Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women's Fury in Lawless Times

From an award-winning historian, an alternative model of feminism driven by the legacy of Black women who took justice into their own hands

So often failed by the state, demeaned by racism and sexism, and denied respectable means of redress, Black women have nevertheless patiently resisted myriad injustices. Yet history shows an alternative path. It involved razors, pistols, hatchets, and blackjacks, and playacting for courts and reporters--whatever it took to beat the system. In a world where Black women are castigated and caricatured for being angry, Vengeance Feminism tells the story of those who leaned into their fury, crafting a different kind of ideology that scratched and stabbed and sometimes even succeeded.

Vengeance Feminism is about the Black women who hit back--not always figuratively, and not necessarily nobly either. Weaving together historical narrative with Black feminist analysis, Gross illuminates the stories of Black women who fought for their dignity on their own terms, from the nineteenth-century "badger thieves" who robbed men on the streets of Philadelphia to victims of intimate partner violence who defended their honor and bodily autonomy with deadly force.

Reckoning with women who lied, robbed, and cheated a racist, misogynistic world, Vengeance Feminism grapples with the volatile power of violence in pursuit of racial and gender justice.

Publisher: Seal Press (CA)
Published: 09/24/2024
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9781541603462


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2024

About the Author
Kali Nicole Gross is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the coauthor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of A Black Women's History of the United States, and author of Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia