My mother is almost 70 years old and has never been allowed to be angry. She appears frustrated, exhausted, defeated but never angry. No unbridled rage, ever. When she tries to express frustration about something, she is apologetic midsentence, she softens her voice, she makes herself smaller. A woman who learned early that her rage had no place in this world.
This inheritance passes down without words. It comes through the way she holds her tongue, the way she smiled when she wanted to scream. When anger surfaces, it arrives twisted with guilt. More time is spent justifying these feelings than experiencing them. An apology comes before anyone else gets the chance to speak.
In that childhood home, anger belonged to men. My mother would often whisper “he will get angry” like a warning and those five words became a law that governed everything. The rhythm of the household depended on reading his moods the way others read weather reports. To placate him required first predicting his mood, preventing his anger before it emerged. His anger mattered because it held power and strength, the ability to withhold affection, warmth and often, finances.
In relationships, this inheritance becomes a contract, one signed without knowing. A male partner’s micro and major aggressions are excused as his second nature, even applauded. His rage is “just him letting off steam,” a natural release that must be accommodated. The moment a woman dares to flare up in response, she must explain herself. She is asked to justify her hurt, to prove her anger was warranted. He is allowed to feel; she is required to apologize.
Angry men get patted on the back for standing their ground, while women get branded “hysterical,” “dangerous,” “unladylike.” So the pattern repeats: swallow it, let it sit inside. Deepa Narayan interviewed hundreds of Indian women for her book Chup and found this same pattern repeated across generations. All trained to merge into their surroundings and to disappear into the hostility they are subjected to.
The state makes sure this lesson is never forgotten. During the recent Jantar Mantar protests against exam corruption and paper leaks, men and women raged together. Yet only women were vilified by the government and media. A 15-year-old schoolgirl from Noida became a target: hounded by a government servant, coerced into publicly apologizing to the Prime Minister for using cuss words at the protest. A child forced to apologize for her rage.
But the humiliation didn’t stop there. The Prime Minister himself weighed in, calling the protesting women “uncultured” for their language. He spoke of how “this kind of behaviour doesn’t suit our daughters and daughters-in-law.” He was reducing women to possessions, to subjects whose right to expression depends on his approval. Not daughters as autonomous beings with legitimate grievances. Daughters as bahu betiyan, objects to be controlled, their rage a breach of decorum rather than a voice demanding justice.
Notice the machinery at work: Men’s fury at the same protest was noted as strength, as justified outrage. Women’s anger was criminalized, policed through language and physical presence, controlled through shame and surveillance. A teenage girl was made to apologize for words her male counterparts spoke freely. She was taught, in front of the nation, that her rage has a price: that speaking truth without permission is a transgression against “culture,” against the imagined sanctity of daughterhood.
The message is clear: Women are allowed to exist in these roles, but only as long as they remain palatable, obedient, small. The moment they dare to speak with the same force as men, they become threats to be tamed. Their rage isn’t recognized as righteous. It’s criminalized as indecency.
The irony is suffocating. We speak of freedom, celebrate Independence Day, but whose freedom? When a man’s anger is treated as justified, even noble, and a woman’s anger gets her labelled as a shrew or a nag, that’s not freedom.
Feminist writer Soraya Chemaly opines, “ignoring anger makes us careless with ourselves and allows society and state to be careless with us. Treating women’s anger and pain in these ways makes it easier to exploit us for reproduction, labour, sex, and ideology.”
As important as the need for equality may be, it’s time to start talking about equity alongside it. Equality would give the same treatment. It would mean rage gets celebrated the way a father’s is. While that may be fair, it’s not enough. Equity is needed. A world that understands this anger carries generations. A daughter’s rage is not just her being sensitive and emotional; it’s the breaking of chains women have worn for centuries. It’s the sound of silence finally shattering. By refusing the slow death of suppression, anger can be recognized for what it is. Rage can be reclaimed with the rightful respect and acknowledgement it deserves. Simply put: when a man gets angry it’s about the moment, when a woman finally rages, it’s about everything she was not allowed to feel before.
Writer Meena Kandasamy calls herself “an angry young woman” and says, “the world has not seen enough of our kind.” She writes about that moment when a woman’s silence finally cracks into rage, and how society treats it like a disease. The moment a woman dares to express what has been held for decades, names come: bitter, angry, ungrateful witch. As if rage emerged from some vacuum, instead of centuries of being silenced.
My mother’s immunity is at its lowest with chronic pains. Around her, older and younger women have been diagnosed with autoimmune disorders. When they talk about their diagnoses, they can invariably trace it back to something. A mother who never let herself feel. A grandmother who swallowed decades of rage. A pattern of women choosing everyone else’s comfort over their own survival. Physician Dr. Gabor Mate documents this connection between suppressed emotion and immune collapse. He writes that when anger is repressed, it “disarms the body’s defences against illness.” The research backs up what appears around us everywhere. When women abandon their own silence, their bodies erupt.
These are the costs of silence: compromised immunity, autoimmune conditions carried silently, chronic pain managed without voice, bodies speaking what mouths could never say or were never allowed to. The rage that was never permitted to have a voice is now destroying from the inside. This unlearning is happening now. Brittany Cooper reminds us that “it does more harm to not be able to rage.” Every time anger surfaces and the urge to apologize is resisted, the immune system is told it deserves to survive. Bell Hooks understood that rage, when channelled with intention, can become generative: a source of healing and growth, and therefore, change.
My daughter gets angry. She says it out loud. She doesn’t shrink or apologise or spend hours wondering if she has the right to feel what she feels. Sometimes it exhausts to parent a child that refuses to disappear. But there’s clarity in watching her: this is what freedom looks like. My mother never got this. There’s still work being done to move through the guilt embedded in rage. But my daughter is inheriting something different. She is inheriting a body that hasn’t learnt to betray itself.
The wish is for all of us more than just freedom. The wish is for equity in the right to rage. The right to be angry about injustices, about devaluation, about centuries of suppression, and not be called ungrateful. Not to be labelled difficult or be diminished. If a man’s anger can burn bright and be respected and wars be waged and justified too, then a woman’s righteous rage deserves the same without the shame. Because rage is never the problem; silence always is. A woman who knows her own rage is a woman who knows her own worth. And a body allowed to protect itself is a body that survives.
