S2 Ep14: Soraya Chemaly: Resilience, Women’s Anger, and Dismantling Male Supremacy for Good

Discovering Soraya Chemaly’s work on women’s anger was a revelation for me. I was finally able to claim my own anger, rather than dismiss it as juvenile and embarrassing. We must be able to claim our anger, because we have plenty to be angry about.

I was so thrilled to get to interview Soraya, and I think you will love her if you’re not already familiar with her rich body of work.

Some of the many topics we discuss in this podcast episode include:

• The power of women’s anger—and why patriarchy wants to keep that anger under control.
  
  
• The credibility gap, and how it undermines women’s authority.
  
  
• Why we associate genius and intelligence with boys, and foolishness with women.
  
  
• Constructing women as annoying.
  
  
• Soraya’s arguments in favor of pettiness.
  
  
• What resilience means and doesn’t mean, and how the wider culture constructs our assessment of risk in parenting.
  
  

Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning feminist writer, speaker, and activist. Former Executive Director of The Representation Project and co-founder of the Women's Media Center Speech Project, she is committed to expanding women's civic and political participation.

Soraya is the author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger, recognized as a Best Book of 2018 by the Washington Post, NPR, and others. Her work appears in TIME, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Ms. Magazine, and she has been featured on NPR, PBS NewsHour, BBC, and MSNBC.

She serves on the Women's Media Center board and has been recognized by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and awarded a Wikipedia Distinguished Service Award. Her next book, All We Want is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy, will be released November 11, 2025.

Read Soraya’s Substack here, or visit her website here.