What happens when a woman resorts to violence?
When Elizabeth Flock was 20, she took a trip to Rome with friends, and the group signed up for a guided tour. At night, they traipsed from one bar to the next with their male guide before heading to the Trevi Fountain, where they tossed pennies over their shoulders into the water, a local ritual ensuring their return to the city someday. That is Flock’s last memory of the evening. She woke in a dimly lit room to find herself being raped by the tour guide. She froze. “I let it happen,” she writes.
Flock, now a journalist, did not report the rape to the police because she “did not think they would help me.” If she’d had a knife or a gun within her reach that night, would she have used it? she wonders. And what would have happened if she had? Would she have been arrested and jailed? Years later, she doggedly searched for the guide and discovered that he lived in the same city she did, where he owned a furniture shop. She fantasized about burning the shop down but ended up sending him a message on Facebook instead, asking if he remembered what he had done to her and how many other women he had hurt. She never received a reply.
She began a new search, this time for women who did what she could not bring herself to do: fight back. “The Furies” of Flock’s title are three women who “took matters into their own hands,” defending themselves “in places where institutions failed to protect them.”
In Alabama, she meets Brittany Smith, who shot and killed the man who raped her. In Tirwa, a town in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, she finds Angoori Dahariya, a Dalit who, after being evicted from her home by an upper- caste landlord, formed a cane-wielding gang of women to deal with abusive and unscrupulous men. And in the Afrin district of northern Syria, she encounters Cicek Mustafa Zibo, who joined an all- female militia to protect the newly autonomous Kurdish- majority region of Rojava from ISIS militants. In intimate character studies of her three subjects, Flock seeks to answer a question she had asked herself: Does fighting back lead to change?
Her book is no rosetinted call to arms. These women’s stories don’t lend themselves to easy morals. Smith was raped and beaten by an acquaintance who detained her in her home until she shot him with her brother’s gun. She was charged with murder, and planned to invoke a “stand your ground” defense — a statute that permits the use of lethal force against deadly threats. Her request to use the defense was denied by a judge. Although a medical examiner listed 33 injuries to Smith’s body, including bite marks, when a police investigator was asked on the stand about the severity of her injuries, he said, “Honestly, I mean, I would have thought there would be more.”
One activist tells Flock that in Smith’s Alabama county rape is epidemic, and in “The Furies” the incidents pile up, one outdoing the next in brutality. Smith’s rapist’s ex- wife says that the man once tied her to a chair and threatened to drown her, while another woman recounts that her ex- husband “stomped” on her head until she fainted. The county sheriff shrugs off such accounts. “People get high, they get stupid,” he tells Flock.
Smith’s case takes many cruel turns — at one point, a judge sends her to a psychiatric hospital — yet by the end, after Smith agrees to plead guilty to murder, it has sparked conversations online about the public’s desire for an impossible “perfect victim” and the impact of trauma on behavior. A local advocate for rape victims tells Flock that the county police “were making more domestic violence arrests and the courts were handing out more abuse convictions.” Was Smith’s fight to be exonerated worth it?
Flock, who helped produce a 2022 documentary on Smith’s case, brings rigor and granularity to her reporting, down to the Baptist pop anthem Smith sings on her way to court. By comparison, the sections on Dahariya and Zibo are uneven. Dahariya is a housewife who, her husband says, “was afraid of everything” until the day in 1999 that her landlord evicts her family — despite their having built a home and made monthly payments toward owning the land it sat on. Her uppercaste neighbors apparently do not want a Dalit family in their midst. The unfairness curdles within Dahariya until she lands on the idea that “she could become like Phoolan Devi,” India’s famous “Bandit Queen,” who led a gang avenging crimes perpetrated against women. Yet Flock gives us scant details about Dahariya’s evolution from victim to vigilante: “She grew braver”; “she seemed different, enlivened.”
Her “Green Gang” vows to “take on men, particularly the high caste, who did poor women wrong” and over the years it attracts more than 1,000 members, turning “girls who were as docile as cows into women headstrong as bulls.” But Dahariya is not above the same violent and humiliating tactics she and other women have faced for years. She punishes a corrupt engineer thought to be overcharging customers for electricity by dressing him in a sari petticoat, smearing red lipstick on his mouth and putting bangles on his wrists. At one point, she and her gang members beat a 17- year- old girl for having an affair, and force her to marry a stranger as punishment — as “a lesson to other girls.”
By the time we get to Flock’s section on Zibo, she is testing the limits of our empathy. Here, violence is undertaken not in self- defense but rather in the service of a political ideal. In 2013, when she was 17, Zibo joined the Women’s Protection Units in northern Syria, thrilled to help defend her Kurdish homeland. She describes her first kill, of an ISIS fighter, as “so joyful,” and becomes known for her ululations — cries more commonly uttered at wedding celebrations — during airstrikes and ambushes. Zibo and her fellow women- in- arms dream of creating in Rojava an autonomous state modeled on feminist principles. The aim, a commander tells Flock, is not just for women to hold a gun, “but to be aware” of their rights. Eventually, however, for many Syrians in the region, battered by years of war and facing an economic crisis, “the promises of a democratic, egalitarian and feminist revolution began to seem foolish when they did not have any bread.”