Young Women’s Anger in Romantic Relationships: Gendered Rules and Power

We used a social constructionist and feminist framework to examine how young women negotiate gendered rules for anger in their romantic relationships and how such negotiations are associated with women’s power in these relationships. We analyzed 24 interviews using a grounded-theory methodology. Our analyses indicated five women resisted gendered rules for anger as they accepted their anger, attributed shared responsibility for their anger, and expressed their anger externally and directly. The other 19 young women followed gendered rules for anger as they distanced themselves from their anger, ambivalently attributed responsibility for their anger, and kept their anger in and expressed it indirectly. Women who resisted gendered rules for anger narrated being engaged in egalitarian relationships, while women who followed gendered rules for anger seemed to participate in nonegalitarian relationships. The findings of this study offer a feminist conceptualization of women’s anger in terms of social rules for anger experience and expression.