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
“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