VENGEANCE FEMINISM

An examination of Black women taking the law into their own hands in late-19th- and early-20th-century Philadelphia.

Focusing her attention on a period in which justice “didn’t exist for Black women,” the author of A Black Women’s History of the United States explores “the extremities Black women used to escape total victimization.” The book is organized into five chapters, beginning with one on specific acts of revenge for physical and verbal abuse. This is followed by a study of laws that sanctioned enslavement and Black women’s sexual abuse and their ensuing effects. The middle of the book unpacks two cases in which Black women faced the death penalty for murder. One of them, Lillie Fisher, fatally stabbed her lover in 1900, claimed self-defense at trial, and was acquitted by the jury, which was unusual. “Black women often battled on two fronts,” Gross writes, “against direct attacks but also the legal system itself in the aftermath.” Chapter 4 turns to female thieves (aka badgers) who posed as prostitutes in order to rob the white men who hired them, thereby weaponizing stereotypes about them. The final chapter covers abortion and infanticide—the consequences, Gross argues, of "an interwoven, restrictive set of religious, social, financial, and legal realities—all of which solidified to form a near unfathomable, combustible mix of fear, desperation, and resentment." Acknowledging that “vengeance feminism is not healing or productive in the conventional sense,” she offers a compelling case for the women who went to violent and/or criminal lengths to stand up for themselves, particularly at a time when they were offered virtually no systemic protections. “Even when our backs are up against the wall,” she writes in the conclusion, “losing is not a foregone conclusion.” While sometimes repetitive, the book's focus is sharp, and the subject merits attention.

Explosive and compelling.