"Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger"
About this Quote
A “pretty face” is doing double duty here: it’s beauty, sure, but it’s also politeness, agreeableness, the feminine mask that keeps rooms comfortable. Nancy Friday’s line lands because it treats that mask not as a harmless social nicety but as a disciplinary tool. The pivot word is “trained.” Anger isn’t merely discouraged; it’s actively conditioned out, like a bad habit, through reward and punishment delivered by family, romance, workplaces, and pop culture. Friday frames this as a social preference with real psychic consequences: the self gets edited for public consumption.
The subtext is blunt: a woman’s anger is dangerous precisely because it clarifies power. Anger names injustice, redraws boundaries, demands change. If you can persuade women to “cut off” that signal at the source, you don’t have to argue with what it reveals. You just get compliance packaged as charm. The phrasing “cut off” is almost surgical, suggesting amputation rather than restraint; something essential is removed, and the body learns to live around the loss. That’s how repression becomes “personality.”
Context matters. Friday wrote in an era when second-wave feminism was making private life political and when women’s interior realities (desire, resentment, rage) were being newly treated as evidence rather than pathology. Her intent isn’t to romanticize anger as purity; it’s to indict the bargain: be palatable, be protected. The cost is that anger doesn’t vanish; it mutates into depression, self-blame, sarcasm, or exhaustion. A pretty face, in this reading, isn’t an accessory. It’s a muzzle disguised as manners.
The subtext is blunt: a woman’s anger is dangerous precisely because it clarifies power. Anger names injustice, redraws boundaries, demands change. If you can persuade women to “cut off” that signal at the source, you don’t have to argue with what it reveals. You just get compliance packaged as charm. The phrasing “cut off” is almost surgical, suggesting amputation rather than restraint; something essential is removed, and the body learns to live around the loss. That’s how repression becomes “personality.”
Context matters. Friday wrote in an era when second-wave feminism was making private life political and when women’s interior realities (desire, resentment, rage) were being newly treated as evidence rather than pathology. Her intent isn’t to romanticize anger as purity; it’s to indict the bargain: be palatable, be protected. The cost is that anger doesn’t vanish; it mutates into depression, self-blame, sarcasm, or exhaustion. A pretty face, in this reading, isn’t an accessory. It’s a muzzle disguised as manners.
Quote Details
| Topic | Anger |
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