Book Name: Vengeance Feminism
Series: NA
Author: Kali Nichole Gross
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

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.

Women, especially Black women, are often characterised as angry just for showing their passion or frustration at a world that is not only designed to keep them down, but often kills them for stepping out of line.

This book is full of snippets of stories where black women took their vengeance into their own hands. Their stories woven together to create a world where maybe they had the opportunity to get back a little of what the world stole from them.

In Australia at the moment there is a lot of focus on the astronomical number of women who are murdered by men. Every year the number increases. Feminism and how women are viewed and treated within Australian culture is front and centre as I was reading this and I could totally empathise with the rage that the people in this book were feeling. The feminist movement we have today owes a lot to the people in this book. It’s not all pussy hats and #GirlBoss.

Thanks to #NetGallery and publisher for a copy of this book.

Genre: nonfiction, history
Format: Digital

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.

My Take:
This is for the folk who think that women, especially Black women, have passively accepted whatever injustice befallen them. This text gives examples of times where Black women have chosen another form of action: one that "crosses the bloody line in the sand" and it a glorious piece of scholarly work. Add it to your reading lists on women's history, Black feminism, womanism, Black studies, and Black literature lists: it will give historical context to women real and imagined, throughout time and space.

I think this book was really powerful with its message. The writing shows a level of research, passion, and knowledge about the subject that made me, as a reader, feel something when reading. For a book like this that requires so much information, it was delivered in a way that was accessible and allowed for readers to truly understand the scope of the issue and the history that follows it.