I'm Leslie Jamison, I'm a writer and the teacher.

And in 2018, I wrote an essay about women's anger.

So I wrote this piece in early 2018 and actually finished the piece on a hospital bed a few days

after giving birth to my daughter.

And now that feels like another universe.

My daughter is two and a half, we're in the middle of a pandemic.

I've been in quarantine with a little toddler who's running around our tiny apartment.

But in so many ways, the ideas that I was writing about in the piece, exploring the shame

that can get attached to female anger, exploring the potentially constructive force of female

anger, feel more relevant to me than ever.

And I was thinking a lot about the thrilling kind of world building force of female anger.

When I watched Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's speech last week at the House of Representatives,

where she was responding to a particular incident of harassment that she'd experienced

at the hands of another representative.

But she was using that experience to talk about a much larger pattern of sexism, sexual

harassment, misogynistic mistreatment.

And you could see and feel in her words and in her eloquence and in her self-possession

the ways in which she was simultaneously motivated by fury and also harnessing that fury into

argument.

One of the things that AOC's speech was making me think about was the way that Audrey Lord

describes anger as something that can potentially function as a kind of corrective surgery, which

is to say anger can be destructive, it can be horribly destructive, but it's not always

...