Furies: Women, Vengeance and Justice, by Elizabeth Flock, is shocking

Viking, £18.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

American journalist Elizabeth Flock’s harrowing account of women who have used violence to protect themselves (and others) begins on a very personal note. As a student on holiday in Rome, she was raped by a tour guide who had spiked her drink. Her instinctive response was to freeze, but she now realises things might have gone in another direction: “Often, I’ve wondered how that morning, and my life since, might have been different if I’d had access to a knife or a gun.”

The three women whose stories she tells in The Furies - aptly named after the mythological goddesses with snakes in their hair - did have access to weapons. The outcome for each was very different, but the underlying motive for their actions was identical. They defended themselves, writes Flock, “in places where institutions failed to protect them”.

Written in three parts, The Furies is an engrossing, disturbing and challenging read. A writer for the New York Times and The New Yorker among others, Flock brings a descriptive eye to what might otherwise feel like plain reportage. The material and interviews used for the first part of the book were the basis of a Netflix documentary. I have not seen it, but the vividness and directness of The Furies is distinctly filmic, the scenes, conversations and seemingly small domestic details Flock records bringing these eye-opening stories alive.

The subject of the Netflix documentary is Brittany Smith, a young woman from Alabama who, in 2018, fatally shot the man who had just raped and nearly murdered her. She pulled the trigger when he had her brother in a choke hold, and seemed likely to murder him too.

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Brittany, who was separated from her husband and whose four children had been removed by the state, was a recovering drug addict. She had been arrested on a few occasions for minor drug offences, but by 2018 she was about to regain custody of her children. Then she decided to buy a pit bull puppy from an old friend, who was a fellow meth addict.

In the slow-burn style of vintage American reportage, Flock takes time to describe the small drug-ravaged town of Stevenson where Brittany lived. It’s a place, she writes, where “Some wake up in the morning and check the jail roster first thing to see who the police arrested the day before.”

When Todd Smith, the man Brittany killed, took his regular dose of methamphetamine and Xanax, writes Flock, the entire Tennessee neighbourhood where he lived “walked on eggshells”. Her portrait of Todd could be a Johnny Cash lyric. As a teenager, he was confident and calm: “He stayed that way until meth came to town, his mother got sick, and his father taught him how to fight.”

Among the many tragedies in Brittany’s story is the damage that parental neglect or abuse inflicts on young men and the women in their orbit, especially when combined with addiction and a toxic culture of machismo. Initially, Brittany blamed her brother for the killing, since she had used his gun. The next day she admitted it had been her, but it was too late. It was now easy to portray her as a liar as well as an addict and a terrible mother. In a state where women are often regarded as second-class citizens, some questioned whether she had even been raped. Although her lawyers argued legitimate self-defence, Brittany was found guilty and jailed.

All-woman group meted out justice for wrongs to women

Half-way across the world, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in India, Flock follows the exploits of the founder of the Green Gang, an all-woman group formed in 2010 that meted out justice for wrongs to women. Its cult leader, Angoori Dahariya, was born into the lowest rung of society, once called “untouchables”.

After she and her husband were cheated out of their house and land by a high-caste family, she turned from a biddable middle-aged wife into a termagant brandishing a bamboo cane. Bringing vigilante justice for mistreated women, who were often beaten by their husbands, she made inroads into a society in which women were invisible, with almost no rights or legal recourse. Soon, she and her acolytes made the police, and politicians, take notice.

Over the years, Angoori’s increasingly high-handed actions raised concerns about fairness and transparency, but a decade after her gang work began, she told Flock that one of her deepest regrets was caning her own children: “canes should only be wielded against the powerful”. Although her legacy is mixed, journalists who covered her story from its early days are agreed that “Angoori’s most significant accomplishment was her ability to turn girls who were as docile as cows into women headstrong as bulls.”

The most memorable but troubling of Flock’s trio is the Kurdish Syrian guerrilla Cicek. From an early age this untameable tomboy defied the rules on how women should behave.

The Furies: Women, Vengeance and Justice (Image: free)

She found her calling when she heard of the all-female militia group, the YPJ which worked in tandem with men’s units to defend the newly autonomous Kurdish-majority northern region of Syria against Syrian rebels and Islamist terrorists. Joining them in 2013, aged 17, Cicek played a fearless role, killing dozens of ISIS members. Even after sustaining severe injuries, she was insistent on returning to the frontline.

Hers is a tale worthy of ancient Rome, her courage extraordinary, as was her dedication to safeguarding her country. An important part of that mission was achieving equality for Syrian women who, hitherto, had been utterly dependent on their fathers or brothers.

As with entering the dangerous region where Angooli operated, gaining access to war-torn Syria for Flock was not easy. Nevertheless, she meticulously recreates events, offering a compelling, often horrifying depiction of battle, and the camaraderie and dedication of female combatants.

Because of the almost outrageous courage Cicek displays in the face of a truly terrifying enemy, it is her story that sings most loudly. In a powerful and determinedly unsentimental book that exposes engrained injustice against women on three continents, the ferocity, humour, commitment and vision of this dauntless young soldier is the stuff of heroes – or martyrs.