For years, I have been afraid of my own anger. Because women are taught to fear rage, especially the rage of other women. I have come to learn that it is not the anger that makes me afraid, but the uses to which it might be put. For within every rage there is a power that can be used for destruction or construction.
-Audre Lorde.
Despite being dismissed as hysteria, female anger is a powerful force in shaping social and political change. This article examines how women artists have used their work to express their anger and frustration, breaking barriers that they believe are normal and can challenge gender roles.

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Get notified of top trending articles like this one every week! (we won't spam you)Historical Context
We can see early manifestations of female wrath in ancient myths and folklore. Characters like Joan of Arc and Medusa, frequently depicted as spiteful or hideous, serve as a metaphor for the repression of female power and the results of disobeying social norms.

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Medusa
According to Greek mythology, Medusa was once a beautiful priestess of Athena who had been sexually violated by Poseidon in the temple of Athena and then transformed into this terrifying monster with snakes for hair. Her transformation is a wonderful symbol of feminine wrath and the dangers of challenging masculine authority.

Image Credits: Livioandronico2013 from Wikimedia
Medusa's persecution is the core of the story. In the sacred temple of Athena, Poseidon sexually violated her. This is considered a grave offense in this sacred place so Athena punishes Medusa by turning her into a Monstrous creature rather than seeing her as a victim.
This is a typical behaviour in society where besides experiencing the torture she is also made to answer for it as well. Medusa's sensuality cannot be separated from her ability so her glare can transform a man into stone. Although Medusa is commonly depicted as a villain, feminist readings of her character find her to be a symbol of female resistance. It is possible to see her hideous appearance as a way of expressing her anger and rebelling against the ideals of female beauty and submissiveness that society demands.
Joan of Arc
During the tumultuous Hundred Years' War which was an extended, fierce battle between France and England, a young French peasant girl named Joan of Arc witnessed all this. She proclaimed that God had chosen her to assist the Dauphin, future King Charles VII, in the restoration of the French monarchy from the clutches of the English. Her inspiration, she believed, came from the saints who appeared to her.

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Although Joan lacked military experience and was a woman in a masculine society, she convinced the Dauphin to allow her to command the French army. Through her undying faith and inspiring leadership, she proved pivotal in winning many crucial French battles, but most notably, the relieving of the city that had been placed under siege in the city of Orléans. This huge victory raised French morale and changed the trend of war.
But this success wasn't for a long time. She was convicted of heresy by an English-dominated ecclesiastical court after being taken prisoner by the Burgundian forces who were allied with the English. Joan was charged with witchcraft and crossdressing, for which she was found guilty and received the death penalty. When she was only 19 years old, she was brutally burnt at the stake in 1431. Though Joan of Arc's life was tragically short, it was to last long in history. She came to represent French resistance to foreign dominance and patriotism. In this respect, her life is a timeless example of the strength of faith, bravery, and the human spirit to triumph over seemingly insurmountable obstacles, thrilling and inspiring people around the world.
The Rise of Feminist Art
The larger women's liberation movement coincided with the emergence of the feminist art movement in the 1960s and 1970s. During this period of profound social and political transformation, female artists started to question conventional ideas of art and femininity as well as the male-dominated art industry. The goal of feminist art was to change art history, which had mostly ignored the contributions of female artists. They sought to question the canon of art that was dominated by male viewpoints and to raise awareness of women artists, both historical and contemporary.
Feminist artists broadened the definition of art to encompass a greater variety of media and activities, including photography, body art, performance art, and crafts like needlework and pottery which are typically seen as "women's work." This put into question the art world's hierarchical system, which frequently regarded sculpture and painting as superior art forms.
Numerous topics pertaining to female identity, sexuality, the body, domesticity, and social and political challenges impacting women were examined in feminist art. Artists frequently questioned assumptions and traditional gender norms to give voice to the feminine experience.
One of my favorite artists and her work from this era is:
Artemisia Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter who is considered a pioneer in the field of art history. She managed to be a successful female artist in the male-dominated world by fighting major social and personal obstacles. The characteristics of the works of Gentileschi are strong chiaroscuro, dramatic realism, and an emphasis on strong female characters.
Her work is dramatically lit and darkened. Her works were indeed inspired a lot by the works of Caravaggio, and she had a great share of terrible traumatic experiences where a close family friend violated her, and it greatly influenced her painting.
Image Credits: Caravaggio from Wikimedia
The picture above is the painting of one of her greatest works this striking and gory portrayal of the biblical heroine Judith slaying the Assyrian General Holofernes. It is a reflection of her interest in strong, aggressive female role models as well as her own experiences.
The Impact of Artistic Performances
Through performance art, women artists expressed themselves by utilizing their bodies as a means of self-expression. Performance art thus challenged the classical style of art which at most objectified women and kept them out of the whole creative process. It re-asserted their control through the male gaze when they took over to present their selves by use of the body.
Then, women were able to challenge the social stigmas towards their sexual and nudity issues as well as the ones regarding aggression. In this way, artists were able to question boundaries and challenge the conventional notion of femininity by exploring and subverting these taboos with their bodies. The experiences and feelings of women, which were usually repressed or ignored in popular society, were given a voice through performance art. Performance could effectively and immediately address issues such as body image, sexual violence, and reproductive rights. Here are two examples:
María Evelia Marmolejo is a Colombian performance artist who has been impacting feminist art in Latin America especially. Her work often deals with the most pressing social and political issues about women in Colombia.
She began her career amid Colombia's intense political crisis in the 1980s. "Anónimo 1" (Anonymous 1), one of her first and most influential works, discussed the horrific consequence of war: political disappearances. Marmolejo inflicted her injuries when she performed, a powerful and jarring gesture that embodied the agony and brutality suffered by those who face political repression.

Image Credit: Mandragoras Art Space from Wikimedia
Another performance was "11 de marzo—ritual a la menstruación" (March 11th—Ritual in Honor of Menstruation), which put to rest long-standing taboos surrounding menstruation. Marmolejo reclaimed an otherwise normal biological function that often suffers from stigma and is not spoken of in public when he displayed menstrual blood in public. The act of this rebellion was to honor the female body and break social taboos.
Beyond just the questioning of taboos, Marmolejo's work concerns more universal issues than taboos and covers general issues about body politics, feminine sexuality, as well as social and political realities within the womanly world of Latin America. She has brought the struggles of Colombian women into the limelight.
Anna Halprin began dancing during the second half of the 20th century. She has been one of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey's pioneers in modern dances, an art that flourished toward modernism. She, however, quickly began breaking away from their very stylized and emotionally controlled techniques.
Halprin aimed to create a more emotional and intimate dancing technique that was deeply connected to her feelings and experiences. This is how her exploration of improvisation, which was based on the relationship between the mind, body, and spirit, emerged. This omnipresent approach she called an expression "psychophysical integration" because she believed in the possibility of a movement serving an artistic expression, healing activity, and self-development.

Image Credits: DLambertNJ from Wikimedia
Out of the evolution of aesthetic theory sprang the work, "The House on the Hill". To create the landmark performance of this piece, she made her house her set as a progression from working from "task movement" work to site-specific performance. Dancers traversed and occupied the rooms during a performance, taking hold of the spaces themselves and of the furniture and the personal things.
They walked out into the garden, climbed up on the roof, and encountered living surroundings. This elementary break of traditional dramaturgy shows the clear distinctions between the open world of art and the real world; the open and domestic spaces. This enabled "The House on the Hill" to probe the assumption that the home is purely a domestic sphere of life. Halprin allowed both the performers and the viewers to experience something unique and individual by incorporating the house itself as part of the performance. From a refreshing perspective, performance revealed an inter-relationship existing between the body, environmental space, and human mind through the emphasis on natural motions and opportunities for expression built into daily life.
Feminist Literature's Use of the Written Word as a Weapon: Rage and Opposition
"Anger is an energy. Find a way to use it and you can move mountains."
- Mae Jemison.
Women authors were utilizing the power of the written word to express their anger and resist the patriarchal systems that confined their lives even before the feminist art movement became popular. Women realized that literature was a powerful medium for giving voice to realities that were often disregarded or overlooked in other fields.
This challenged dominant social and cultural norms to which women were confined and could not access higher education or pursue job opportunities through her writings. Women found themselves in a community of and with solidarity, a means of identifying common problems and connections through shared literary experience.
Kate Chopin was an important American writer who explored late 19th-century women's lives and their struggles, as well as the questioning of social practices. She grew up in a lively, intellectually active environment in St. Louis, Missouri, where she was exposed to diverse social circles, and she enjoyed a degree of independence relatively rare for women in her era.
This session, perhaps, made her more observant of how women's lives and loves were depicted in her novels and short stories. Female desire, sexuality, and restraint within the lines of societal norms formed a recurring theme for Chopin to explore. She probed into the subtlety of a woman's self and called into question, as the convention ordained them, to gender roles.

Image Credits: John A. Scholten from Wikimedia
(There will be slight spoilers about her book The Awakening. If you don't want to be spoiled, feel free to skip this part.)
"The Awakening" is a powerful example of how literature can be used to explore the themes of female anger, but in a more subdued and introverted sense. Here in her book, the protagonist of "The Awakening," Edna Pontellier, known as Janey, is trapped by the social mores of 19th-century New Orleans. She is expected to be a wife and mother, and as she grapples with the limits imposed on her, she becomes increasingly resentful and miserable.
Janey craves a life outside of the home, one where she can express her individuality and pursue her passions. But this desire is met with internalized shame and social ostracism. She feels a silent anger and growing bitterness towards these confines that force her into this life she thinks of it as not being truly her own. Janey's rebellion is as intense in its subtlety for it is not only concealed but more covert than outward protests. She begins to scrutinize the traditional roles mapped for her and seeks an affirmation of her wants to define who she is. She has love relationships on her terms, follows after her intellectual interests, and finally takes steps that offend social conventions. Although she ends tragically, there is something very interestingly presented about the inner conflict for autonomy and self-discovery in Janey's work. "The Awakening" portrays a powerful portrayal of stony anger and festering resentment that can arise through social constraint and the denial of women's passion.
When we talk about women in literature, we can't forget Sylvia Plath, an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, known for her confessional poetry and her raw, unflinching exploration of mental illness, female experience, and the complexities of human emotion. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and experienced a turbulent childhood. The death of her father when she was still a young girl also affected her greatly, but depression took over her lifetime.
Her literary career developed when she studied at Smith College, where she attained high grades and started to develop her poetry voice. Plath tragically died in 1963, as she committed suicide aged thirty. She may have had a brief life, but a strong, long-lasting literary heritage remains due to her writings. That is why the poetry presented in her book is interesting today and reveals a serious, unflinching exploration of human nature as well as the complexity of the woman's life.

Image Credits: RBainbridge2000 from Wikimedia
Plath's intensity of emotional honesty, brilliant imagination, and dark themes she explores in her poetry, such as death, despair, the female experience, and poems that delve into the human experience, often into the more complex depths of love, loss, and the struggle for identity within the human psyche.
While most of us know her most famous work "The Bell Jar" published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas," a semi-autobiographical novel explores themes of mental illness, societal expectations, and the challenges faced by women in the mid-20th century. (There will be spoilers here as well so feel free to skip)
The book is about our protagonist Esther and her experiences as a bright college student who secures an internship at a prominent magazine in New York City. First, Esther is thrilled, but soon she struggles with a mounting sense of disappointment and hopelessness. She resists the limitation of love relations, is suffocated by cultural constraints, and fails to meet her intellectual pursuits with scarce choices of female employment.
Esther's fall into mental illness is vividly described, encompassing emotions of loneliness, anxiety, and desperation. She combats suicidal impulses, and hallucinations, and finally goes through electroshock therapy.
Apart from revealing an understanding of the human condition, female rage in literature provides the recognition and legitimization that helps transform social and political aspects of society. Analyzing this literary work concerning the past offers insight into where women are currently regarding their battles for equality.
Conclusion
So here we are at the end of this article even if it has been dismissed as irrational or hysterical, female fury is a powerful force that has historically sparked artistic expression and social change.
Songs I would suggest listening to are "Labour" by Paris Paloma and "The Willow Maid" by Erutan because they encompass the core of feminine fury. "Labour" is a very well-known song that has given us such an honest and unapologetic take on the emotional and physical pressures imposed on women. “The Willow Maid”(my personal favourite) goes on to tell the story with folk traditional music of defiance by the feminine and how strong the human spirit remains. These songs remind us of how the power of feminine ire also continues to this day, and the literary works covered in this article show this very fact.
However, the search for feminist anger is the first thing to identify and eradicate structural injustices that have yet to be removed from women. We may enjoy a fairer and more harmonious world where women are freed to express themselves and be as they are without fear of retaliation or attacks that tell them they shouldn't be hurt. I hope this article was informative for all of my dear readers.