Stassa Edwards' "History of Female Anger" is something more than that: a history of how society deals with and neutralizes a recurring challenge.
Women's anger is a powerful force; coded as a dangerous and destabilizing, it wreaks havoc on blissful homes and placid communities. Stereotypes about female anger ubiquitous: the shrill wife, the crazy ex-girlfriend, feminazis, and the angry black woman. These phrases are familiar haunts, easily conjured when women's anger threatens to sabotage a certain sense of social order.
Here's an excerpt from Protection for Women by Jane Anger, published in 1589.
The desire that every man hath to shewe his true vaine in writing is unspeakable, and their mindes are so caried away with the manner, as no care at all is had of the matter: they run so into Rethorick, as often times they overrun the boundes of their own wits, and goe they knowe not whether. If they have stretched their invention so hard on a last, as it is at a stand, there remaines but one help, which is, to write of us women: If they may once encroch so far into our presence, as they may but see the lyning of our outermost garment, they straight think that Apollo honours them, in yeelding so good a supply to refresh their sore overburdened heads, through studying for matters to indite off.
More than 400 years later, "they run into rhetoric as they overrun the bounds of their own wits" is a perfect description of men on twitter.
