Name: Rebecca Traister - “Angry Girls Will Get Us Through” | The Daily Show
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T21:38:31.000Z
Duration: 10 min 9 s
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Gerund

Future simple

So there's a lot of different things that anger can be, including political anger.

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 angry people, a lot of angry white men who want to get back their power and are doing an enormous amount of destruction.

Angry white oh, no, there's no angry white men in here at all.

This book is about the women who have pissed those men off.

So this book is a book about angry women and girls and gender nonconforming people who have been angry at inequity, at injustice.

And I would argue that that kind of anger is good, can be good.

But also, one of the reasons I'm writing this book and one of the reasons this is an adaptation for young readers of a book that I wrote for adults is because that anger has been underrecognized.

In fact, women and girls and gender nonconforming people are often told that their anger makes them ugly or hysterical or crazy or dangerous.

And in fact, when I have gone back to get an education that I never got and I had a very good education but was never taught that at the beginning of almost every major social movement that has reshaped this country, not just the officially women's movement ones, civil rights, environment, labor, there were angry women and girls at the start.

And their stories haven't been transmitted to us.

So this is an attempt for me to begin to tell some of those stories that I don't think got recognized or appreciated.

And it's specifically about the anger that didn't get appreciated as catalytic and righteous.

Now, it's also a good time to write about history.

Is there any you kind of walk through a lot of characters within the women's movement.

Is there anybody who stands out to you in this as particularly important in a moment like this?

Well, there are a lot of people who are very important.

I will tell you somebody I've been thinking about recently, in part because she just died, a woman named Claudette Colvin.

And that's a name that a lot of people might not immediately recognize.

Claudette Colvin was 15 in 1955, March of 1955, almost exactly 70 years ago, when she, as a 15-year-old girl, refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery.

This was nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.

Now, the civil rights movement, which had been planning to stage an action around this, did not want Claudette Colvin, this 15-year-old girl, to be the face of that action.

She became a plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that ultimately, in 1956, would bar racial segregation on public transportation.

Her choice that day on that bus actually changed the law.

There are a lot of very messed up reasons that were not taught about her and that the movement itself wanted to choose Rosa Parks, who herself is angry in ways we're not taught about.

But one of the reasons that I think about Claudette Colvin in particular, writing this book for young readers, is that the way she described her choice that day as a high school student was that because she'd been reading history specifically about the abolition movement a century before her, she says that she felt like the ghosts of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were pushing on her shoulders, gluing her to that bus seat.

And it reminds me of why it's so important that we have this history, that we do tell these stories of anger and resistance, because a 15-year-old girl can be inspired by them 100 years later and wind up a plaintiff in a Supreme Court case that winds up altering the law around segregation and public transportation.

You see the import in recognizing the pattern where anger has been, in many ways, whitewashed or sanded down.

And you're asking people to connect with that anger right now.

But I think a lot of people also feel the burnout attached with anger.

How does someone hold that anger, that righteous feeling that they have when they're pissed off at the system?

But when I go out and talk to a lot of people who are watching the news, there's no shortage of being mad at it.

But almost for self-survival, there's a desire to step back and give yourself that space.

How do you reconcile keeping that fire burning and also staying sane in this world?

And especially these past couple of years, I've heard that so much from so many people, people who were angry in the first Trump administration and now are tired, right?

It's another reason that it's really important to tell a longer and more complex history.

And the first thing I want to say is that anger can be a very destructive force.

I never want to pretend that it can't be.

It can explode relationships between allies, between friends.

It can be very combustible and destructive.

We don't talk enough about how anger, shared anger, can also bring people together.

It's the building blocks of organizing and of movements.

And when you discourage people on the margins from expressing their anger, that means they can't let other people know what they're angry about.

And they can't hear the other people who might be right next to them in class, on their block, at work, who are angry about the same things and with whom they could form a bond that winds up being supportive, people they can work together with, do organizing,

One story in this book is about kids who planned a trans prom.

There's celebration in anger and in organizing.

And then there's also people who can spell you when you're exhausted.

And so one of the things that I want to stress about anger, including for young people, is that while it can be harmful and hurt, it can also draw people together.

So actually, I think that the answer to burnout there's sometimes no answer to burnout.

Community, connection, working together, really listening and paying attention to the people who are angry about the same things you are, how they're doing, how they're feeling, can you help them, can they help you.

You talk a little bit in this about your own writing process and how years ago, comedy was a tool many people used as a way to invite people in and still do,

but that you shifted to an angrier stance and immediately found that that was resonating more or it got much more attention.

But when I look at the media landscape right now or the platforms with which people engage, anger is sort of the bar for engagement.

So how do you balance what seems to get clicks with actual effectiveness?

It feels like the conversation happens amongst a din of anger.

So that's a question that I think we could ask about almost any era, right, where you're trying to break through, whether that's in newspaper periodicals or whether it's in a television era or now whether it's in an internet clickbait era.

And there's not an easy answer, except that I think people I think all of us here can recognize and connect with things that are authentic versus things that are performed, right?

You can't perform anger in a way that's going to resonate.

You can perform it in a way that's going to make people laugh, that might make people but I don't think there's a single solution to that problem.

I think it's a matter of continuing to think hard about what we want to say and to whom we want to say it and how we want to say it and make sure that it's coming from a place that's real and not just trying to get the attention, because people can see through that pretty quickly, I think.

Well, I hope that people can't see through it, inauthenticity.