Shaheen Pasha describes her experience being a Muslim woman in America and her anger arisen from trying to navigate these two identities with pressure from both sides to choose between them. Several essays discuss anger in relation to one’s identity. She watched her mother trade stories of frustration and rage with other moms and noted how often she heard, “phrases like, ‘I wish I could have said… ’” (157) On the other hand, Boss writes that her father openly raged, and she learned that as a girl it was her job, “to keep the peace through work and silence.” (158) Reema Zaman’s essay, “My Name and My Voice,” also speaks to the expectation for women to bare the weight of a man’s anger “I’ve been taught that men of any kind, be they our abuser, father, or partner, are our mystery to solve, our duty to abide, our pain to nurse, our responsibility to care for, our child-master to defer to.” (140) Women are taught to be nurturers, first and foremost, even if it means they must sacrifice freedom, safety, or happiness.

Dani Boss’ essay, “On the Backburner,” describes how as a child she learned that the place for women’s anger was in the presence of other women. The writers talk about not having a space to release anger, and several speak of denying they ever felt angry so they wouldn’t have to confront it. Many of the essays in this collection address the gendered nature of anger, who is allowed to express it, and how women bear the burden of keeping the peace. Burn it Down splits open women’s anger to reveal the ugly, uncomfortable inside and gives women a space to rage. “Every woman I know is angry,” Dancyger writes.

They are angry about widespread violence and sexual assault, being stripped of rights and agency, being talked over, told to be quiet, or not taken seriously, and so much more. Written by a diverse group of angry women, the twenty-two essays in Burn It Down confront the long history of women accused of being dramatic, hysterical, crazy, or hormonal for expressing anger and forced to swallow their rage in order to be viewed as composed and respectable ladies. “Throughout history, angry women have been called harpies, bitches, witches, and whores,” Lilly Dancyger writes in the introduction of her new anthology, Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger.

Burn it down women writing about anger