This study examines how women in the United States understand and express the emotions that shape their political experiences and engagement. Building on our recent work (Slaughter et al., 2025), which shows that emotions motivate women’s political participation differently across racial and ethnic groups, this qualitative extension explores how women interpret and act on these emotions in their everyday lives. Drawing on 10–12 focus groups with women from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, we analyze how participants describe the emotional dimensions of their political encounters. Centering women’s narratives, we reveal how race and ethnicity structure emotional responses to public life and how these emotions influence belonging and political (dis)engagement. This study advances feminist and intersectional scholarship by offering qualitative insight into the meanings women attach to political emotion, illuminating both shared and distinct affective pathways in women’s participation in U.S. politics.
