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You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean … You have to be a career woman but also always looking out for other people—Greta Gerwig, Director, Barbie, 2023
Janet Rivkin Zuckerman’s book, Nasty Women—Reclaiming the Power of Female Aggression: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, is an urgently relevant, compulsively readable evocation of the conflicts women continue to face around expression of their aggression in the workplace and in the world.
Using her own family history, two case examples from her clinical practice, a revisiting of the third Clinton/Trump 2016 presidential debate, Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and a fascinating survey of six highly accomplished professional women, Zuckerman explores how women struggle to navigate expressions of aggression within culturally imposed restrictions.
Zuckerman begins by addressing the multiple and complex definitions of aggression. On the positive end, aggression can mean “agency, self-assertion, healthy competition, ambition … vitality,” and on the negative end, “violence, rage, hate … malevolence” (Zuckerman, 2025, p. 11). Zuckerman notes that pairing the word “aggression” with “women” often stirs unease (Zuckerman, 2025, p. 11) in the “normative unconscious” (Zuckerman, 2025, p. 63, citing Layton, 2020).