Kamala Harris is one of America's least "hysterical" politicians. In a news cycle dominated by dark conspiracies, shocking revelations, and occasional moments of flat-out what-is-happening catastrophe, Harris is a calm within the storm: The competent, no-bullshit attorney, here to slice through the noise. At ongoing Senate Intelligence hearings, Harris has addressed testifiers with short, sharp questions, moving through each point as quickly as humanly possible to maximize every second of her allotted time. It's a stirring display of professionalism; in an age where even the President behaves like an Internet troll angrily drunk-tweeting a Game of Thrones episode, Kamala Harris is a reminder that level-headed grown-ups still exist. Well, unless you're an old white man, in which case she is evidently reason to freak the hell out.

On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly complained, while being questioned by Harris, that she made him "nervous." She has been interrupted and shut down twice by male colleagues—once, when reminding Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to answer "yes" or "no" to a yes-or-no question, and once when asking Sessions about a policy which supposedly forbade him from answering questions. Here's that second exchange:

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HARRIS: You referred to a longstanding DOJ policy. Can you tell us what policy it is you're talking about?

SESSIONS: Well, I think most cabinet people, as the witnesses, uh, you had before you earlier, those individuals declined to comment. Because we're all about conversations with the President —

HARRIS: Sir, I'm just asking you about the DOJ policy you referred to.

SESSIONS: — a longstanding policy that goes beyond just the Attorney General.

HARRIS: Is that policy in writing somewhere?

SESSIONS: Uh, I — I think so.

And so on.

Now, you may get the sense that Sessions has "a policy" in the same sense that you, in the seventh grade, had "a boyfriend" who "goes to another school" — Kamala Harris is good at her job — but this is hardly an exercise in unhinged melodrama. Harris didn't scream; she did not cry; she did not throw a lamp at Jeff Sessions, despite the fact that this exactly what many of us would like to do to Jeff Sessions. Kamala Harris behaved exactly like who she is: an exceptionally skilled prosecutor, pinning down an evasive client. And yet for two sad-man CNN commentators, the entire back-and-forth was an excuse to dismiss Harris as "hysterical."

"From my perspective, from my, I would say, objective perspective… I think she was hysterical," said former Trump advisor Jason Miller. "She was trying to shout down Attorney General Sessions, and I thought it was way out of bounds." When political analyst Kirsten Powers noted that Miller hadn't applied called any of Sessions' male questioners "hysterical," Jeffrey Lord jumped in to calm Powers' inflamed ladyfeelings: "Hysteria is a neutral quality," Lord insisted.

Oof.

But, actually, it's not. Not only is the actual word "hysteria" gendered — it once referred to an exclusively female disease, a mental illness thought to be caused by a malfunctioning uterus — there is a very long history of critics using accusations or innuendo about women's mental health or emotional stability in order to shut down their political voices. It's a trope that goes back to the beginnings of women's participation in democracy: "'Votes for women!' is the shrill cry of a number of apparently discontented ladies who somehow seem to have missed the best of life," wrote Marie Corelli. The essay is entitled "Woman — or Suffragette?" It dates from 1907.

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And it hasn't let up since. Not only is Harris not the first woman to bear the brunt of the stereotype, she's not even the first woman in recent memory. In late November 2016, Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski slammed Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) for being too "angry" about Donald Trump: "There's an anger there that's shrill, and a step above where it needs to be, unmeasured, and almost unhinged." On May 4, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), gave a speech in defense of the ACA — "I don't want the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg on the streets, to steal bread from the market because they can't get any health insurance," she said — only to be dismissed by Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), who told her that "If I had to defend Obamacare, I'd go into hysterics too." Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Labour MP Mary Creagh asked Chancellor of the Exchequer Phillip Hammond a dry procedural question about Brexit — "[would] he give policy and regulatory certainty to the 100,000 UK businesses who registered companies in Ireland after the vote to leave the EU" — only to be told "not to be hysterical about these things." Hammond later defended himself by claiming that "I didn't call [Creagh] hysterical – I urged her not to be hysterical," as if his female colleague had been teetering on the edge of madness, and only being condescended to in a public forum could hold her back.

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Terrible. @JacksonLeeTX18's give a passionate critique of the ACA repeal bill and is then told she's in "hysterics" by @RepDougCollins pic.twitter.com/T65mgTX1Ex — Ben D'Avanzo (@BenDAvanzo) May 4, 2017

The farther back you go, the more examples you'll find. Former Prime Minister David Cameron infamously told Angela Eagle to "calm down, dear, and listen to the doctor" when she asked a question during a session designed to, well, let MPs ask David Cameron questions. In America, female politicians from Hillary Clinton to Michele Bachmann have been subject to magazine covers — Clinton's concerned "THE VOICES IN HER HEAD;" Bachmann's dubbed her "THE QUEEN OF RAGE" — portraying them with googly eyes and/or wide-open, shouting mouths, implying that they were literally insane. And if all this is bad for white women, it is worse for black women like Jackson Lee or Harris, who are frequently cast as "aggressive" or "angry" simply for existing. Just ask Michelle Obama, who's endured New York Times' speculation on whether she's an "angry black woman," and has had every photo for which she doesn't gamely smile compiled into a tabloid slideshow that dubbed her "The Queen of Mean": ("Tantrums, Feuds, Fights and More!")

But when a woman breaks through this conditioning — when she is passionate, fiery, able to connect on a human level and evoke emotion — we say she's a shrieking mess who's unfit to lead.

Like Harris, most of the women who are accused of "hysteria" are not engaged in wild displays of emotion. Of the women on our list, only Lee even comes close — because she was delivering a speech, and politicians are supposed to be passionate and forceful while giving speeches. The fact that Lee can be penalized for visibly caring about her constituents dying under bridges is one small part of how the "hysteria" diagnosis hurts women's ability to engage with their work and their audiences. We monitor women's public emotions so closely that many female politicians learn to keep any human vulnerability buried deep beneath a seemingly impenetrable veneer. For this, we call them "calculating," "robotic" or "inauthentic." (You may associate some or all of these words with a certain recent presidential candidate — but when Warren ran for Senate in 2012, local pundits bemoaned her woodenness, and accused her of faking folksiness to disguise her Harvard credentials, too. "I'm asking her to be more authentic. I want her to just sound like a human being, not read the script," one political analyst complained.)

But when a woman breaks through this conditioning — when she is passionate, fiery, able to connect on a human level and evoke emotion — we say she's a shrieking mess who's unfit to lead. And it's all particularly cruel because forcefulness and outrage are core assets in any male politician's rhetorical toolbox. Where would Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump be if they weren't allowed to get angry?

On some level, we're still playing by 1907 rules. The assumption behind the question "woman or suffragette?" is that you cannot, actually, be both at once. Women's political activity is not just wrongheaded, but unnatural; a pathology. Sexists refer to every female political opinion as "hysterical," just like they refer to every word a woman says when she opens her mouth as "shouting," and for the same reasons — not because the women are actually being loud or unreasonable, but because women are not supposed to have opinions or voices at all. They don't just want women to be more genial or hushed. They want women to leave the room.

Which is to say, there is actually no way for Kamala Harris to do her job, let alone be good at her job, without being called aggressive, loud, and "hysterical." There's no way out for Sheila Jackson Lee, or Elizabeth Warren, or any other woman, either. The only thing they can do is keep soldiering on, regardless. One hopes, at least, they can occasionally pause to savor all the old white dude "nervousness" and very male, very real "hysteria" they manage to inspire.

Sady Doyle Sady Doyle is the author of 'Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear ...

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