I’m done being told women are ‘too angry’

I’m done being told women are ‘too angry’ – aren’t you?

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I've been called an “angry woman” more times than I can remember. One man once remarked that he understood that I was a feminist, but “why do you have to be so angry about it?” My natural response to that was to shrug and say: but of course I'm angry. The real question I wanted to ask is: why aren't you?

I am here for all of the angry women; the incandescent, fire-lit women; the “hysterical” women – and did you know that the origin of the word “hysteria” comes from the ancient Greek word hystera, meaning uterus, or womb? For thousands of years, male physicians would attribute any unexplained emotional outbursts in women – including fainting and physical ailments – to a “wandering uterus” that they believed was physically moving around the body. It was thought to press on other organs and cause distress, with the recommended “cure” being marriage or pregnancy. I wonder if a man came up with that one...?

Women have a lot to be angry about at the moment. We can – and should – be furious about losing our bodily autonomy, including our rights to abortion and contraception, which are being stripped away in the US and are very much at risk in the UK (especially if Reform UK gets in, with its emphasis on pronatalism, “resetting Britain’s sexual culture”, undoing the sexual revolution of the 1960s and returning to “traditional family values”; not to mention this exposé of the way in which abortion is becoming a new front in Reform’s culture war).

We should be angry about our sisters in Afghanistan, who are being silenced and shut away and married off – at the age of just nine – by the Taliban; angry that violence against women and girls is one of the world’s most pervasive human rights abuses, affecting one in three women globally. We should be angry that, when the UK co-hosts a major conference on the future of international development in London this week, the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, will place women and girls at the centre of UK foreign policy as part of an “international mission” to enable women to live “free from fear”. We should be angry that we even need that protection in the first place.

And we should be livid, lit up and furious in the wake of the Epstein files revelations and the many powerful men who treated young women like paper napkins in a diner: to be used up, torn and thrown away.

If you're angry too, I get it. I feel it. I bleed it, right along with you. The issue, though, is what to do with all that rage. If you believe that anger can be a fuel for something good, like I do – to galvanise us, to prompt action (just as anger about the racism and bigotry in the political landscape propelled half a million of us to march against the far-right a few months ago) – then you'll probably want to know where to put it.

This month, I've been thinking a lot about how I process my own fury after becoming part of a collective of “angry women” (more than 70 female-identifying and non-binary playwrights and artists, in fact) called ALL THE RAGE.

Together, we have written an urgent collective theatrical response to the release of the Epstein files, which will be showcased at Theatre Deli in Leadenhall, London, from 11–13 June. I've written a poem for a space dedicated to “Letter to My Younger Self”. It'll be performed by an actor as part of a two-hour, site-responsive and immersive production that confronts institutional silence, cultural complicity and the enduring history of misogyny. I'd love you to come along and see it.

This is my anger – now tell me yours?