Kellie Carter Jackson

Black women are angry. We should be. We never compel people to sit with Black women’s anger. Instead, we dismiss it, ignore it, stereotype it, mock it, scoff at it, but never interrogate it. Kali Gross’s new book, Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times, pushes readers to do just that—take in Black women’s justified anger and fury. Her book is situated predominantly in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. There, Gross walks readers through story after story of Black women who made capricious and calculated decisions about how they were not going to be treated. Armed with “razors, pistols, hatchets, blackjacks, and balled-up fists,” these Black women took the law into their own hands.  

I appreciate an honest agenda. Gross makes clear her “adoration for all manner of unruly women.” I’m here for it.  The beginnings of Black women’s history as a field provided a great deal of space for Black women leaders and respectable intellectuals. From Charlotte Forten Grimké to Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Dorothy Height, and even Rosa Parks, there are wonderful histories of accomplished, bold, and reputable Black women working to bring change to their communities and the nation writ large. We celebrate these women. But until recently, historians have been rather nervous to write about imperfect heroes, let alone criminals or “loose women.” I am deeply interested in reading about characters that are unlikable or even unknowable. There is something to be said for taking in a fuller portrait of Black history that includes the fullest range of humanity. Gross is unflinching in her storytelling. She compels us to give attention to the deep levels of trauma and disgrace that many unwed or uncared-for Black women faced.  Her storytelling makes us uncomfortable and it should. She complicates the ways scholars have simplistically understood capricious acts of violence.  

A book such as Vengeance Feminism is a welcomed contribution to the field, and one that will pair well Nikki Taylor’s Brooding Over Bloody Revenge, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, or LaShawn Harris’s Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners.  Even in my own work, We Refuse, Black women are employing force and violence to refuse degradation and exploitation. These books are feeding a new generation of students who are no longer content to hear stories about marches, peaceful protests, or nonviolent resistance. They want their heroes to not only fight back but savor their enemy’s comeuppance even if it costs them their life or livelihood. Their authentic anger is exciting to them in the same ways that young people rooted for the militancy of the Black Panther Party. It feels dangerous, but equally honest. I have never been more excited to read the new scholarship in the field of Black women’s history. Good books are provocative, they keep the conversation going, they spawn new or expansive ideas, and they can even get us to question our central ideas about morality.  

Black women are angry because Black women were wronged. They are worthy of a study that sheds light on those injustices and validates their desperate decisions in the face of an insurmountable legal, juridical, economic, and social systems. And because Black women are human, we should expect them to fight back.  

For too long, scholarship has ignored Black women’s anger, their fury, and their grievances. Gross’s lessons must be heeded because as Audre Lorde wrote, “It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.” Thank you, Dr. Gross, for showing readers that vengeance has utility, and that our rage can be quenched and even satisfied.  

Joy James

Historically, women have sought vengeance against their violators. In 335 BCE, as Alexander the Great invaded Thebes, one of his captains raped a noblewoman, Timoclea. The captain-rapist commanded her to give him her gold, silver, and jewelry. Timoclea offered to take him to the dry well where she said she had hidden her wealth. He eagerly followed. While he peered over the side of the dark well, she pushed her violator into the well (see Elisabetta Sirani’s Timoclea of Thebes) and threw large stones upon him until she killed him. His soldiers brought Timoclea to Alexander, whereupon she denounced her violation and rape; in response, Alexander pardoned the woman and gave her and her children safe passage. 

Elisabetta Sirani’s Timoclea of Thebes (1659)

Despite vast differences, and diverse patriarchies, harm and dishonor to women is often the norm (women also attack other women, but that is another story). The differences between Timoclea and the Black women depicted in Vengeance Feminism (as well as LaShawn Harris’s Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground) are stark. However, despite the century, caste, and coloring, the context of war remains present. War fuels anti-Blackness, predatory patriarchy, colonizing cultures that steal land and labor, and it limits decent housing and food, impairs mental/emotional stability, and denies safe birth control and safe adoption (Vengeance Feminism describes “baby farms” monetizing infanticide). Overwhelmed with personal crises and betrayals, often the only “war” waged is that of personal honor (shattered by shame) while collective resistance and communal sanctuary appear to be elusive or dreamscapes. Most Black women and girls seeking (righteous) vengeance will not receive the leniency offered by Alexander (to a rich “white” woman) or in more recent times an acquittal by judge/jury. The antebellum recycles the postbellum with the Thirteenth Amendment, which legalizes slavery in prisons. Vendetta as a private possession becomes a “victory” that does not impact structured denigration and degradation. How do we connect the individual to communal? Felicia Denaud’s “Renegade Gestation” suggests that shackled to personal pain, rage, and vengeance, feminisms (plural) plot for the communal. 

In “The Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” (1971), written weeks after prison guards killed George Jackson, Angela Davis wrote of Black women who fought enslavers with a vengeance. Decades later, Davis reconsidered the article and characterized it as a reflection on Black feminism not Black rebellion. Yet, both personal vengeance and collective resistance remain joined: a bicephalic entanglement of emotions within a predatory empire. As Black women navigate personal pain, rage, and desperate demands for love, honor, acceptance, some also cloak their feminism through war resistance. 

Koritha Mitchell

When reality television star Donald Trump demanded President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, “good” and “decent” white people—political leaders and ordinary citizens alike—stood by. Ever since, Trump has been allowed to set the terms of national conversations. For years, mainstream media refused to use words like “racist” and “lie” when speaking of Trump. Then, a new pattern emerged: Trump would lie, and media outlets would focus on refuting the lie, leaving him in the driver’s seat. Trump has displayed a fourth-grade proficiency with the English language, but that fact hasn’t diminished his power because Americans keep letting him steer discussion. 

Trump’s 2024 running mate JD Vance has joined him in wielding discourse-shaping power, and Kali Gross’s Vengeance Feminism reached my doorstep amidst evidence of that fact. When Vance denigrated “childless cat ladies,” countless individuals embraced the label in defiance. For decades, I have referred to myself as childfree—never childless—and reactions to Vance demonstrate why that matters.  

When we accept a dehumanizing term, our attempts to reclaim power rely on proximity to its standards. I was therefore sad to see so many people energized by a declaration from Tracee Ellis Ross: “The childless women have been mothering the world and elevating culture as aunties, godmothers, teachers, mentors, sisters, and friends.… You do not need to push out a baby to help push humanity forward.” This amounts to: We’re not mothers, but we’re still mothering! We understand we’re not worthy unless we’re mothering. 

In this context, Vengeance Feminism’s discussion of women who secured abortions or abandoned their newborns in the early 1900s stood out. Gross emphasizes that the women she calls “vengeance feminists” lacked formal education, but they “possessed an expert knowledge of violence, violation, deprivation, and corruption.” Given the need to extrapolate their “feminist logics” from their actions, Gross admits to not having “all the answers.” Instead, her book tarries with the “richness in wrangling with ideas, stories, and all manner of Black women’s mysteries.”  

While I sometimes wanted Gross to trace the contours of “vengeance feminism” as a theory in more detail, when encountering women who freed themselves from childbearing or childrearing, I came closest to understanding why she wants readers to think of the experiences described in terms of feminist theory. For example, Gross says a young woman who killed her newborn acted out of fear created by a “restrictive set of religious, social, financial, and legal realities.” However, Gross highlights that considering “desperation and powerlessness” is more palatable than what she asks her readers to face, which is that such women acted out of anger. Infanticide is better understood as “reproductive retribution,” a “vengeance feminist response to the inequalities that stigmatized them for having sex and for not wanting to be mothers.”  

Why is that feminism? Because American culture insists that Black women in situations made desperate by a nation built on their exploitation should simply accept their lot. In the United States, the stigma attached to becoming a mother in any but the most respectable circumstances drastically diminishes one’s future marriage prospects. And poor marriage prospects nearly guarantee economic struggle in a society opposed to equal opportunity and equal pay for women workers. Gross explains, “As much as these responses to unwanted pregnancies were an attempt to elude undue financial burden and public condemnation, there was also a different kind of political consciousness at work—one that viewed their own lives as more important than motherhood or the lives of the newborns. That in and of itself was a revolutionary concept.” 

I can only agree because, even in 2024, “mothering the world” feels to so many women like I’ll show him! 

Michelle Taylor

I remember the first time I felt rage, though I didn’t know it by name then. It was overwhelming, beyond my control. I was in fifth grade, sitting quietly when Kumar, a male classmate, came over and mocked me for being fat. He raised his arm as if to hit me, and all I could hear was my mother’s voice: “Don’t you ever let a boy hit you!” In a flash, I stood up, grabbed my wooden school chair, and threw it at him. Blood gushed from his head, and the classroom erupted into chaos, but my mind was calm. I watched, emotionless, as the teacher pulled me away, chastising me for hurting him. The teacher pulled me back from him, asking me what I had done. What I had done? He tried to hit me! I began to laugh and yelled, “Bet you won’t try that again!” Kumar’s fear satisfied me immensely.  

For this “fight,” I was suspended, and though I feared my mother’s reaction more than the school’s punishment, she surprised me. In the principal’s office, she defended me, saying I did nothing wrong. It was then I realized the power of my rage. I understood that, at times, it’s necessary to embrace and wield it. As I grew older, I came to see that for Black women, there are moments when rage and fury are not only justified but inevitable because we are offered no other recourse. Those who provoke it may not come out unscathed, and that’s just how it is.  

In Vengeance Feminism, Kali Nicole Gross explores how rage and violence serve as tools of Black women’s resistance against the brutality of misogynoir from enslavement until modern times. She takes us on a page-turning journey, sharing captivating tales of African American women using force to defend themselves in what she identifies as “vengeance feminism.” This work is timely and relevant because, frankly, Black women need this affirmation. Black women need a reprieve. Gross challenges any idea that feminism isn’t or shouldn’t be violent, and it calls on us to understand that for some women, justice will be had by any and every means necessary. In a country that has denied Black women protection, compassion, and justice for centuries, particularly in cases of physical and sexual abuse, many of us have seen revenge as our only option.    

When I finished this book, I sat back and thought, “Damn, I wish I wrote this myself. Shit!” It is that good. Gross is a stellar storyteller and one of our greatest modern historians. There is something so comforting, something ancestral about the connection I felt to several of the women whose stories she shared. As an academic, my research centers on the experiences of Black women (mothers, specifically), and there were times when I felt a particular glee as I cheered on the women for their “get back.” Her focus on Philadelphia resonated with me, as this is the city I now call home. Like Gross, I am also a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and I’ve long felt that Black women in Philly deserve to have more attention paid to their struggles. The sistas here have been through so much, and it has largely been due to systematic disenfranchisement perpetuated by both white people and Black men. At a time when there is so much hurt, pain, and confusion in the world, it is Black women who suffer disproportionately while we are expected to remain silent about our pain. We are often left behind to pick up the scraps of progress and justice, facing more obstacles on our paths to success than most people. How refreshing it is to learn that not only were there times when Black women embodied autonomy and harnessed our power to challenge the status quo, but that so much of what we experience today is rooted in laws and social norms designed to subjugate us in perpetuity. None of this is our fault, and it’s important that we know and understand it.     

Vengeance Feminism not only gives voice to the women whose stories are shared but calls forth every Black woman, known and unknown, who dared to take matters into her own hands in a feminist praxis that empowered women whose souls this country tried to crush.  

Kali N. Gross

Absorbing the commentaries on my latest book has been both humbling and profoundly gratifying—I am truly grateful to Signs and the esteemed participants. Michelle B. Taylor’s poignant response gets at the heart of Vengeance Feminism (hereafter VF), which, as she notes, seeks to take readers on a “page-turning journey, sharing captivating tales of African American women” who used force and their intellect to defend themselves in a time when they existed as citizens in name only. Taylor considers this history “timely and relevant because, frankly, Black women need this affirmation.” Her response ties the text to her own experiences in ways that illustrate how this past can speak to our present.

I am equally heartened to see that the commentators understood the urgency of this study, as Kellie Carter Jackson pointedly states: “We never compel people to sit with Black women’s anger. Instead, we dismiss it, ignore it, stereotype it, mock it, scoff at it, but never interrogate it.” We don’t—and I understand why—because indeed, as she explains, mining trauma and fury in “storytelling makes us uncomfortable and it should.” This was a difficult book to write; it resisted easy resolutions and took me through bloody depths alongside the Black women who clawed themselves back from the brink.  

Simultaneously, it compels us to wrangle with the hard angles in sources. Joy James writes, “often the only ‘war’ waged is that of personal honor (shattered by shame) while collective resistance and communal sanctuary appear to be elusive or dreamscapes.” There is truth here, though VF underscores the importance of Black women defending and avenging themselves while it maps the wider imprint of their individual acts. It questions exclusively privileging the “collective” in Black feminist activism since this too often amounts to Black women working on behalf of everyone else; such efforts are rarely reciprocated.

Koritha Mitchell touches on a key tension in the work. She notes, “I sometimes wanted Gross to trace the contours of ‘vengeance feminism’ as a theory in more detail.” Positioning the women’s myriad praxes as indicative of political thought showcases the potential of focusing on Black women’s experiences and its drawbacks. It tends to privilege documentable acts over the ideologies behind them. This is also complicated by my own desire to tell the women’s stories to a broader range of readers. I wanted the prose to draw folks in and keep them going through the especially harrowing parts.

It may not be evident at first blush, but VF springs from a place of hope. Its stories, questions, and provocations are not universally happy or triumphant, yet they tease out spaces of victory for Black women in tangled, sometimes chilling ways. Even so, I needed these stories in this moment. I yearned for narratives that showed Black women lashing back against the odious isms jeopardizing their lives. I was drawn to accounts of Black women who had nothing beneath their feet and still somehow managed to stick a landing with their sense of honor and dignity intact.

VF doesn’t fit neatly into the historiographies or theories it is concerned with; in this sense, I believe it best honors the legacies of the women it takes up.