Women’s Issues Are Everyone’s Issues

Here’s a woman’s issue for you: RAGE.

Does the phrase, “woman’s issue,” irritate you? Good. It should. The anger of being told you’re too much and not enough, sometimes in the same breath. Of watching autonomy slip away in real time. Of staying calm on the surface while everything tightens around you. Because issues that affect women affect everyone. The rage in these books isn’t niche—it’s what all of us feel.

Whether you feel dismissed and ignored or not, I’ve compiled a short list — just three books— that get at something experienced widely: the rage of being told your pain isn’t real, your anger isn’t justified, your experience doesn’t matter. But they also give us something else that matters: those fierce bonds between women that make the rage bearable. The bonds that sometimes turn rage into something we can use.

This month — Women’s History Month — I have one book of fiction, one essay collection, and one book of poetry for you. These books aren’t about politics — they’re about what happens when women’s autonomy, choices, and voices are threatened, dismissed, or erased. Whether it’s systemic or personal, structural or intimate, it all costs everyone something.

Women aren’t allowed to be angry. Feel anger inside, sure… but show it? Definitely not. Last year’s adaptation of “Nightbitch” by Rachel Yoder brought maternal rage roaring into the mainstream conversation.

In “Nightbitch,” when a woman pauses her career to become a stay-at-home mom, she has nowhere to express the stupefying reality of putting her life and career on hold, only to be told to be grateful for it. What no one warns you about is how confusing it is to be grateful while also feeling all of these other things: left behind by your partner, unpaid, lonely in the absence of the village everyone promises, ignored on the sidewalk or in a doorway, irrationally irritated by a pile of clothes on the floor, overstimulated by noise, light, and touch. She doesn’t have a space where she’s allowed to fully feel much other than grateful, or happy, or blissful and barefoot, the don’t-blink-because-they-grow-up-too-soon state of mind. So when the mother portrayed in “Nightbitch” starts to turn into a dog (think: werewolf), she finally has an outlet for the feral part of her, the ugly, angry part she had pushed down for so long. “Nightbitch” comes out at night, and she is free.

These same feelings reverberate through Kate Baer’s new poetry collection, “How About Now,” which explores the reclaiming of the self on the journey through middle age. Her poem, “Birth of a Mother,” addresses the silent turmoil of women’s lifelong expectations as mothers, likening it to a dragon turning within her. In “Birthday Request,” she encourages us to live fully and defy anything that constrains self-actualization in middle age: “I had a friend who said, / We’re too old to wear crop tops. / I’ll never forget the way she said it. / I never liked crop tops, but look, / I’m wearing one today.” We transform, we mold our lives and our bodies to fit the needs of others. But the dragon, that’s the part of us that won’t be tamed by gendered expectations of woman, of the body, of the role of partner, mother, wife. This part stays restless, shifting, even unresolved—and the crop top gets worn anyway.

Then there are our bodies—and what happens when they change in ways the world would rather ignore. I’m talking about perimenopause, menopause, and post-menopause. Have you felt rage at your medical concerns being minimized, dismissed, and, at worst, silenced? The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause is an essay collection edited by Lidia Yuknavitch that features women discussing menopause at all stages. In it, Pacific Northwest writer Monica Drake writes about how divorce court indignities mirror how patriarchal systems cause women to loathe their bodies and themselves. She writes, “When we say THE CHANGE, the biggest change is the one that is taking place right now, in releasing body shame, reproductive health shame.” This collection is beautifully book-ended by Yuknavitch with the following line from her essay, Transmogrify: “If you find you must lay some bodies down in order to continue changing and growing, bodies like rage, or sorrow, or guilt…do it. We honor the parting. We know what weight you carried. Let go. Lift your heart.”

Take comfort that we are in this together, because, as Kate Baer tells us in her poem, “The Bridesmaid’s Speech”: “There is very little women choose / to keep from one another. How / lucky are we to know a love like this.” And herein lies an emotional truth: the bonds between us—should we recognize and embrace them—are stronger than what divides us.

A mother who transforms into a dog to access her feral rage. A dragon that never stops turning, never settles into the role. Women collectively refusing to be shamed about their bodies. Here are the “women’s issues” we honor this month.

What Cassie’s Reading: “The Radiant Dark” by Alexandra Oliva

It’s March 1980, and Carol Girard and her husband live an ordinary life in a small town in the Adirondacks. They have just had their first child and the future seems clear. Until something extraordinary happens: communication from intelligent life on another planet. And so begins a decades-long exchange of messages with this mysterious, faraway civilization.

Tracing five decades of love, loss, ambition, and self-discovery, The Radiant Dark is a stunning examination of a family navigating their lives with the knowledge that we are not alone.

This article appears in the Source February 26, 2026.