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365: Reclaiming Women’s Anger with Gemma Hartley

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What if the anger you have been taught to hide is actually pointing you toward the life you want?

Gemma Hartley is a freelance journalist, writing coach, and author of No One Loves An Angry Woman: an Exvangelical Coming-of-Rage Story and Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward. She is a distinguished speaker who has presented everywhere from corporate conferences to festivals at the Sydney Opera House. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Health, Glamour, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and many others. She lives in Reno, Nevada.

Gemma first joined us in November 2020 to talk about Fed Up, her book on emotional labor. Returning guests are rare on this show, and I’m glad to welcome her back for her new book.  

Gemma is a clear-eyed feminist writer who is also willing to be personal. She does not stay in theory. She traces her own anger back to the moment the message she heard as a child that no one would love her if she showed it, and she explains how the cultural scripts behind emotional labor are the same ones that teach women to stay small, quiet, and agreeable. Her story starts in evangelical culture, but the anger she writes about belongs to anyone who has been socialized as a woman.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

  • Why Gemma wrote the title essay in 2019 and waited years before publishing the book
  • How women learn to suppress anger and prioritize being agreeable
  • The connection between emotional labor, anger, and staying small
  • How to honor anger without immediately acting on it
  • What it can mean to maintain relationships while making room for anger
  • The challenges of expressing anger at work and within systems that treat women’s and men’s anger differently
  • Why telling the stories that feel hardest to share can be transformative
  • How Gemma supports writers in telling the stories they are afraid to write
  • Why well-being includes anger alongside love, joy, and contentment

This conversation is a reminder that wellness is not about being calm all the time. It is about being whole. When we make room for every emotion, including the ones we were told to hide, ease and joy have somewhere real to land. Here is how this episode connects to our four guiding words:

✨ Ease: Gemma shares that ease grows when we stop performing comfort for everyone else and start creating it for ourselves.

✨ Joy: We cannot pick and choose our emotions. Allowing anger opens the door to deeper joy, love, and contentment.

✨ Impact: Anger signals that something is wrong and something needs to change. If honored well, it becomes fuel for changing the systems we work in.

✨ Self-trust: When something whispers to us, we can listen early. Gemma invites us to write the dangerous thing down and trust what it shows us.

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Resources Mentioned

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