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

2025 PEN Open Book Award Winner

2025 ASALH Book Prize Winner

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.