THE FURIES

Why three women became vigilantes.

Drawing on in-depth interviews over many years, Emmy Award–winning journalist Flock, author of The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, creates vivid profiles of three women who responded to abuse with violence and vengeance. “Like alchemists,” writes the author, they “took their stories of pain and transmuted them into power.” In Alabama, Brittany Smith shot a man who had raped and nearly killed her. Angoori Dahariya, a lower-caste wife and mother, emulated India’s legendary Bandit Queen to become a leader of a gang of women who avenged crimes against the poor. Cicek Mustafa Zibo, at 17, joined an all-female militia, the Women’s Protection Units, that operated in concert with men’s units to fight against the Islamic State group in Syria. Flock portrays these women as tireless fighters against forces trying to silence them. Dahariya amassed a large following: From just a dozen at the start, her Green Gang swelled to more than 1,000 women, who shared stories “of domestic violence, dowry harassment, beating by in-laws, land-grabbing, police abuse, abandonment by husbands, molestation, rape, and more.” While her successes inspired other gangs to spring up across India, Smith faced repeated frustrations in defending herself against a murder charge, first claiming self-defense, then invoking the stand-your-ground law. Her case dragged on for years, during which she sometimes relapsed into drug use. Zibo was shot and seriously wounded, but she rejoined the fighting. Yet after nearly a decade of war, she often felt hopeless and embittered. These women, writes Flock, “sought to change the status quo, yet never fully escaped the oppressive systems they grew up in and continue to live under.” Nevertheless, they found, and inspired in others, “agency, a voice, and an identity beyond how the men in their towns saw them,” even though, in their own lives, “they got no perfect, happy endings.”

Stirring narratives of defiance.