I spent so many years trying to fight my anger, to hide it, and that never worked," Wilson wrote. "I don't think it's possible to ignore anger, and I don't think it can be fought. But it can be controlled, transformed, used. It can be a tool. Anger can inspire art, and anger fuels activism."Then she asked the question that stays with you:"What if we knew girls could be angry? What if we showed them how to use it?"It was only when Wilson found other angry women — through music, through art, through activism — that she stopped feeling alone in her rage. And it was only then that the anger became productive rather than corrosive.Chemaly's research supports this. When women's anger is acknowledged rather than suppressed, it becomes what she calls "a radar for injustice and a catalyst for change." Every social movement in history — suffrage, civil rights, — was fueled by people who were told their anger was inappropriate, and who refused to believe it.The choice isn't between anger and calm. It's between anger that is acknowledged and channeled, and anger that is buried and turned inward — where it becomes depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and silence.We don't have an anger problem. We have a permission problem.As Wilson concluded: "These are dark times — and in dark times, our inner fire glows brightest."Maybe it's time to stop teaching girls to put out the fire. And start teaching them what to build with it.
