Women and the Truth About Anger
For many women, anger isn’t absent—it’s just hidden.
It simmers beneath smiles, polite responses, and phrases like “I’m fine.” It hides behind stomachaches, sleepless nights, and over-apologizing. For generations, women have been taught—explicitly and implicitly—that expressing anger is unseemly, unladylike, and even ungodly.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. A 1987 paper presented at Harvard Medical School traced women’s inhibition in expressing anger to the pressure to embody selflessness and service—what some call the “feminine ideal.” In the religious system I was once part of, they called it sacrifice. The message was clear: suppress the anger, swallow the pain, and serve without complaint.
Fast forward to modern research, and not much has changed. A 2010 study in the Journal of Social Issues suggested women experience anger as often as men—but express it far less. A February 2023 study in the journal Emotion revealed something deeper: gender inequality does indeed make women angry, but many resist expressing it out of fear it will reinforce negative stereotypes. In workplaces especially, women often internalize challenges and question their own competence instead of addressing the real, external issues.
Why is it so hard to change this?
Because these reactions are wired into our nervous systems. The phrase “neurons that fire together, wire together” is real. If you've spent a lifetime suppressing anger to maintain connection or safety, those patterns become deeply entrenched. Your body learns to flinch, freeze, or fawn—not to fight.
But here’s the truth we need to remember: anger is not bad.
Anger is information. It tells us something is off. That a boundary has been crossed. That something needs attention. In its healthy form, anger is a force of protection and clarity—a crucial signal that moves us from awareness to action.
Yelling, criticizing, blaming—these are behaviors. They are not the emotion itself. And we can learn to decouple the two. First, we name the emotion: “I feel angry.” Then we allow it to move through the body, without suppressing it and without harming others. This practice creates space for adaptive action—not reactive behavior.
For years, I lived in fear of my own anger. I was afraid of being discredited, labeled, or dismissed. I was told, in sermons and in conversations, that the “godly” thing was to forgive and forget—even in the face of abuse. My duty, I was told, was to minimize, deny, and keep the peace.
But peace built on silence is not peace. It’s performance.
In her book On Our Best Behavior, Elise Loehnen puts it this way:
"There is no realm, private or public, where women and girls get to work with their anger. We've been trained to make other people comfortable. We've been directed toward passivity and its implied dependency and victimhood. We've been instructed to suppress our natural aggression—or told we shouldn't have any at all."
But the tide is turning. I encourage my clients—and myself—to explore anger with curiosity and compassion. We ask:
What is this anger pointing to?
Where does it come from?
What does it want me to notice or change?
Through reflection, conversation, journaling, and therapy, we begin to see anger not as an enemy, but as a teacher. A protector. A truth-teller.
When women reclaim anger as a tool—not a weapon—we begin to restore our wholeness.
We begin to live, not just smile.
