Welcome to Litsy!

Please teach me about my anger.

In spite of all the evidence that humanity has made great strides towards equality, empathy, and self-awareness, the most powerful country in the world once again stands for oppression, sexism, racism, and corruption.
I am as surprised as I am not at all.
And yet, my heart is broken.

I am Canadian, so while today's very big and very important US election will impact my country, the fact is I have absolutely no say in what happens down there. All I can do is sit, wait, and hope for the best (so, yeah, KAMALA PLEASE!!). That said, this audiobook is the perfect read while I practice patience. Love and patience to all you American Littens today 💖 vote, vote, vote!

This is a really interesting exploration of th power of women's anger, how it has been historically weaponised against them, and how personally invigorating it can be.

Next up #WomensHistoryMonth

The writing was terrible. I had to keep rereading sentences because they just didn't make sense. Took hours just to get to page 18. #HailTheBail

On a positive note: I got a second bingo on my January #BookSpinBingo board 😁 @TheAromaofBooks

13/62
#MountTBR #ReadAway2024 @Andrew65 @DieAReader @GHABI4ROSES

Love me some cool end pages 😍

I had taken these from my TBR shelf to read. Then my library holds peaked my interest…

Who can relate?

Loving today‘s #sundayfunday question! And, yes, SO many books. The two that triggered real sea changes in my life were Siddhartha when I was a teenager, and the tagged book about 4 years ago. They both renewed interests I already had, gave me permission to feel more passionate about them, spurred me to read many more books in those genres, and had tangible effects outside my reading life.

If you‘re looking for places to donate, I‘ll share some resources/links in the comments. 💔

Jumping in late to #curiouscovers with an aggressively feminist photo for #redandwhite
@Eggs @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

I want to talk about what a great book this is, but first -can we just admire these fantastic end pages? 😍 Traister explores the election of 2016 & how it led to the uprising of women's activism, the #metoo movement, Women's March, and explosion of women running for office. She also pulls in history: women's suffrage & the women's rights movement of the 70s. It's history, social commentary, and it's a call to action. #bookspin @TheAromaofBooks

4⭐

I often get angry at white feminists, the active work they do to make their book not intersectional is appalling. I did not feel that here.
I picked up this because Traister was interviewed and kept bringing the conversation back to the Black activists who have been working and being often ignored by the media and the white activists. I was not disappointed to see she does the same work here.
Well written and researched w/a clear message

I listened on audio and it was great. I enjoyed the history, older and more recent that this book covered. It‘s not perfect, but I thought well done.

As a Black Woman...

I. JUST. CAN‘T.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2717604080

Brilliant, cathartic, necessary reading. Traister's narration is superb. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Seems an appropriate pre-Iowa caucus listen

Thinking about all the examples of bullsh*t women have put up with will make anyone good and mad. #audio

This is a great book on the value of female anger as well as all the ways women are punished for expressing it. Valuable read.

No one can promise that our work now will remap our landscape and remake our future. That burden is on those of us who want desperately for it to do so. ~We~ determine whether or not we change the world.

Women understand that this has to be the beginning of something...because they‘ve seen, for the first time, the real consequences of inaction. So you have women who are waking up and seeing that they don‘t have the luxury of going back to sleep. —Stacey Abrams

Once you wake up and see how important local elections are, it‘s hard to go back to the shadows and stick your head in the sand. On election night, a switch got flipped in me. I‘m starting to call it my ‘I‘ll be damned‘ switch. I‘ll be damned if I‘m going to be quiet anymore. —Kim Drew Wright

Change won‘t come from women running for office; it will also come from the women who are engaging in their campaigns, volunteering, paying attention, educating themselves, becoming activists for the first time in their lives. And in the years since Trump became president, those women are legion.

Part of the reason that we‘re seeing women running is we know that our voices are needed to the see the change we‘re looking for, because we can‘t count on someone else to be the advocate. —Lauren Underwood

The tsunami of #metoo stories hadn‘t just revealed the way that men had grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it had also shown us that they had done it all while building the very world in which we still were forced to live.

Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, the blame for our own victimization, and all the subtler, invisible cuts that undermine us daily...we are not even allowed to be angry about it.

—Lindy West

A white woman has only one handicap to overcome—that of sex. I have two—both sex and race.

Do a Google image search on any of the powerful women in politics or public life, especially those who threaten white male power— and you‘ll turn up scores of photos of women with their mouths open, unrestrained. The best way to discredit these women, to make them look unattractive, is to capture an image of them screaming; the act of a woman opening her mouth with volume and assured force, often in complaint, is coded in our minds as ugly.

The furious female is, we are told to this day, in innumerable ways, both subtle and stark, a perversion of both nature and our social norms. She is ugly, emotional, out of control, sick, unhappy, unpleasant to be around, unpersuasive, irrational, crazy, infantile. Above all, she must not be heard.

We are primed to hear the anger of men as stirring, downright American, as our national lullaby, and primed to hear the sound of women demanding freedom as the screech of nails on our national chalkboard. That‘s because women‘s freedom would in fact circumscribe white male dominion.

We are taught it— give me liberty or give me death, live free or die, don‘t tread on me—as patriotic catechism, but only when it has been expressed by white men has it sounded or been transmitted to us as admirable, reasonable, as the crucial catalectic ingredient to political change.

The antipatriarchy movement is building, aiming to undo ten thousand years of recorded history. Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn‘t juxstapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch. This is a defining moment in the culture. It‘ll never be the same going forward. —Steve Bannon

DAMN RIGHT.👊🏾✊🏻🖕🏻

Furious women...speaking alone or working together against tyranny or oppression or injustice in this country...moving it closer to where it must be if it is to fulfill its patriotic, and yet unmet, promise of equality.

On both the right and the left, the kind of foul-mouthed, performative anger that I had gawked at coming from women trying to storm the political gates in earlier eras was in 2016 being directed ~at~ the woman who had come closer to knocking those gates down than any other before her.

We must come to recognize our own rage as valid, as rational, and not as what we‘re told it is: ugly, hysterical, marginal, laughable.

Perhaps the reason that women‘s anger is so broadly denigrated—treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational—is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn the very systems that have sought to contain it.

There has always been an understanding of the power of women‘s anger: that as an oppressed majority in the US, women have long had within them the potential to rise up in fury, to take over a country in which they‘ve never really been offered their fair or representative stake.

I really liked this non fiction about women in my politics right now. People are mad and taking action.

This book about female anger: its historic, current, & manipulative suppression; its insurrectionist release; & its power to change the world (largely through politics) is nuanced, carefully-researched, & passionate. Well-worth the read (or listen)!

*Likely the shortest review I‘ve ever written, but this in no way reflects the time you should spend with it.

This song was written in 1972 for the feminist wing of the DNC held in Miami. I was a raging feminist back then. And I‘m angrier now than I was then. I marched at age 17 for Roe. Marched for ERA amendment. Why is this generation not? I‘d love to hear what other generations think. #goodBook.

Next up on my #20booksby2020 #24b4Monday #Deweysreadathon

Read this if you're a woman who has ever felt thatv things need to change. Or if you're a man who wants a clearer path to understanding that women are justified in they're anger.

I‘ve been listening to the tagged book & thinking. I came up with an idea that I think could be BIG if organized & promoted properly:

Treat March 1st (the first day of Women‘s History Month) as if it‘s New Year‘s — but instead of making New Year‘s Resolutions, make #feministresolutions. Hashtag it, convince the other women in your life to do it, & the men, too. Make it go viral! Feminism is for everyone. 👇🏻

“Most women I knew did not want the “opportunity” to patrol the borders of patriarchal overreach; we felt torn about both the vague prospect & the observed reality of these men losing their jobs. We thought of their feelings & their families, fretted that the disclosure of their misdeeds might cost them future employment, or even provoke them to harm themselves. But this was something else we were being compelled to notice: 👇🏻

#7Days7Covers #CoverCrush

Day 7

Post 7 book covers that you love over 7 days, with no explanation.

Have you been tagged yet? If not, you‘re it! Join the fun!

History of woman‘s discontent and its impact on politics

Finally picking this book up again, I‘ve had a very steady stream of library holds grace my ereader. Wanna get to at least two more books before school starts up in a few weeks. Wish me luck!

#thisonesforthegirls #lilithjuly
These few are 😁
Thanks for a great month Cindy and Karen 👍🏻😘

#lilithjuly #notreadytomakenice @Cinfhen @KarenUK

I‘d listened to so many interviews with Rebecca Traister before I got my hands on her book that I was beginning to wonder if I needed to read it at all. Of course I did. It was exactly what I need to read. Anger at injustice and oppression is exactly what we need to feel. Using anger to drive action and change is perfectly legitimate. This book helped me feel less alone in my anger and more empowered to use it.