The view from the edge of the cauldron.

As anger and violence exponentially increase in the United States, creating the image of a fiery cauldron of emotionality, a curious societal denial prevails. While the headlines scream news of incidents of air rage, road rage, and desk rage, many people--nurses included--shake their heads in bewilderment. Invariably, in newspaper accounts of school shootings, teachers and neighbors express shock at the behavior of a quiet child whom they would not have suspected of harboring such malevolence. Indeed, it seems inexplicable that "baby-faced" schoolchildren are killing each other in the classroom and "perfectly normal" people are driving like maniacs or exploding in rage on airplanes. But we cannot remain mired in our incredulity if we are to make a difference. As Paquette (2001) has pointed out, violence can be understood. It is not random and senseless. And I believe it is incumbent on psychiatric nurses to begin making a difference. We begin by increasing our understanding of the anger-violence continuum. We cannot intervene with that which we do not understand. We begin by listening to the voices of researchers who have peered into the cauldron to examine the elements that produce anger and sometimes bring it to the boiling point. I am one of those researchers, although my program of research has focused mainly on the anger end of the anger-violence continuum--the edge of the cauldron, if you will. To be more specific, I have focused on women's anger. The following remarks are based on my personal experience in this research area over the past 12 years. I believe that the response to my research over these years is fascinating to consider. I have personally encountered society's denial. Some people simply don't want to hear about angry women. This is especially true when the potential listeners to my findings are men. Let me paint a typical scenario for you. At a national interdisciplinary research conference, six or seven conference attendees are chatting at a cocktail reception. Spying the name of my university on my badge, a man says to me: "Oh, you're from the University of Tennessee. Are you presenting a paper here? What do you study?" When I reply, "I study women's anger," the man quickly sees someone across the room whom he simply must greet. He makes his escape from Medusa. On those rare occasions when a man stays in my vicinity for a few more minutes, he generally makes a disparaging remark, seeking to trivialize the research. Or he may say, "Gee, you don't look like an angry woman!" as though I must personally exhibit pathology to study it. This behavior, in my view, is indicative of a continuing societal taboo regarding women's anger, a taboo first identified by Harriet Lerner (1985), author of "The Dance of Anger." This taboo is manifested in several ways. First, consider the small number of researchers of women's anger. In contrast to the legions of researchers of anxiety and depression, we are few. (In fact, all of us know each other; we presented a symposium together at the International Congress on Women's Health Issues in San Francisco in 2000.) Second, recall the pejorative media depictions of angry women. In preparation for a recent speech, I went through my files examining magazine illustrations that accompanied stories about my research. In the years since the early reports appeared in The New York Times and USA Today about the Women's Anger Study (Thomas, 1993), stories about various aspects of the research have appeared in more than two dozen magazines. Invariably, the illustrations portray "angry women" as ugly, demonic, or crazed. Not a single drawing or photograph conveys the possibility that a woman could be appropriately angry in defense of her boundaries, values, or rights as a human being. The magazines' choice of such illustrations is especially intriguing because they are not consistent with the content of the articles: I always emphasize that anger can have positive and health-promoting functions as well as destructive ones. …