"You should smile more"
Female anger and a 1589 treatise filled with a woman's rage. Another in the series "Shut Out, Not Shut Up."
This essay is part of a series called “Shut Out, Not Shut Up” on women through the ages who’ve written despite being dismissed because of their sex. They persisted.
Everyone experiences anger, but only some are allowed to express it. How you’re permitted to show anger correlates to status, a fact that the ‘Karen’1 meme exploits. The ‘Karen’ character unleashes anger at perceived slights with all the privilege she expects from her status. She assumes it is ‘her place’ to police the rights of strangers. Part of what makes the meme so powerful is that her bullying is obviously out of place—she’s as much on the wrong side of the facts as Gilda Radner’s immortal ‘Emily Litella.’
But partly, the ‘Karen’ meme leverages society’s disapproval of feminine anger. ‘Karen’ anger is defensively strident, fear intensifying her over-the-top emotions. The male counterparts of ‘Karens’ can be found everywhere; they can sometimes make credible runs for public office without attracting notice. We call them bullies, and these men always appear comfortable in asserting their status. Male ‘Karens’ aren’t funny. There is no comic dissonance.
I have no love for ‘Karens.’ I note the meme because the dominant male culture has a problem with women’s anger—whether it’s Karen-type bullying, or tearful rage, or ‘hysterical’ anger. Too many women internalize the shaming of female anger. They become fearful of expressing rage in front of men because they don’t want to be judged, or because they don’t want to ‘lose control’ and appear weak or childlike. Men reinforce these damaging tropes when they: fret over not knowing how to ‘deal with’ female employees who cry, or wonder about an angry woman’s “time of the month,” or condescendingly advise women to ‘smile more.’
To whom do women look for models in displaying anger? Who gives them permission to risk an ugly cry fueled by rage, in public? New proposals to make illegal no-fault divorce, or divorce of any kind, scares me. It reinforces that women lack status to assert power over their own bodies and lives. It shoves every woman back into a corner, tapes her mouth, shackles her hands.
In 1589, an anonymous woman wrote a pamphlet, her words soaked in anger, to vilify misogynism. She wanted, above all, to claim her status as not only equal to all men but also better than them. To demonstrate her right to speak out against power, she signed her pamphlet with the name “Jane Anger.”
“Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women”
An unknown woman2, enraged by Thomas Orwin’s pamphlet, “Book His Surfeit in Love,” put her pen to use in eviscerating male presumption of privilege. Men, whom she derisively calls smock-sniffers3 (“Smel-smocke”), presume that women only have use for male needs, literary or sexual. Orwin wrote of an elderly man who’s had too much (‘surfeit’) of pretty young things.
Is it any marvell though they surfeit, when they are so greedy, but is it not pittie that any of them should perish, which will be so soon killed with unkindnes? Yes truly. […] Nay, some of them are so carried away with conceite, that shameles they will blaze abroad among their companions, that they have obtained the love of a woman, unto whom they never spake above once, if that: Are not these froward fellowes, you must beare with them, because they dwell far from lying neighboures.
-Jane Anger Her Protection of Women
It’s not simply male lasciviousness and mendacity that the author warns women of: it is the threat men pose to women. In this paragraph, she speaks to the ‘Surfeit’ essayist:
Having made a long discourse of the Gods censure concerning love, he leaves them (& I with him) and comes to the principall object and generall foundation of love, which he affirmeth to be grounded on women: & now beginning to search his scroule, wherein are tauntes against us, he beginneth and saieth that we allure their hearts to us: wherein he saieth more truly then he is aware off: for we woo them with our vertues, & they wed us with vanities, and men being of wit sufficient to consider of the vertues which are in us women, are ravished with the delight of those dainties, which allure & draw the sences of them to serve us, whereby they become ravenous haukes, who doe not only seize upon us, but devour us. Our good toward them is the destruction of our selves […].
Our self-styled ‘Jane Anger’ notes that although men consider women on a level beneath them, much like the ‘bruite beasts,’ she interprets the Biblical origin story to indicate women’s supremacy over men.
The creation of man and woman at the first, hee being formed In pricipio of drosse and filthy clay, did so remaine until God saw that in him his workmanship was good, and therefore by the transformation of the dust which was loathsome unto flesh, it became purified. Then lacking a help for him, GOD making woman of mans fleshe, that she might bee purer then he, doth evidently showe, how far we women are more excellent then men. Our bodies are fruitefull, whereby the world encreaseth, and our care wonderful, by which man is preserved. From woman sprang mans salvation. A woman was the first that beleeved, & a woman likewise the first that repented of sin. In women is onely true Fidelity: (except in her) there is constancie, and without her no Huswifery. In the time of their sicknes we cannot be wanted, & when they are in health we for them are most necessary. They are comforted by our means: they nourished by the meats we dresse: their bodies freed from diseases by our cleanlines, which otherwise would surfeit unreasonably through their own noisomnes. Without our care they lie in their beds as dogs in litter, & goe like lowsie Mackarell swimming in the heat of sommer.
Here is the crux of things: “They confesse we are necessarie, but they would have us likewise evil,” The ‘Surfeit’ men are both drawn to women and reject them, hating their obsessions, moving secretly to feed their addiction. “When men protest secrecie most solemnly, believe them lest, for then surely there is a tricke of knavery to be discarded, for in a Friers habite an olde Fornicator is alwaies clothed.”
Knowing well that men, especially male writers, will reject not just her words but her right to publish them, Anger addresses her pamphlet to fellow women. She dedicates her preface “To the Gentlewomen of ENGLAND” and to them she apologizes in advance for any errors.
But (in a worde) for my presumption I crave pardon, because it was ANGER that did write it: committing your protection, and my selfe, to the protection of your selves, and the judgement of the cause to the censures of your just mindes.
She pens a second preface “To all Women in generall,” challenging them to follow her lead: to stand up and defend other women. She wants nothing less than to create a movement by using the emotional force of her words. She wants to wield anger as an organizing principle in up-ending patriarchy.
She notes in her summation that she’s not advocating to condemn all men, but to “take heed of the false hearts of al,” some of whom she notes are valiant and virtuous. Anticipating the defense of ‘not all men,’ she writes:
And therefore thinke well of as many as you may, love them that you have cause, heare every thing that they say, (& affoord them noddes which make themselves noddies) but beleeve very little therof or nothing at all, and hate all those, who shall speake any thing in the dispraise or to the dishonor of our sex.”
She finishes with a send-off to the ‘old Lover’ in Orwin’s “Surfeit”: “his melodie is past.”
Men have dismissed women talking amongst themselves for the length of recorded history—it’s where we get the English word “gossip.” Little wonder, since women who talk together sometimes are lacing into the men in their lives who annoy them. Some men no doubt read Jane Anger’s piece as a screed from an hysterical woman. They might have assumed her an old hag or a homely old maid. Jane Anger anticipates that criticism in firmly claiming her literary cred: she builds an (admittedly fiery) argument based on reason; she structures the argument using classical rhetoric; she casually dispenses Latin witticisms liberally through her text. She makes clear that she, too, has literary rights.
The power of the pamphlet
In the year 1589, Jane Anger ushered women writers into the realm of pamphleteering. Writers today consider bound books to be the mark of a successful writing career, but this was not always so.
In the 16th century, writers had to self-publish. For writers other than the very wealthy, producing a book wasn’t possible. One could write plays and poems, but women weren’t yet allowed to participate in the theatre (a status that gave rise to the concept of the closet play, which was written to be read, not performed). Pamphlets, however, were relatively inexpensive to print and distribute, and they were cheap enough to make them accessible to any one with literacy. To be a pamphleteer was to be in a position of influence. A woman staking a claim in this venue was important. It would be affronting to many men, and liberating to many women.
The idea of a female sentence
The woman behind “Jane Anger” isn’t known now; if her identity was known in 1589, it’s been lost to history. Suggestions that a man wrote “Jane Anger Her Protection for Women” are wildly off the mark.Virginia Woolf famously noted “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman” (A Room of One’s Own), yet for some reason men are quick to question whether women actually wrote works attributed to them.
It’s helpful to recall one longstanding theory that attributed To Kill a Mokingbird to Truman Capote, who was a friend to the actual author, Harper Lee (and who was captured in the book as the character Dil). The rationale for crediting Capote was thin: Lee had no other works to her name at the time, and Capote was a best selling writer. Never mind that their literary styles and sensibilities differed greatly; a great man was required for a great book.
Could Berthe Morisot’s work be mistaken for her brother-in-law’s, Edouard Manet? Her perspective is entirely female, recognizably so even compared to male Impressionists, like Pierre Bonnard or Edouard Vuillard, who specialized in decorative paintings of domestic life, or Edgar Degas’s drawings of women bathing.
Morisot depicts a beautiful woman who’s taken care to make herself attractive, but here, she’s taken a moment for herself. She’s alone with her thoughts as she almost literally blends into the background. To approach her in this moment would be intrusive.
Morisot and Degas each painted a series of women bathing or attending to self-care, but I think these two images illustrate the differences in their perspectives of the female form. Degas painted a number of images on the theme shown above: a woman crouching to bathe herself in a shallow tub. I think he was interested in how to capture, using paint, a body as it balances its weight and how the shifting of muscles affects the light upon it. The woman in the image, her face down and averted, is anonymous, but her sex is undoubted. She appears highly uncomfortable in this unnatural pose. The model’s body has been manipulated by the artist’s direction to her. There is beauty in this image, but there is also a power dynamic that makes me uncomfortable.
No one has claimed that a man is responsible for Morisot’s art. Moreover, men have every right to depict women as do women in painting male bodies. That said, these two images of a similar subject illustrate that the gender perspective of the artist affects the depiction of the female experience. This may be easier to spot in the visual arts than it is in literature.
Here is an excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird:
Simon would have regarded with impotent fury the disturbance between the North and the South, as it left his descendants stripped of everything but their land, yet the tradition of living on the land remained unbroken until well into the twentieth century, when my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his younger brother went to Boston to study medicine. Their sister Alexandra was the Finch who remained at the Landing: she married a taciturn man who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering if his trot-lines were full.
And here is one from Capote’s In Cold Blood:
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveller reaches them.
Lee’s sentence: “she married a man who spent most of his time lying in a hammock by the river wondering if his trot-lines were full” convincingly renders the thoughts of a woman, sister to Atticus. I find it hard to imagine the man who wrote In Cold Blood, whose prose distances the author from the people of Holcomb while he describes them, writing a sentence that convincingly occupies a woman’s thoughts.
I have the advantage of not doubting that Harper Lee is the author of her bestseller, nor that Capote wrote his true-crime thriller. It’s unlikely that a reader can know the gender of an author from their sentences, but I’m curious how someone can argue that an author’s words are not hers? I can only think of one: that theorist holds beliefs that get in the way of acknowledging facts. To theorize that Lee didn’t write her masterpiece, one must believe that any woman, not just Harper Lee, is incapable of literary art.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf didn’t merely advocate for women to have the space and financial independence to write: she argued that literature demanded to hear women’s sentences. Of women in literature, she wrote:
But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of that woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.4
When Woolf writes later about the ‘Jane Austen sentence,’ she’s longing to enter a fictional world seeing what a woman sees. Does she see a sensual body that holds the artist’s intimate memories, or does she witness a familiar introspection that’s allowed her by the confines of her bath?
Finding, and using, your voice
Jane Anger’s sentences speak to long-held resentments of being dismissed and abused, and to her exhilaration at speaking her mind without restraint. She demonstrates she’s aware of the power she can wield with her writing, the influence she can exert with women in England, and indeed all women. The printers who published her writing are ‘R. Jones and T. Orwin.’ If this T. Orwin is the author of the “Book” she shreds with her criticism, I can only imagine her pleasure at his firm’s fulfillment of her printing order.
The writer we know only as Jane Anger leveraged her knowledge of men’s literature to claim space to articulate a fully feminine perspective. She must have anticipated a harsh response from men. She not only targeted their faults; she did it in an unrelentingly angry voice. There’s nothing pretty about her writing, nor her sentiment. What use would they have of that, in a woman?
Despite opting for a pseudonym to protect herself, Jane Anger acted courageously. The historic record didn’t preserve her pamphlet’s impact on contemporaneous women. What remains is the text, and that’s significant in itself. History hasn’t preserved every pamphlet and broadsheet printed over the centuries. There is meaning in the fact that I was easily able to find this pamphlet downloadable in PDF format, 435 years of life and counting.
Women almost certainly have many more male than female examples to learn from, whatever their endeavors. When I was in school, I had to enroll in a Women’s Studies class to be assigned women authors to read. I was learning to write at the same time my reading was composed overwhelmingly of men’s sentences. Unconsciously, their rhythms and perspectives seeped into my evaluation of ‘good’ writing. I became adept in the arcane, logical, and unemotional style then in vogue at my graduate school. My writing became contorted and abstract, so much so that one professor gave me an A on a paper although, he admitted, he couldn’t fully understand it. His comments gutted me, although now I’m thankful for his honesty.
Every writer has to work to create sentences that reveal their unique internal landscapes. But the work is harder for any one whose life experiences are removed from those who dominate the larger culture. If to be admired a woman must smile, be selfless, support others, and concede arguments to maintain peace, how does she manage to communicate her anger, her need to claim space for herself, to promote her own well-being, and to press an argument in the face of vitriol? This, though, is the work.
Raise a glass to a woman who shall remain nameless, but famously read smock-sniffers for filth back in 1589.
Ellie’s Corner
Late summer is bringing shorter days and intermittent light, cooler temps that warn of winter not far away. Ellie helps me stay in the moment.
Thanks for reading,
It’s unfortunate that this meme has ruined the name for women named Karen (and Karin and Keren) who are beautiful, loving, and generous souls, one of whom I’m proud to have as my sister. So, I’m only using the name surrounded by quotes because I’m referring to a character, not a person.
Historians note that at the time, only several women named “Jane Anger” lived in England, none of which wrote this pamphlet. It’s kind of endearing that historians feel the need to scour the historical records before making an assertion that seems pretty darn clear on its face. The author repeatedly writes ANGER all in caps, to reinforce that she’s angry while calling attention to the name she chose. It’s important, I think, that she chooses her name for this writing, which supports her primary thesis of having the right to make choices that men think they can deny her.
Allusion to Lemony Snicket (‘cake sniffers’) absolutely intended.
Page 80, Vintage Classics edition, A Room of One’s Own.
“…for in a Friers habite an olde Fornicator is alwaies clothed.” Gotta love this quote!
Thank you for this, as always. It’s an excellent read. I can only imagine the frustration experienced by intelligent women through the ages and even now…or perhaps I can’t imagine it thoroughly, which is why essays like this are important.
I love that she didn’t hold back. I too thought that quote was sensational. And I had to laugh every time she called men smock sniffers. She was clearly OVER it.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the series. The works I’m studying may have little general reading interest today, but the writers are fascinating and their struggles, sadly, remain relevant. Thank you for your comment.