Winner

2025 PEN Open Book Award

2025 ASALH Book Prize

WHAT REVIEWERS ARE SAYING

The Best Black History Books of 2024.

—African American Intellectual History Society

2024 Best of the Rest - Our Favorite Books of the Year.

—Ms. Magazine

Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times is an enthralling account centering unsung Black women who fought racism and sexism with axes, pistols, hatchets, and fists. Gross digs deep into the archives to unearth remarkable stories of Black women who lied, cheated, stole, and hit back to defend their honor and demand justice that no one else would offer them. Gross marshals an impressive array of historical evidence, from arrest records to reportage from the Black presses, to render twentieth-century Philadelphia, its seedy back alleys, thriving juke joints, and parks bursting with picnics. At once humorous, provocative, and riveting, Vengeance Feminism writes into the gaps left by histories of the Black Women’s Club Movement and poor Black women often viewed as its passive beneficiaries. A rare page-turning history, the book leans into the elements of story, scene, dialogue, and plot, to bring its subjects to vibrant life. Gross offers a magnificent example of the necessity of reclaiming forms of resistance deemed disreputable and even dangerous, as well as a blueprint for grounding such stories in rich contexts to allow for empathy and respect for subjects. Gross’s elegant, eye-opening tour de force reminds us that Black women need not always “go high,” and that history shows they’ve always been on the frontlines defending their livelihoods, their bodies, and their honor, with a knife in hand. — PEN America judges’ citation

“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.”—Michelle B. Taylor, Short Takes, Signs.

“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.” — Kellie Carter Jackson, Short Takes, Signs.

“Explosive and compelling.”―Kirkus Reviews.

“Sometimes feminists have to take off their earrings and throw down. Kali Nicole Gross, one of our nation's most formidable historians, certainly throws down here, while offering us a riveting new history of Black women who threw their own left hooks at the patriarchy. This deeply researched and engaging book reminds us that fighting is not always a metaphor, and feminism is no stranger to fisticuffs.”―Brittney Cooper, New York Times–bestselling author of Eloquent Rage

“Kali Gross poignantly rescues Black women’s fury as a powerful response to the personal and political violence they have been subjected to historically, while also, in ways long overdue, redefining their rage as resistance. This extraordinary reckoning with the true complexity of violence, rage, and resistance in a country that celebrates these acts for some, while condemning and criminalizing them for others, is at times harrowing, often painful, and yet always a most stunning testament to Black women’s resilience no matter the regularity of repression.”―Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water

“With captivating prose that centers nail-biting struggle, Vengeance Feminism offers both a practical and theoretical new pillar of Black feminism. Kali Nicole Gross uses the nation’s birthplace of Philadelphia as an apt symbolic stage for the violent, clever, and dramatic ways that Black women protected and defended themselves when justice was unavailable. This book is a powerful and important contribution to 19th century Black women’s history.”―Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of the award-winning book, Never Caught, and Co-Producer of the award-winning HBO Series The Gilded Age