Black feminists have long explored the political uses of anger (and also pointed out that, of course, not all women are allowed, let alone congratulated, for accessing their anger). Brittney Cooper’s “Eloquent Rage” (2018) follows in the line of classics in the genre, like Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger” and bell hooks’s “Killing Rage.” It was the 2016 election of Donald Trump, according to Rebecca Traister in “Good and Mad,” that awakened other women, “largely white and benefiting in many respects from the status quo.”

Surveying these books, there is, unsurprisingly, no consensus on the correct uses of rage, its prescribed application — even its value. For some, like Rebecca Solnit, rage must be supplanted by love. For others, like Cooper (and Traister would agree), rage is valuable and must be harnessed: “We need to embrace our rage,” Cooper has said, “and allow it to become a source of energy that empowers the type of work we can do, to build a world we want to see.”

But these books all share the backdrop of our age of rage: of far-right protesters marching with torches in Charlottesville, Va.; the massacre at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C.; Christine Blasey Ford’s precision and reserve contrasted with Brett Kavanaugh’s suppurating anger and tears at the spectacle of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

In each book, there is the intimation that we have still only seen the first sparks of the fire. “While men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end,” Ferrante writes in “My Brilliant Friend.” “Women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”