The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice

“Arresting, deeply reported. . . . a patient reporter who embeds with her subjects long enough to write about their inner worlds with authority and nuance. . . . The Furies is deeply respectful of its subjects’ autonomy, including their self-justifications and mistakes. Flock largely withholds judgment, and her work is richer and more troubling because of it.” —Washington Post

Renowned journalist and author of The Heart is a Shifting Sea Elizabeth Flock investigates what few dare to confront, or even imagine: the role and necessity of female-led violence in this gripping work of narrative nonfiction.

In The Furies, a timely and provocative work of investigative journalism, Elizabeth Flock examines how three real-life women have used violence to fight back, and how views of women who defend their lives are often distorted by their depictions in media and pop culture. These three immersive narratives follow Brittany Smith, a young woman whose riveting true crime story from Stevenson, Alabama, saw her kill a man she said raped her but be denied the protection of the Stand-Your-Ground law; Angoori Dahariya, leader of a gang in Uttar Pradesh, India, dedicated to avenging victims of domestic abuse; and Cicek Mustafa Zibo, a fighter in a thousands-strong all-female militia that battled ISIS in Syria. Each woman chose to use lethal force to gain power, safety, and freedom when the institutions meant to protect them—government, police, courts—utterly failed to do so. Each woman has been criticized for their actions by those who believe that violence is never the answer.

Through Flock’s propulsive prose and remarkable research on the ground—embedded with families, communities, and organizations in America, India, and Syria—The Furies examines, with exquisite nuance, whether the fight for women’s safety is fully possible without force. Do these women’s acts of vengeance help or hurt them, and ultimately, all women? Did they create lasting change in entrenched misogynistic and paternalistic systems? And ultimately, what would societies in which women have real power look like?

Across mythologies and throughout history, the stories of women’s lives frequently end with their bodies as sites of violence. But there are also celebrated tales of women, real and fictional, who have fought back. The novelistic accounts of these three women provoke questions about how to achieve true gender equality, and offer profound insights in the quest for answers.

Through these three unforgettable true stories, The Furies challenges our understanding of justice, agency, and the complex reality of women who fight back.

• A Stand-Your-Ground Case Gone Wrong: Follow the harrowing legal battle of Brittany Smith in rural Alabama, a woman who killed her alleged rapist only to find herself on trial for murder in a case that challenges the very definition of self-defense.
• Vigilante Justice in India: Meet Angoori Dahariya, the leader of a formidable women’s gang in Uttar Pradesh who use bamboo canes to deliver swift, brutal justice to domestic abusers when the police will not.
• The All-Female Militia Fighting ISIS: Embed with Cicek Mustafa Zibo and the thousands of women in an all-female militia in Syria, who took up arms to battle ISIS and carve out a new future for themselves and their communities.
• When Systems Fail: A powerful exploration of what happens when governments, police, and courts fail to protect women, forcing them to take their safety, and the law, into their own hands.

ELIZABETH FLOCK is an Emmy Award–winning journalist whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and The Atlantic, and on PBS NewsHour and Netflix, among other outlets. She is the host of Blind Plea, a podcast from Lemonada Media about criminalized survival. Her reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center, PEN America, and the International Women’s Media Foundation. Her first book, The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, won a Nautilus Book Award for books that inspire and make a difference. She lives in Chicago.